Israel in a Turbulent Region

Security and Foreign Policy

Tore Petersen, Tore Petersen, Tore T. Petersen, Tore T. Petersen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429864773
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique du Moyen-Orient

This anthology examines and deconstructs what Israeli security looks like and how its various security identities have evolved both before the establishment of the state and in the years and decades since 1948. It casts light on how aspects of Israel's foreign relations have been shaped as much by internal politics as by external challenge. Further, not only does it answer the questions surrounding Israel's past, but examines carefully what type of country it has now become.

Compared to much of the turbulence in the region, Israel's diplomacies have been remarkably resilient and inventive. With the background of 100th anniversary of the Balfour declaration this book is a multidisciplinary study using several different methodological approaches; from discursive analyses, to theories of memories and identity, to interviews with Israeli soldiers in the field, to a legal approach to the topic, as well as International Relations studies and traditional archival studies. South Africa was one of Israel's main partners in terms of security cooperation and weapons research and development until the fall of the apartheid regime. This has been compensated with Israel opening up diplomatic relations with China (1991) and India (1992) and extending its ties with Japan. While the EU often criticize Israel's policies against the Palestinians, this is mostly rhetoric as for practical purposes Israel is like a member of the EU.

This comprehensive volume studying contemporary Israel is an invaluable resource for students and scholars interested in Foreign and Security Policy, Israel and the Middle East.

1 A divisive promise

The legacy of the Balfour Declaration

Carly Beckerman

Introduction

What is the centennial legacy of the Balfour Declaration? This document, written in 1917, was undoubtedly a crucial moment in the history of modern Israeli, Palestinian and Middle Eastern politics. It was a letter – ostensibly from British Foreign Secretary, Lord Balfour, to Zionist patron, Baron de Rothschild – and proclaimed Britain’s support for a Jewish National Home in Palestine. Vitally, the Declaration provided an ideational justification for Britain’s subsequent military occupation of Palestine and its mandate to govern the area.¹ As a result, this document has become intimately associated with the events leading to Israel’s independence and the Palestinian Nakba in 1948, so that Balfour’s disproportionately brief note has developed an immense symbolic status far beyond its original role in British imperial strategic planning. This appears to be chiefly because Balfour’s letter has been discursively subsumed into broader Israeli and Palestinian historical narratives that recount the development of their intractable conflict.² In turn, these narratives have been adopted and rejected in wider political discourse so that there now appears to be a web of contradictory ‘meanings’ ascribed to the Balfour Declaration.³ Developing a coherent picture of these differing narrative-driven interpretations remains a challenge.

When attempting to provide insight about the Balfour Declaration, scholars have traditionally studied the events surrounding its initial writing and publication through historical process tracing. The detailed work of academics such as Elie Kedourie, Isaiah Friedman and, more recently, Jonathan Schneer, fit into this category.⁴ However, this body of literature is not overly helpful for understanding how the ‘meaning’ or legacy of the Balfour Declaration might be understood a century after its release. A wide range of scholars have, of course, also explored the historical symbolism associated with the Israel–Palestine conflict as a whole. The work of Rotberg, Saloman, Bar-Tal and Bar-On, to name a few, has been instructive in this regard.⁵ These academics have even explored how competing Israeli–Palestinian historical narratives exacerbate the conflict, drawing on a variety of approaches including poststructuralist frameworks. However, while achieving sophisticated analyses, these existing studies tend to describe how different narratives view the historic Balfour Declaration as either positive or negative while preferring to concentrate their in-depth studies on the controversial legacy of 1948. These bodies of work require some synthesis.

It is also important to recognise that understanding the discursive legacy of the Balfour Declaration involves a very wide-reaching inquiry. The letter was issued by Great Britain but was agreed by France and the Vatican and was later enshrined by the Great Powers in San Remo, as well as the long list of signatories to the Treaty of Sèvres, and the United States Congress. The declaration, therefore, was the most profound early example of external involvement in Zionist–Arab relations that, from the very beginning, internationalised the tense situation in Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine. Likewise, it is also true today that there are many important players who claim an interest in Israeli–Palestinian conflict and peace. This means that understanding the legacy of the Balfour Declaration requires an analysis that investigates meaning-making from both inside and outside of the conflict. We know precisely how the Balfour Declaration plays a role in Israeli and Palestinian narratives, but how has the meaning of this momentous document been produced in the discourses that are constructed by external parties who claim an interest in the conflict? Or rather, to what extent are actors outside of the conflict drawing upon Israeli- and Palestinian-constructed meanings, rather than purely indigenous contexts, as resources for discussing aspects of regional and world politics today? These questions help us to understand the otherwise nebulous concept of ‘legacy’.

Twenty-first-century British political discourse represents an ideal case for exploring these questions. Britain issued the promise to support a Jewish National Home in 1917 before conquering and governing Mandatory Palestine; this means that the Balfour Declaration remains significant to British history and identity and is likely to have indigenously generated meanings. Therefore, this chapter asks, to what extent does British political discourse import Israeli and Palestinian historical narratives to ‘make sense’ of the Balfour Declaration? Considering the transformative events of the early 2000s, particularly the September 11th attacks, the al-Aqsa Intifada and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is acceptable to begin analysis of British discourse related to the Middle East in this century. Crucially, this study reveals an observable trend: Since 2016, there has been a noticeable change in British politicians supplanting indigenous ‘meanings’ of the Balfour Declaration with the discursive narrative-based practices of the Israel–Palestine conflict. In particular, there has been a marked increase in the number of British politicians mirroring Israeli discourse when mentioning the Balfour Declaration. Perhaps as Bar-On predicted, foreign narratives have procured “the moral and intellectual support of a third party”.⁶ The result is an increased dichotomy of meaning-making within British political discourse, making it more emotive and adversarial. The legacy of the Declaration is found in this cycle of divisiveness.

In order to demonstrate and contextualise these findings, this chapter presents its discourse analysis framework before briefly outlining Israeli and Palestinian historical narratives related to the Balfour Declaration. It then assesses all utterances made in the British Parliament that directly invoke the Balfour Declaration, from 2000 until the summer of 2017. It concludes that, approaching the centenary, British political discourse has subsumed elements of external narratives that sow or reflect greater internal discord.

Discourse analysis as theory and framework

It is important to recognise that Discourse Analysis represents an inseparable combination of theory and method, meaning that certain key premises underpin both the discursive psychological approach taken in this chapter and its analytical framework. These premises then have direct relevance for understanding the discursive legacy of the Balfour Declaration.

Although there is no clear consensus on what discourses are or how the scholar should analyse them, a useful, if not definitive definition sees discourse “as a particular way of talking about and understanding the world (or an aspect of the world)”.⁷ Discourses, then, may encompass a wide array of verbal and written communications, including conversations and anecdotes.⁸ Regardless of academic disputes about methodology, all approaches appreciate that talk, as a system of signification, plays an active role in creating and altering reality.⁹ If we appreciate that knowledge is not objective and, instead, is a product of social interactions that construct truths and compete about falsehoods, then Israeli, Palestinian, British and wider historical narratives concerning the Balfour Declaration are simultaneously both imagined and real. These discourses then render political choices and policies possible, preferable or unimaginable, meaning that “the social construction of knowledge and truth has social consequences”.¹⁰

Specifically, this chapter draws on discursive psychology and its “empirical focus on specific instances of language use in social interaction”.¹¹ It aims to “use the available discourses flexibly in creating and negotiating representations of the world” and “to analyze the social consequences of this”.¹² In terms of methodology, such an approach focuses on crisis points, meaning evidence of aberrance in human interactions that demonstrates the existence of multiple discourses. As discourses define and enable but also act to silence and exclude, understanding this multiplicity of discourses is crucial.¹³ This chapter utilises a relatively small sample of utterances (155 over 17 years) and so analysis is qualitative and presented in the form of direct quotations. Working with what has been said in these political contexts, the analyst is capable of “exploring patterns in and across the statements and identifying the social consequences of different discursive representations of reality”.¹⁴ As such, this chapter does not present a linguistic analysis that deals with individual words; rather, it aims to identify and evidence the patterns in various political discourses that interact with, and define the meanings (and, therefore, social consequences) of, a single event: The Balfour Declaration. These patterns or groupings are referred to as narratives throughout. It is also important to note that this chapter does not attempt to determine the historical accuracy of each Parliamentary statement, precisely because the discursive psychological approach accepts coexisting truth and falsehood within narrative-based and narrative-forming practices.¹⁵

Although the somewhat cyclical descriptions of this approach can be methodologically problematic, the core premises of discourse analysis are translated coherently into the Fairclough Framework.¹⁶ This analytical design was originally developed for Critical Discourse Analysis, which is more fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A divisive promise: The legacy of the Balfour Declaration
• 2 Constructing “The Seventh Million”? Holocaust and national identity in contemporary Israel
• 3 “I don’t know who we are”: Testimonies from Israel Defense Forces soldiers in the West Bank about Jewish settlers
• 4 Israel’s legal insecurity: The domestic and international consequences of Israel’s increasingly transparent support for the settlement outposts
• 5 Israel and the Gulf States: Regimes, rivalry and regional security
• 6 Veiled diplomacy: Israel, Saudi Arabia and Yemen – decades of clandestine relations
• 7 Israel and the Palestinians: The slippery slope
• 8 Far away: The relation between Denmark and Israel
• 9 “With friendly concern”: The turbulent relations between Israel and Sweden
• 10 Europe and the rule of (international) law in the Israeli–Palestinian space
• 11 In the shadow of the Balfour Declaration: British policy towards Israel and the occupied territories during the Coalition and Conservative Governments, 2010–16
• 12 The special relationship between the United States and Israel
• 13 Breakthrough: Israel’s great leap forward into Asia
• 14 The renaissance of Israel’s periphery doctrine: A comparative analysis
• Index