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Israel Studies 3.1 (1998) 24-44



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Citizens, Consumers and Believers:
The Israeli Public Sphere between Capitalism and Fundamentalism

Uri Ram


Politics increasingly became an exercise in evasion. —Eric Hobsbawm 1

THE LAST NATION-WIDE ELECTORAL campaigns conducted in Israel within the framework of the 1996 elections for the Knesset and Prime Minister have demonstrated the substantial transformation that the Israeli political culture is undergoing recently. We shall argue that, beyond current political controversies and explicit political eventualities, there is a deep-rooted process of transformation in the very concept of what politics is about and how it is conducted. More pointedly, we argue that the concept of citizenship, which is immanent to democratic polity, and which is problematic in Israel for reasons dealt with elsewhere, 2 is under threat of decomposing due to a double challenge: a challenge from the globalist consumerist culture, and a challenge from a localist identity culture. Both challenges threaten the constitution of a public of citizens, to be distinguished from individual consumers, on one hand, and communal believers, on the other. We argue that consumers and believers may live in a democracy, but that democracy can not thrive under their tutelage.

In what follows, we shall offer a conceptual framework to the analysis of the newly emergent political culture. We shall consider three different theoretical options relevant for such analysis—the modern, the post-modern, and the critical-modern—and will adopt the latter as our point of reference. We shall offer, therefore, an interpretation of the newly emerging political culture in Israel inspired by the political sociology of the Frankfurt School, from Otto Kirchheimer 3 to Jürgen Habermas, 4 especially their (respective) concepts of catch-all-party and the structural transformation of [End Page 24] the public sphere (i.e., its colonization by both communal and instrumental rationality). We will adduce also the conceptual framework offered by Benjamin Barber of "Jihad versus McWorld," in which the fundamental insights of the Frankfurt School are brought to bear upon current pre-modern/post-modern global and local configurations. 5 There are two levels of texts in this study, and the reader is invited to move between the two: the major text of the author is frequently interrupted by framed minor texts of other authors, which are newspaper-cuts from the electoral campaign era. The minor texts convey and demonstrate most vividly the analytical interpretation proposed in the major text.

Two explicit manifestations of the new political culture are the new method of direct elections for the prime-ministership, and the contraction in the representation of the large political parties in the parliament. Taken together, these constitutional and political novelties signal a transition toward a third phase in the history of the Israeli political system.

The first phase began in the 1930s and ended in 1977, while the second phase began with the electoral "upheaval" [mahapach], which deposed Labor for the first time in the country's history from the governing role it had fulfilled for decades. The multi-party political system under one-party domination (Mapai, later Labor) was then replaced with a two-block political system (center-left block, led by Labor; and center-right block, led by Likud), characterized by a protracted electoral stalemate with a slight advantage to the right-wing. In the sphere of political culture, the transition was from a broad consensus under Labor hegemony, into a sharp Left-Right split and contest. The basic political division characterizing the last two decades has not changed recently; in fact the vote for the prime ministership in 1996 split the electorate right down the middle. The justification of our claim that a new phase in the Israeli political system and political culture is marked by the 1996 elections does not derive, therefore, from a new distribution of the electorate, but rather from new forms of mobilization and channeling of the electorate, a transition to what can be tentatively labeled a post-party era. To recapitulate, the political system and political culture in Israel have undergone three phases: first, the...

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