Democracy and Conflict Resolution: The Dilemmas of Israel's Peacemaking

6: The Israeli Right and Israel’s Territorial Dilemma

157 6 The Israeli Right and Israel’s Territorial Dilemma Ideological Purity and Political Readjustment in the Fourth Republic Ilan Peleg T H E S U B J E C T O F T H I S C H A P T E R is the Israeli Right and its evolving political attitudes toward the possibility of partitioning Palestine (or Eretz Israel) between the State of Israel and a future Palestinian state. Territorial partition has been at the very center of the political debate within the pre1948 Zionist movement, and has been dramatically revived in post-1967 and even more so in post-Oslo Israel. The territorial debate is likely to dominate the political agenda in years to come. The eventual resolution of that debate could significantly affect not only the relationships among Jewish Israelis and diaspora Jews, but also the resolution of the 130-year conflict between Jews and Israelis, on the one hand, and Arabs and Palestinians , on the other hand.1 An important theoretical contribution of this chapter is its systematic examination of ideology as a consequential factor determining political behavior within a democratic regime, specifically Israel since 1948. The 1. The Jewish-Arab conflict goes back to almost the very beginning of Zionist settlement in Palestine or Eretz Israel in the early 1880s. The first actual physical attack on a Jewish settlement occurred in Petach Tikvah in 1886. The conflict has had territorial and demographic components from the very beginning. 158 ▲ Ilan Peleg power of ideational variables has long been acknowledged in many subfields in political science, including International Relations and foreign policy analysis (Goldstein and Keohane 1993; Blyth 1997). In the context of democratic peace theory (DPT), as explained in the introduction to this volume, some scholars interested in ideational variables point to democratic ideals, values, and attitudes as the source and maybe even the main determinants of the so-called democratic peace phenomenon. Yet, democratic peace theorists have tended to treat ideology in democracy as an undifferentiated and constant category with only one possible outcome (or at least one highly likely one): peace. This article will demonstrate that ideological conviction in democracy might lead to the perpetuation of conflict, not peace. Recognizing that in democracies, rival political camps are motivated by, and advance diverse ideologies can help us better understand why seemingly invariable exogenous pressure yields different results when different political parties or coalitions are in power. The overall argument of this chapter, substantiated by the empirical examination of the Israeli Right, is that ideological constraints mediate significantly the impact of external pressures and international variables. This phenomenon impacts political behavior and determines political outcomes. Within the context of the contemporary Middle East, it might be argued that US administrations and other international players will find it more difficult to sway right-wing governments to make territorial withdrawals from the territories Israel conquered in the 1967 war. The ideology of such governments will determine the outcome, not the mere existence of democracy. Above all, it is important to realize that ideology matters and that it is not a constant. In analyzing the Israeli Right and in thinking about ideology in general, it is important to adopt a dynamic view. Rather than merely describing what the “Right” stands for in terms of its ideological raison d’être, it is essential to assess this political camp in terms of changes occurring within it, as well as in terms of general developments in Israeli society and international politics. Accordingly, this chapter will distinguish not only between the pre-state (or Mandatory Palestine) and the post-state eras, a standard distinction used by many authors (Horowitz and Lissak 1978), but also between four different eras in the history of Ideological Purity and Political Readjustment ▲ 159 Israel since its establishment. The chapter will term those different eras “republics,” suggesting that they constitute significantly distinct periods, presenting the Right with different challenges and opportunities. This detailed differentiation is important for gaining insight into the behavior of the Right within Israel’s democratic system, but it might also have more general implications for the application of democratic peace theory to the Israeli case and beyond. The chapter is divided into six parts. The first part briefly surveys the different eras, or republics, and the diverse challenges and opportunities they presented for the Israeli Right. The second section offers a conceptualization of the Israeli Right, and the third explains its...