Israel-Palestine Conflict: Security, Ethnocracy, and Policy

Introduction

The most recent escalation of conflict in Israel and Gaza demonstrates that the current situation is untenable. This paper examines the history of the creation of the State of Israel, the aftermath of the Balfour Declaration, and the subsequent United Nations resolutions of 1947. After providing background information on the situation in Israel, the paper examines the security risks that both Israelis and 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 impeded the organic evolution of Palestinian citizenship within 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 their 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. Israel's segmentation of its geopolitical boundaries has therefore 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 because Israel has countless financial, economic, and political interests and stakeholders scattered across 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 that malicious outsiders might exploit. 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 and are 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 produces such manifest realities as segregated roads, segregated schools, and the denial of voting and employment privileges — all in the name of national security — alongside 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.

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 the wider 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. British strongholds in the Middle East following 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 Bedouin 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 only in response to the influx of Jewish refugees to the Arab spiritual homeland, but also to the overt Western European hegemony that the Balfour Declaration represented. Having recently divested themselves of the Ottoman colonial occupation that had lasted for centuries, Arabs were unwilling to be subjugated to yet another — and this time Christian — political overlord. When the State of Israel was created, anti-colonial sentiment and resentment was redirected at the Jews instead. The Jewish people in Israel became the scapegoat for Arab frustration, a dynamic that continues to manifest in the twenty-first century.

As Finkelstein points out, Israel from the outset had two options for creating the state. One model was based on apartheid from the start: enabling the influx of Jews from around the world to integrate with Arabs while ruling over them from an Israeli hegemonic perspective. Another model was based on "the way of transfer" — essentially displacing Palestinian residents by moving them to zones where they could self-govern, leaving Israeli Jews in peace in exchange for national sovereignty. "With few exceptions, none of the Zionists disputed the desirability of forced transfer — or its morality," (Finkelstein, 2003, p. viii).

Ethnocracy as a Security Issue

Yet there were few other options on the table. Palestinians, fearing the annihilation of their own state, were in a subjugated position due to the authority of the United Nations. The result was the beginning of what Yiftachel (1999; 2006) calls ethnocracy.

According to Yiftachel (1999), an ethnocratic regime is "neither authoritarian nor democratic" (p. 1). Instead, such regimes are "states which maintain a relatively open government, yet facilitate a non-democratic seizure of the country and polity by one ethnic group" (p. 1). The problem with Yiftachel's (1999) analysis is that the ethnic composition of Jewish Israel is far too diverse to accuse it of being a true ethnocracy. With Jews from Ethiopia, Morocco, Argentina, France, and Russia living together, it cannot be straightforward to fit Israel into an ethnocratic model. Complicating matters further is the diverse social landscape of contemporary Israel. As Yiftachel (1999) puts it, there are "three major Israeli societal cleavages: Arab-Jewish, Ashkenazi-Mizrahi, and secular-orthodox" (p. 1). Still, the analysis offers a sensible starting point from which to launch a serious discussion about the current security issues plaguing Israel and to propose possible solutions that could create a more peaceful future.

Conclusion

The national security of Palestine will evolve as an ongoing relationship between it and Israel and between it and its neighbors as the two-state solution becomes reality. The path forward requires mutual negotiation, broad international coalition-building, and a commitment on all sides to the principles of human rights and democratic self-determination.