The Civil Society,the Uncivil Society,and the Difficulty Israel Has Making Peace with the Palestinians

Abstract

The difficulty Israel has making peace with the Palestinians, which became evident with the failure of the 1993 Oslo Agreements, can be explained through the internal relationships and historical dynamics within the Israeli public sphere, and the relations between the public sphere and the state. Using the terms ‘civil society’ and ‘uncivil society’ as a theoretical framework, the article examines both the relations between these two binary representations within the public sphere and the ability of each of them to influence state policy through two analytical tools: cultural politics and instrumental politics. The contention is that the Oslo Agreements failed in part because while both the civil and uncivil societies arose as a cultural innovation and alternative collective identities in neo-liberal Israel, the uncivil society succeeded in translating its collective representations into effective instrumental politics that influenced the Israeli state, while the civil society failed to do so.     

Freedom and peace at the shopping centre: the politics of consumerism in Israel/Palestine

ABSTRACT

Shopping centres are products and indicators of consumerism. In the case of Israel/Palestine, where shopping malls have spread since the mid-1980s, they have acquired political meanings beyond the widespread conception of consumer-choice-as-freedom, as they also claim to advance coexistence in a context marked by ethnic segregation. We perceive shopping centres as ‘non-places’, following the work of Marc Augé, and analyse two overarching ideologies that coalesce in the shopping centre, in alignment with the political economy of Israel/Palestine. The first is liberal peace, which underpins the remnants of the Oslo process, but in an individualized form. The second is securitism, which presents shopping centres as a secure island in a sea of inter-ethnic violence. This image is taken apart throughout the article on the basis of ethnographic and discourse-analytical research on four sites in Israel, Jerusalem, and the occupied West Bank, focusing on the ways Palestinian consumers experience Israeli shopping centres.     

Restoring Ethnic Democracy: The Or Commission and Palestinian Citizenship in Israel

Israel's Palestinian citizens have historically enjoyed limited individual rights, but no collective rights. Their status as rights-bearing citizens was highlighted in 1967, with the imposition of Israel's military rule on the non-citizen Palestinians living in the occupied territories. It was the citizenship status of its Palestinian citizens that qualified Israel, a self-defined “Jewish and democratic state”, as an “ethnic democracy”. In October 2000 Israeli police killed 13 citizen Palestinians who participated in violent but unarmed demonstrations to protest the killing of non-citizen Palestinians in the occupied territories. Both the citizen Palestinian demonstrators and the police were engaged in acts of citizenship: the former were asserting their right as Israeli citizens to protest the actions of their government in the occupied territories, while the latter attempted to deny them that right and erase the difference between citizen and non-citizen Palestinians. Significantly, no Jewish demonstrator has ever been killed by police in Israel, no matter how violent his or her behavior. In November 2000 a commission of inquiry was appointed to investigate the killings. Its report, published in September 2003, is yet another act of citizenship: it seeks to restore the civil status of the citizen Palestinians to where it was before October 2000, that is, to the status of second-class citizens in an ethnic democracy. The Commission sought to achieve this end by undertaking a dual move: while relating the continuous violation of the Palestinians' citizenship rights by the state, it demanded that they adhere to their obligation to protest this violation within the narrow limits of the law. This article's key question is: could the Commission, by viewing the behavior of the Palestinian protestors as legitimate civil disobedience, have encouraged the evolution of Israel from an ethnic to a liberal democracy?     

The counter-hegemonic role of civil society: Palestinian–Arab NGOs in Israel

This paper deals with the causes and impact of the rise in the number of Palestinian–Arab Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in Israel in the last two decades. It provides a multi-level model that combines economic, political and cultural factors to explain the shifts in Palestinian-Arab political mobilization in Israel and as a result to the rise of a complex network of Arab NGOs. The paper demonstrates the way in which the civil institutions and their intensive involvement in public social affairs generate social capital that has internal as well as external political impact. Arab civil society institutions, which operate mainly separately from civil institutions of the Jewish majority, assist in the empowerment and the development of Arab society. They provide services in different fields, such as education, health, and planning. They also advocate and lobby for the rights of the Arab citizens inside Israel and internationally. Arab civil society institutions also provide information necessary for political mobilization, identity formation, and cultural preservation. In this framework the paper claims that they play a counter-hegemonic role vis-à-vis the Israeli state. However, the paper also claims that the broad advocacy and lobbying activity of Arab civil institutions did not manage to fully democratize Israeli policies towards Arab society, demonstrating the centrality of state identity and power structure when it comes to democratization processes. On a different level, the paper reveals that, although the Palestinian–Arab NGOs network has managed to lead to a liberalization process within Arab society, this process is partial and selective.     

Introducing the Journal of Civil Society: An editorial statement

Abstract

The comparative strength of Scandinavian democracy is perceived to depend on its close connection with a widespread and membership-based associational life that cultivates orientations and behaviour in harmony with an active, egalitarian citizenship. However, at the end of the twentieth century, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish governmental audits simultaneously revealed that the integrated Scandinavian model of democracy appeared not only to be diverging but threatened by individualization, segregation, and globalization. By a critical examination of various research findings, this article argues that Scandinavian civil society in certain respects is undergoing severe transformations that may explain more general tendencies of Scandinavian democracy. The changes of the civil society are not only internal, such as a shift from members to volunteers. Also externally, substantial changes are taking place, these partly due to governance structures and runaway parties, and causing some civic actors to move from the input side to the output side of the political system; others are shaping their critical role by speaking a global human rights language. Even though Scandinavian civil society has become more diverse, it is still undoubtedly embedded in Scandinavian democracy. However, its role as a trustworthy ally of an integrated democracy should no longer be taken for granted.     

Weak civil society in a hard state: Lessons from Africa

Abstract

This paper investigates the role of civil society in Botswana within the broader context of the state–civil society dynamic in Africa. It is argued that, like other countries in Africa, civil society in Botswana is rather weak. Conversely, unlike other countries in Africa, a weak civil society is accompanied by a hard state. Thanks to wise leadership, Botswana has experienced remarkable economic growth rates and significant improvements in human development over a period of about four decades. Botswana is also considered a ‘shining liberal democracy’, with elections held every five years, an independent judiciary system, and low levels of corruption. Yet it has been a democratic system with a weak civil society. Four main reasons are provided: first, the political culture makes it difficult to question authority; second, it is arduous to mobilize citizens because of the culture of dependency created by the clientelistic state; third, the Government has for a long time denied—and still does—the role of civil society as a legitimate player in the development process; fourth, civil society is not a cohesive group and lacks funds, especially the advocacy groups.     

Forging a Resilient Social Contract in South Africa: States and Societies Sustaining Peace in the Post-Apartheid Era

ABSTRACT

Since the advent of democracy in the 1990s, the South African political settlement has ushered into policy a progressive framework for the realization of socio-economic rights, enshrined by the Constitution. However, this political settlement has failed to translate into an economic and social settlement that results in just livelihood strategies and equitable service delivery that addresses historical grievances. Inadequate implementation of socio-economic policies designed to address injustice has contributed to weakening vertical cohesion between state and society. Analysing these two core conflict issues, access to service delivery and livelihood strategies, this article argues that the interaction of the political settlement and the ability of institutions to deliver effectively has negatively affected state-society relations and the legitimacy of the reconciliation agenda meant to support inter-group cohesion.     

Acts of citizenship as a politics of resistance? Reflections on realizing concrete rights within the Israeli asylum regime

This paper investigates how Eritrean refugees in Israel and civil society organisations who engage with refugee issues contest the exclusionary politics of asylum in Israel. It presents various acts of claims-making initiated by Eritrean refugees themselves or in response to hostility by others, as well as acts inaugurated by Israeli civil society organisations on behalf of or with refugee populations. Drawing on the concept of activist acts of citizenship developed by Engin Isin, the paper subsequently analyses to what degree those acts have redefined aspects of social and political membership for Eritrean refugees in Israel. In a further step, it shows the limitations of such acts in terms of developing a solidaristic refugee-citizen agenda that profoundly challenges hegemonic public discourse and political debate. The paper concludes by arguing that activist acts of citizenship are best studied in relation to the transformative power they may have on the various individuals engaging in them, but not as a strategy for a wider politics of resistance, as ultimately nation state politics continue to determine the actual realisation of concrete rights.     

Self-exclusion as a strategy of inclusion: the case of Shas

Among the many paradoxes of Israeli politics, there are the strategies of political inclusion used by organizations and parties representing groups that reject the universalism which Israeli democracy is heir to. This paper develops a model of ‘political inclusion Israeli-style’, illustrated by one party, Shas, which since 1984 proclaims itself the voice of the socially and culturally excluded Sephardi population of north African and Middle Eastern Jews, who represent over 40% of the Jewish population. Shas is also a movement of religious and ethnic revival which, by adopting a social strategy of self-exclusion grounded in strict religious observance, and of independence vis-à-vis established Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox politics, has gained 11 out of 120 Knesset seats, inclusion in government, and control over a share of educational and welfare expenditure. The paper raises the issue whether such less-than-perfectly universalistic practices are not a variety of corporatism and possibly, for the parties concerned, a more effective strategy of incorporation than the classic social democratic path.     

The Limits of Tolerance: Nation–State Building and What It Means for Minority Groups

Abstract

When we think of the most egregious forms of intolerance directed against minority communities we tend to associate them with particularly despicable regimes, such as Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, where racism, ideology or some special route to development is often held to blame, or where ultra-nationalism swamps positive tendencies towards democracy and a civil society. In this essay Levene proposes a partial corrective to this view with reference to the supposedly ‘good’ nation–state derived from the western liberal model. He considers the behaviour of two such states at their inception, Poland and Israel, with regard to two minorities, Jews and Arabs, with the Jews providing linkage between the two state trajectories. Levene charts their respective rejections of bi-national or multinational development, and suggests that the fact that both states today maintain a modicum of tolerance towards their residual Jewish and Arab minorities is more the result of (paradoxical) good luck than of conscious, benevolent design. In conclusion Levene proposes that the very nature of the modern nation–state militates against genuine pluralistic tolerance, a goal that requires a massive structural re-ordering of contemporary society away from global economies to a sustainability of human scale.     

Fake and Dishonest: Pathologies of Differentiation of the Civil and the Political Sphere in Hungary

ABSTRACT

Almost 25 years has passed since transition, and Hungarian democracy is in a deplorable state. Party politics pervades every aspect of political life, undermining the autonomy of civil actors, treating them as a potential ‘fan club’ of parties rather than cooperating and consultative partners. In order to capture what went wrong in Hungarian civil society, we propose a structural analysis that highlights pathologies of the differentiation between the political and civil spheres. We elucidate how the political sphere usurps the autonomy of the civil sphere; thereby not only does it undermine trust in civil actors, but also undercuts their capacity to perform their control function over the political sphere. In the analysis, we concentrate on what we identify as the ‘fake-civil/pseudo-civil’ phenomenon and related discourses, relying on the conceptual and theoretical apparatus developed by Arato and Cohen.     

Intra-Party Politics and Public Opinion: How Candidate Selection Processes Affect Citizens’ Satisfaction with Democracy

Scholars often mention the centrality of parties for the democratic political system. Indeed political parties are indispensable institutions for the linkage between state and society, and should not remain absent in any comparative analysis of citizens’ political attitudes. Yet, only rarely do scholars study how parties shape people’s opinion about democracy. This article seeks to amend this lacuna and examine empirically how party level characteristics, specifically the nature of a party’s candidate selection procedure, relate to the level of satisfaction with democracy among citizens. The authors constructed a cross-national dataset with data on the selection procedures of 130 political parties in 28 country-sessions to examine whether citizens that vote for democratically organized parties are more satisfied with the way democracy works in their country. Additionally, this relationship is examined more closely in Israel and Belgium, two countries where candidate selection procedures show substantial variation and where politicians have made a strong claim for intraparty democratization. Both the cross-national as well as the country-specific analyses indicate that democratic candidate selection are indeed associated with greater satisfaction with democracy.     

Military Intelligence and Controversial Political Issues: The Unique Case of the Israeli Military Intelligence

Contrary to intelligence services in other democracies worldwide, the activity of the Israeli Directorate of Military Intelligence, AMAN, is not merely centered around collection and research regarding military intelligence matters. Instead, AMAN covers the majority of intelligence activity arenas, including intelligence regarding state-related issues. This field of activity presents a situation where AMAN's officers, and predominantly, its research division, are compelled to deal with sensitive issues embedded well within Israeli political and public controversy. This is commonly illustrated in the field of ‘Intelligence for Peace’ in general and more specifically in the Palestinian arena. Intelligence research surrounding the question of Palestinian commitment to peace throughout the Oslo Process and following the onset of the al Aqsa Intifada – activity classified as ‘Intelligence on Intentions’ – placed AMAM at the heart of political debate in Israel and resulted in bitter internal disagreements in AMAN as well as tensions between the intelligence service and the political leadership. Throughout the years, numerous recommendations have been repeatedly voiced to end AMAN's monopoly over Israel's national intelligence assessment (including aspects of intelligence regarding state-related issues). These recommendations were based predominantly on hindsight evaluations, such as AMAN's repeated failures in intelligence assessments. This paper calls for gradual termination of AMAN's activity of intelligence regarding state-related issues, in light of its contradiction with the appropriate military–political separation in a democratic society. Moreover, it places AMAN at the heart of the political debate dividing Israeli society.     

The Pitfalls of South Africa's "Liberation"

In recent years, the figurative face of politics in America often quite literally has become the face of a celebrity. This trend finds citizens in democratic society willing to yield up their political consciousness to media-created celebrities. Drawing on the theories of Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard, this article argues that the investiture of authority in celebrities represents a continuation of the trend by which social bodies operate as the site where relations of power are played out, and by which the media serve as a means in which real democracy has been replaced by a simulated one. Alongside grassroots participation, and in some cases leading it, society is incorporating a new language that deploys celebrities as chief vehicles for the simulation of political consent, thereby overcoming public apathy, and buttressing the existing political order.     

Exploring citizenship spheres of inclusion/exclusion: rights as ‘potential for power’

ABSTRACT

Ariely examines the logic of inclusion/exclusion involved in the allocation of social, political and cultural rights to minorities. He argues that the unequal allocation of rights is determined by the degree of potential power inherent in the various types of rights, and that rights with more potential power, such as political and cultural representation rights, challenge the dominant group's position more strongly than rights to social welfare and cultural autonomy. Minorities are included at a higher level in spheres of rights with low potential power, and at a lower level in spheres of rights with higher potential power. He uses the case of the Arab citizens of Israel to illustrate the thesis, reviewing institutional practices of inclusion/exclusion as well as the attitudes of Israeli Jews towards the allocation of different rights as reflected in three attitudinal surveys.     

The Structure of Political Competition: Dimensions of Candidate and Group Evaluation Revisited

In this paper, we take a fresh look at the structure of sociopolitical conflict through confirmatory factor analyses of survey data gathered in Florida during the presidential campaign of 1996. Our analysis shows both stability and change in the electorate. In line with prior research, a single bipolar partisan dimension underlies the mass public's evaluations of political leaders, though national figures fit more comfortably on this continuum than do those at the state level. Citizens' evaluations of key sociopolitical groups reflect orthogonal cultural disputes, class divisions, and conflicts relating to issues of social control. While all three of these dimensions impinge to some degree on voters' conceptions of party and ideology, our findings point to the leading role that cultural issues now play in shaping ideological images and identities.     

Political culture, alternative politics and foreign policy: The case of Israel

This article analyzes how sociopolitical dynamics within a state can help explaining foreign policy. We show that under certain conditions, the public can be involved in ways that extend beyond expressing opinions that act as constraints on policy makers, and also takes active initiatives that eventually shape foreign policies. The article explains how sociopolitical processes in Israeli society, which transformed the nature of citizen–politician relations from a top-down to a bottom-up orientation, gradually led to shifts in foreign policy regarding the conflict with the Palestinians. The Israeli public has adopted an approach to solving social problems by unilateral initiatives, as part of its attempts to shape foreign policy from the bottom up, due to continuous government failure to provide public services, combined with blocked influence channels. As long as Israeli politicians ignored these changes, they failed to mobilize support for policies imposed from the top down and lost their positions of power.     

Political space in Vietnam: a view from the ‘rice-roots'

Abstract

Single-party, authoritarian states such as Vietnam are frequently characterised as having ‘closed’ political opportunity structures and ‘un-free’ socio-political systems. The validity of this observation depends, however, on the viewer's frame of reference. Seen from the perspective of active citizens, Vietnamese political structures offer increasingly greater space for collective action than a state-centred institutional analysis would predict. Episodes of contentious politics surrounding land disputes and public parks during 2007 provide evidence of the changing dynamics of participation in politics. Actors involved in these and similar campaigns are broadly optimistic about the future prospects for an opening of political space within the existing system. These findings are contrasted with international reports of violations of political rights and with the Vietnamese government's own efforts at legal reform. Although signals remain mixed, to some extent Vietnam might be becoming a ‘rice-roots democracy’ in practice, while remaining a single-party state. The voices and experiences of civil society actors will continue to shape opportunities and risks in the expansion of political space.     

Economy,state and civil society

The paper identifies a double crisis of agency facing socialists-the inability of the state to act effectively as the agent of society as a whole, and of the party adequately to represent the diversity of people's interests. It argues that this crisis can be resolved by the development of civil society, enabling the exercise of social control over the state and the economy.

An institutional framework for participatory economic democracy is then outlined, based on the author's model of 'negotiated co-ordination'. The model incorporates market exchange, since enterprises use their existing capacity to meet market demand, but not market forces, since interdependent investment decisions are not taken separately by enterprises acting independently, but collectively through negotiation involving all those with an interest in their combined outcome.

The model is constructed on this basic principle of self-government-that decisions should be taken by those affected by them. The conclusion reached is that the dual crisis of agency can be resolved by the development of civil society, but that a role remains for the state, in resolving residual conflicts of interest when negotiation fails to produce agreement, and for political parties, in promoting alternative perspectives on the distribution of resources, rights and responsibilities.     

Modernity Gone Awry: Lefort on Totalitarian and Democratic Self-representation

Abstract

This essay starts by reviewing Claude Lefort's writings on totalitarianism, a theme that runs like a red thread through his oeuvre and plays a key role in the different stages of his intellectual development. The analysis of the USSR is a central interest of Lefort and his colleagues at Socialisme ou Barbarie (and inspires them to adopt an explicitly "political" approach against the "economism" of their fellow Marxists); the problem of totalitarianism features prominently in Lefort's theory of democracy and human rights (where it functions as the "flipside" of democracy); and the theme holds Lefort's attention well after the events of 1989. The emphasis of this essay, however, is not on the chronology of Lefort's trajectory, but on the methodological role of totalitarianism in his theoretical framework. Lefort's account of totalitarianism serves him as a tool to dissect the symbolic fabric of modern society. In Arendt's view, totalitarian rule reveals something of the essence of modernity, as a movement towards ever increasing technical mastery. For Lefort, by contrast, totalitarian tendencies arise as an attempt to close off the experience of indeterminacy that has been opened up by political modernity. He shows that the totalitarian "imaginary" (which he dissects in psychoanalytic terms) presupposes yet deliberately inverts the very ideas that sparked the democratic revolution and that are central to the self-representation of democratic societies. In consequence, democracy is continuously at risk of degenerating into totalitarianism. Importantly, the totalitarian threat, which Lefort believes to be the main threat to modern society, only becomes visible by adopting a specifically "political" perspective. It is therefore of the utmost importance that we continue to under stand and to interpret our society in "political" terms, that is, in reference to the symbolic constellation of collective power.