Israel
Explanation of the Issue: Introduction
The most recent escalation of conflict in Israel and Gaza show that the current situation is untenable. This paper examines the history of the creation of the state of Israel and the aftermath of the Balfour Declaration and its subsequent United Nations resolutions in 1947. After providing background information on the situation in Israel, the author will examine the security risks that both the Israelis and the Palestinians have taken to achieve their respective goals.
It is hypothesized that the policies of the Israeli government have allowed Israel to cement itself literally and figuratively onto Palestinian land. The Israeli approach toward national security has had tremendous economic, social, and political impact on Palestine as well as Israel. As Yiftachel (1999) points out, the situation can be described as an "ethnocracy," as Israel has systematically imeded the organic evolution of Palestinian citizenship in the state of Israel. Although Israel does not wholly fit the ethnocratic model due to the inherent ethnic heterogeneity of the Jewish state, the ethnocratic concept reveals the way key democratic tenets such as equal citizenship for Palestinians, territorial continuity of political community, universal suffrage, and "protection against the tyranny of the majority" have manifested in the Palestinian conflict (Yiftachel, 1999, p. 1).
The ethnocracy model has succeeded in breaking the will of the Palestinians and attempting to force a wedge between them and said land by various means. As a result, Palestinians have repeatedly supported the organization of Hamas, which has a strong and overt militant and terrorist methodology. Therefore, Israel's segmentation of its geopolitical boundaries has led to its own security problems. Israel's ethnocratic model of governance needs to be called into question at this vital and sensitive historical moment. In particular, the Palestinian issue is vital to the security of the State of Israel becaue they have countless financial, economic, and political interests and stakeholders scattered all over the globe. In other words, how Israel acts has a strong bearing on the global balance of political and economic power.
The Palestinians who have become nationalized Israelis pose a genuine security threat to Israel, primarily because Palestinian citizens can gain access to internal state secrets malicious outsiders might abuse. This reality has led to a paranoid public policy in which citizenship rights are restricted for Palestinians. Palestinians are prohibited from engaging in dialogue in the Israeli public sphere; barred from genuine social and political participation in a society that claims to be a model for democratic rights and freedoms in the Middle East. The result is a paradoxical scenario, in which the security of both Israel and Palestine is threatened.
This threat creates such notions and manifest realities of segregated roads, schools, and the lack of voting and employment privileges in the name of national security with a shrinking platform for Palestinian citizenship. If Israel were to occupy Gaza and control all Palestinian lands via brute force, the result would be essentially an apartheid-style system of governance.
Explanation of the Issue: Background of the Security Issues
The birth of the state of Israel emerged in the aftermath of the Holocaust, which was itself a culmination of centuries of persecution and anti-Semitism throughout Europe and indeed the rest of the diaspora. Zionism emerged as a reaction to anti-Semitism, providing a collective cultural dream to which Jews in the diaspora could cling and for which they could strive. The British strongholds in the Middle East in the aftermath of the First and Second World Wars gave Zionism a foothold, from which to become a manifest destiny for the Jewish people. While there were thousands of Jewish people living in Palestine at the time of the Balfour Declaration, they were in the minority amid a diverse group of Muslim, Christian, and Bedoin Arabs. The presumption of peace was never made in the Balfour Declaration, which was itself an expression of European hegemony in the region. Thus, when the Declaration was issued, resentment was the logical reaction among the indigenous Arabs. Resentment blossomed not just in response to the influx of Jewish refugees to their spiritual homeland, but also to the overt Western European hegemony the Balfour Declaration represented. Having recently divested themselves of the Ottoman colonial occupation that lasted for centuries, Arabs were not happy about being subjugated to yet another -- and this time Christian -- political overlord. When the state of Israel was created, anti-colonial sentiment and resentment was targeted at the Jews instead. The Jewish people in Israel became the scapegoat for Arab frustration, which continues to emerge in the 21st century.
Our semester plans gives you unlimited, unrestricted access to our entire library of resources —writing tools, guides, example essays, tutorials, class notes, and more.
Get Started Now