Suchergebnisse

"This chapter examines specific consequences of the practices of the Israeli regime in the occupied territory for the part of Israel that most Israelis consider the proper part of the state: the area within the Green Line. My assumption is that even if die occupation ends today, die impact of decades of occupation will leave sufficiently deep imprints on the structure and political culture of the Israeli regime to stifle its future democratic character. Any assessment of the impact of Israel's occupation on aspects of Israeli democracy since the Six Day War, and especially the impact of decades of expanding controversial Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, faces the methodological difficulty of attributing specific regressions in Israeli democracy since 1967 to the causal effects of the occupation. The difficulty resides in the fact that social and political transformations, as well as changes in the economy, technology of communications, patterns of migration and immigration, shifts in collective values, and developments in political culture, may have had deleterious effects on Israeli democracy regardless of the occupation. Nevertheless, while I do not intend to discuss hypothetical speculative history, I think that the omnipresence of the occupation in the life of the Israeli democracy provides a wide-ranging basis for substantiating preliminary observations on the impact of the occupation on Israeli politics, legal structure, the military, social perceptions of the limits of legitimate internal and external uses of force, norms and practices of the bureaucracy, the educational system, the formal and informal status of Israeli Arabs, the relations between religion and politics, and the international legitimacy of Israel as a democracy." (extract)

The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 met much resistance. In the intervening twenty-five years the Israeli experience has been subjected to much criticism. Some of this resistance and much of the criticism have come from Jews who feared that the political organization of the state and the concomitant functions of controlling and managing power are antithetical to Jewish cultural and ethical orientations. If, to many Jews, a Jewish soldier or a Jewish policeman were symbols of liberation from the threat of massacres and pogroms and the humiliation of defenselessness against anti-Semitic assaults, to others these figures have represented a setback for the moral purity of the Jew, who exemplifies a higher ethical existence, a retreat from the vision of a transpolitical society. That vision did not include such demands of collective physical and material existence as the delineation of territorial boundaries, the organization and the employment of military power and the assumption of collective responsibility for economic viability.