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Israeli state-building in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip: theory and practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Ian Lustick
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Extract

The most significant political division within Israel since 1967 has beenbetween those Israelis who favor the permanent incorporation of the portions of Eretz Yisrael (The Land of Israel) captured in the Six Day War and those Israelis who favor relinquishing most or all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in return for a peace agreement with the Arab world and resolution of the Palestinian problem. Although usually considered an issue of security, ideology, or diplomacy, the uncertain disposition of the West Bank and Gaza Strip can usefully be analyzed as a state-building problem.

Type
Review Essays
Information
International Organization , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , Winter 1987 , pp. 151 - 171
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation and Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

1. In most respects, this theory of how states are built represents a historic turnabout on the part of right-wing (Revisionist) Zionism. Before 1948 this wing of the Zionist movement had minimized the importance of Labor Zionist efforts to build a Jewish state in Palestine by an accumulation of small demographic, economic, administrative, and infrastructural facts. From 1977 until 1984 the Likud government demonstrated that it had abandoned its own earlier theory of state-building, which emphasized the crucial role of military conquest, legal declarations, and international sanction, in favor of the “practical Zionist” model for constructing a “state-on-the-way,” as it was known in the 1930s and 1940s.

2. On the distinction between conquest and consolidation in the context of European state-building see Ian, Lustick, State-Building Failure in British Ireland and French Algeria (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1985), pp. 1–5.Google Scholar

3. See Jackson, Robert H. and Rosberg, Carl G., “Why Africa's Weak States persist: The Empirical and the Juridicl in Statehood,” World Politics 35 (10 1982), pp. 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Charles, Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making,” in Charles, Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 7, 40–42, 76Google Scholar; see also his “Western State-Making and Theories of Political Transformation,” in ibid., pp. 610, 617, 636; and Stein Rokkan, “Dimensions of State Formation and Nation-Building: A Possible Paradigm for Research on Variations within Europe,” in ibid., pp. 562–600. See Otto, Hintze, “The Formation of States and Constitutional Development: A Study in History and Politics,” in The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 161–65Google Scholar; Juan, Linz, “Early State-Building and Late Peripheral Nationalism against the State: The Case of Spain,” in Eisenstadt, S. N. and Stein, Rokkan, eds., Building States and Nations, vol. 2 (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1973), pp. 33–106Google Scholar; and Finer, Samuel E., “State-Building, State Boundaries and Border Control,” Social Science Information 13, (08–10 1974), pp. 79–126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. See, for example, Foltz, William J., “Political Boundaries and Political Competition in Tropical Africa,” in Eisenstadt, S. N. and Stein, Rokkan, eds., Building States and Nations: Analyses by Region, vol. 1 (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1973), pp. 357–83Google Scholar; and Thomas, Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).Google Scholar

6. Krasner, Stephen D., “Approaches to the State: Alternative Conceptions and Historical Dynamics,” Comparative Politics 16 (01 1984), p. 233.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. Ibid., p. 234. This view is endorsed by Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State back in: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Evans, Peter B., Dietrich, Rueschemeyer, and Theda, Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State back in (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also the comments of the editors of this volume, pp. 253–55 and 360–61.

8. Krasner, , “Approaches to the State,” p. 234.Google Scholar

9. Ibid., pp. 234–35 and 243–44.

10. See Baruch, Kimmerling, “Between the Primordial and the Civil Definitions of the Collective Identity: Eretz Israel or the State of Israel?” in Erik, Cohen, Moshe, Lissak, and Uri, Almagor, eds., Comparative Social Dynamics (Boulder: Westview, 1985), pp. 271–72.Google Scholar

11. Ian, Lustick, “Israel and the West Bank after Elon Moreh: The Mechanics of De Facto Annexation,” Middle East Journal 35 (Autumn 1981), p. 557Google Scholar; Gharaibeh, Fawzi A., The Economies of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (Boulder: Westview, 1985), p. 60.Google Scholar

12. Maariv, 12 01 1983.Google Scholar

13. Ibid.

14. Gush Emunim translates as “bloc of the faithful.” It is a network of groups including from 10,000 to 20,000 activists but drawing on much wider circles of support, which was founded in 1974 to further the cause of settlement and permanent absorption of the territories occupied by Israel in 1967.

15. Jerusalem, Domestic Service, 2 March 1983, transcribed by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service [FBIS], Middle East and Africa Report, 4 03 1983, p. 16Google Scholar; Nekuda [Journal of the Jewish Local Councils of Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza District; in Hebrew], no. 58, 18 06 1983, p. 4.Google Scholar

16. Meron, Benvenisti, The West Bank Data Project: A Survey of Israel's Policies (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1984), p. x.Google Scholar

17. Ibid., p. 59.

18. Ibid., p. x.

19. Ibid., p. 65.

20. There are three reasons why a discontinuous notion, such as “threshold,” is needed to label the transformation of the territorial question from a cost-benefit, allocative policy problem (on the incumbent level) to a struggle (on the regime level) that puts the framework of the state at issue. First, not merely a quantitative change but a qualitative change in the character of political competition is indicated. Second, the political dynamics of such critical junctures and the crises or periods of rapid change associated with them deserve analysis in their own right. Third, reversing the process by returning to incumbency struggles even after the regime has been put at risk by the territorial issue can be expected to be peculiarly difficult but not impossible.

21. The conditions under which it is possible for this to be achieved among the population of a core state when it is not accompanied by similar processes of institutionalized legitimation among disenfranchised or repressed populations of the integrated territory is an important empirical question. My own studies of the system of control over Arab inhabitants of Israel (Green Line borders) and of British and French state-building failure in Ireland and Algeria suggest both the complexity of the question and possible systematic answers. See Ian, Lustick, Arabs in the Jewish State: Israel's Control of a National Minority (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), and Lustick, State-Building Failure.Google Scholar

22. Antonio, Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin, Hoare and Geoffrey, Nowell-Smith (New York: International, 1971), pp. 187n, 189, and 418Google Scholar; and Antonio, Gramsci, The Modern Prince and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Louis, Marks (New York: International, 1957), pp. 164–65.Google Scholar For a discussion of the complexities involved in interpreting and operationalizing Gramsci on this point, see Ian, Lustick, “Becoming Problematic: Ireland and the Breakdown of Ideological Hegemony in Nineteenth Century Britain” (Paper presented at the annual convention of the American Political Science Association, 1 09 1985, New Orleans, pp. 1–8).Google Scholar

23. Concerning the likelihood of such developments see, for example, Yoram, Peri, Between Battles and Ballots (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 284–87Google Scholar; Yuval, Elitsur, in Maariv 27 11 1983Google Scholar; and Lea, Anbel, “The Hussein Initiative: What the Settlers in the Territories Will Do,” Koteret Rashit, no. 131, 5 06 1985, p. 7.Google Scholar

24. For opposing views on the question of whether or not withdrawal from the territories is “unthinkable” for the new generation of Israelis, born after 1967, see Tabor, Eli, “Why Is Youth Moving Towards the Right?” Yediot Aharonot, 10 08 1984Google Scholar, translated in Joint Publication Research Service, Near East and South Asia Report, no. 84–152, 10 10 1984, p. 63Google Scholar; and “The Generation of 1967,” Koteret Rashit, no. 131, 5 06 1985, pp. 3, 16–17.Google Scholar

25. The Times [London], 20 12 1887, p. 7.Google Scholar

26. Ibid.

27. In December 1982 Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir admonished young Herat activists not to argue the case for maintaining Israeli rule over the West Bank and Gaza. “We, members of the national movement, must drive into every youth and Jew, this deep, simple, and elementary realization that Eretz Yisrael is ours. Why? Because, without any justifications or explanations, it is.” Jerusalem Domestic Service, 6 December 1982, transcribed in FBIS, 6 December 1982, p. 111. For examples of Gush Emunim spokesmen discussing the requirements and the challenges involved in crossing what I have termed the psycho-cultural threshold see Yoel, Bennun, “Thou Shalt Not Fear!” Nekuda, no. 42,7 04 1982, pp. 4–7Google Scholar; Eli, Susser, remarks before a symposium of settler activists on “Judea, Samaria, the Gaza District, and Israeli Society,” Nekuda, no. 63, 7 09 1983, pp. 22–23Google Scholar; Editorial, Nekuda, no. 68, 01 1984, p. 3Google Scholar; Yoel, Ben-Nun, “The State of Israel vs. the Land of Israel?” Nekuda, no. 72, 16 04 1984, pp. 28–31, 36.Google Scholar