Israel

Gregory S. Mahler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138716759
• eBook ISBN: 9781351768474
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

This title was first published in 2000:  The International Library of Politics and Comparative Government brings together in one series, the most significant journal articles to appear in the field of comparative politics in the last twenty-five years. It makes accessible to teachers, researchers and students an extensive range of essays which provide an indispensable basis for understanding both the established conceptual terrain and the new ground being broken in the fast changing field of comparative political analysis. A number of acknowledged experts have been invited to act as editors for the series. They preface each volume with an introductory essay in which they review the basis for the selection of articles and suggest future directions of research and investigation in the subject area. An invaluable resource for all those working in the field of comparative government and politics.

Part I
The Context of Israeli Politics

Religion and Politics

[1]
From Accommodation to Decision: Transformations in Israel’s Religio-Political Life

ASHER COHEN and BERNARD SUSSER

From the Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish settlement in Palestine) period until the 1980s, relations between religion and politics in Israel were based on consociational accommodation. Indeed, Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak¹ contend that all of Yishuv politics need to be understood in consociational terms. In their follow-up study of the statehood period, they claim that many of these consociational practices were abandoned when Israel became a sovereign state. Nevertheless, they insist that religion and politics are a striking exception to the rule: they continue to be governed by consociational forms of decision making.²

These consociational patterns account for the virtual monopoly of the Orthodox camp over religious life and the effective control that the religious parties exercise over many critical aspects of Israel’s religio-political life. This control is manifest inter alia in the official status and personal composition of various religious institutions (such as the Chief Rabbinate and the local religious councils), the exclusively religious regulation of all matters relating to marriage and divorce, as well as in the autonomy of the religious community in the educational domain.

The object of this essay is to assess the potential for change in these areas against the background of a number of broad and basic transformations that have been taking place in Israeli public life since the beginning of the 1980s. We shall claim, moreover, that the surprising results of the recent elections (29 May 1996) express a protest and backlash against these processes.

We shall focus especially on six salient processes of change: 1) the transition from a dominant party system to a balanced two-camp system; 2) the growth of “judicial activism”; 3) the constitutional revolution that has been taking place since the passage of the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty as well as the Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation; 4) the Basic Law: The Government, at the center of which lies the direct election of the prime minister; 5) the decline of the “illegalist” style that oiled the political wheels by making payoffs to religious parties and institutions; and 6) the demographic changes that Israel has undergone with the wave of immigration from the ex-Soviet states.

Our central contention is that these broad changes in Israeli public life fostered a decline in consociational arrangements and a concomitant rise of majority rule politics. These changes posed a threat to the Orthodox monopoly over religious life as well as a real challenge to the long-lived accommodations between the Orthodox minority and non-Orthodox majority. Our second, concomitant claim is that this decline in consociationalism strongly influenced Israeli voting patterns during the recent election. It is important that they be seen as a vote to counter, indeed to reverse, this process.

The first five elements noted above have a common denominator: they are a portent of a new style of politics that strives for clear and resolute decisions. This new political decisiveness undermined traditional consociational practices that preserved a fragile equilibrium between religious and nonreligious communities. The sixth change relating to the great waves of immigration from the ex-Soviet Union adds an important social catalyst to the process.

The consociational model was first advanced by Arend Lijphart³ in his effort to explain the stable functioning of democratic regimes with deep sociopolitical cleavages. Consociationalism occurs, he suggests, when political elites recognize that the stable functioning of the entire political system might be endangered if the social and ideological disputes that divide their society were allowed to operate without restraint. Because of these fears, the leaders of the various political camps adopt measures to ensure that these cleavages are effectively controlled.

Basically, political leadership refrains from invoking the principle of majority rule to settle controversial issues. Even though such majorities do, in fact, exist—at least in the form of a coalition of groups—the majoritarian style is systematically avoided. So as to prevent latent conflicts from becoming insoluble disputes of principle, a number of steps are typically taken: there is a tendency to transfer explosive issues from the national to the local level and from the public domain to the more informal and discreet spheres of give and take between political elites. Characteristically, controversial issues are dealt with through negotiations, compromise, and reciprocal deference. Proportionalism and not majorities govern the allocation of budgets and power.

Political elites recognize the existence of “red lines” beyond which they dare not tread lest they spark dangerous controversy. An informal system of reciprocal vetoes develops; each group indicates which policies or practices would constitute an intolerable injury to their communal interests. In certain defined areas, each group is granted autonomy to regulate its own affairs in accord with its own worldview and way of life. The participation of all significant groups in the governmental decision-making process is encouraged not because of the ideological proximity between them or because of concrete political payoffs that may ensue, but to moderate potential controversies. Consociationalism is, then, an informal pattern of behavior rather than a constitutionally or legally mandated norm. Its origins reside in the recognition that controversy, if left uncontrolled, can eventuate in conflict so intense that the very unity of the political system would be imperiled.⁴

The Israeli political system from the mid-1980s up to the mid-1990s underwent a number of important transitions. Constitutionally, judicially, structurally, institutionally, and demographically the political style of the past was attenuated as new forms struggled to emerge. There is, of course, no way of knowing whether these transformations will continue to develop in the direction they were heading. Certainly, the results of the recent election give every sign that, at least in the short run, they will be slowed down, if not actually reversed. Even without the victory of Mr. Netanyahu (massively supported by the religious parties), however, it is hardly certain that the process would have prevailed. Notably, of the six areas of change that were noted above, judicial activism is a decade or so old, the “constitutional revolution” prompted by the new Basic Laws is just now beginning to be felt, the direct election of the prime minister has only recently been tried for the first time, and the issues raised by ex-Soviet Jews are still largely latent.

We shall begin by describing the consociational arrangements that characterized the relationships between religion and politics prior to the 1980s. Thereafter, the focus will be on each of the six areas sketched above in order to explain how they undermine consociationalism by encouraging clear and decisive resolutions to religio-political issues. Lastiy, the changes adumbrated by the recent elections will be addressed.

CONSOCIATIONALISM TRIUMPHANT: RELIGIO-POLITICS IN THE ERA OF MAPAI DOMINANCE

One of the more doubtful platitudes of Israeli politics declares that the achievements of the religious parties derive from dieir ability to tip the coalitional scales in one direction or another. Without their participation, either coalitions could not be formed or they would be so narrow as to be unworkable.⁵ This hypothesis may well be accurate for the “two-camp” era beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s but it has little validity for die earlier “dominant party” era.

During the earlier period of Mapai (Israeli Worker’s Party—from which the present Labor Party derives) dominance, the religious parties did not “tip the scales”; indeed, they did not even come close to doing so. Indeed, the standard definition of a “dominant party” entails that it has sufficient electoral clout not to be dependent upon a small party to form a ruling coalition. In this earlier period, the dominant party could form coalitions as it saw fit. Nevertheless, it chose to include the religious parties for consociational reasons rather than because they were arithmetically indispensable.

A careful analysis of the ruling coalitions during the period of Mapai dominance demonstrates that in the overwhelming majority of these coalitions, the National Religious Party (then called the Mizrachi party) was not critical for achieving a parliamentary majority.⁶ Coalitionally such behavior is irrational; consociarionally it makes perfect sense. As one writer put it, “The open invitation to the NRP to join every coalition should be understood as an attempt to neutralize what might have become a powerful source of cleavage.”⁷

One well-known example of this consociational relationship is the “status quo” agreement. The “status quo” is a political practice that regulates religio-political relations by making them subject to the status quo ante, i.e., the situation that prevailed when the State of Israel was founded. From the early 1950s onward, the status quo has acted as a dynamically developing regulatory category⁸ to manage religious-secular tensions. In practice, this means that the nonreligious majority pledges to refrain from utilizing its majoritarian prerogatives in order to decisively resolve issues of religion and the state. The religious community is, in effect, granted a veto over policies that would undermine its religious principles.

The “Who is a Jew”⁹ issue nicely illustrates this consociational arrangement as well. Israel’s Law of Return declares that every Jew has the right to “return” to Israel and the Law of Citizenship grants automatic citizenship to such returning Jews. These laws, however, nowhere define the term “Jew.” At first, Mapai refrained from clear policies in this regard because they would have triggered intense controversy. Controversy broke out nonetheless when the minister of interior ruled (1958) that to be registered as a Jew one required a declaration by both parents that their child is a Jew. The NRP saw this as a deep affront to its worldview and it promptly left the coalition. Notably, the NRP’s decision to leave the coalition had littie or no coalitional significance. Together with the NRP, the government had a solid majority—(eighty members out of a 120-member parliament) and after NRPs departure, the coalition still counted 69. For nearly a year and a half the NRP remained outside the government. From every narrowly coalitional point of view, Mapai had no reason to reinvite the NRP. And yet it did.

The political storm over this issue prompted Mapai to convene a ministerial committee empowered to pose the question, “Who Is a Jew,” to fifty leading Jewish scholars and religious leaders worldwide. Moreover, the government pledged to abide by the majority decision. Of the forty-five responses received, thirty-seven supported the Orthodox definition (some contended that the choice of respondents was rigged so as to receive an outcome congenial to the NRP.) The government thus retreated dramatically from the guidelines it had formerly accepted and in so doing demonstrated the depth of their consociational commitments. After the 1959 elections, the NRP was invited to return to the government, and its leader, C. M. Shapira, became minister of the interior. Shapira quickly established new religiously acceptable guidelines for the registration of Jews. From that time until very recendy, the ministry of interior has always been in religious hands.

Another kind of consociational arrangement manifests itself in the autonomy given to religious groups to handle their own affairs in areas that are of special concern to them. The ability to express their values and way of fife in officially sanctioned and publicly supported institutions contributes to the legitimacy accorded to these groups despite their continuing dispute with the majority. Religious institutions of all kinds, from the Chief Rabbinate to the religious court system to local religious councils, represent such accommodations.¹⁰ Perhaps most prominently, the consociational style is visible in the semi-autonomous publicly-supported religious educational systems that control more than a quarter of elementary education in Israel.

In the period of Mapai dominance, consociational accommodations are particularly dramatic in regard to the Ultra-Orthodox (Haredi), non-Zionist, Agudat Israel party that has not been a full member of a ruling coalition for more than four decades. Consociational arrangements are perhaps understandable in regard to the NRP, the largest religious party possessing a Zionist character and a central role in the ruling coalition. To find instances of consociationalism in regard to Agudat Israel despite its lack of a coalitional role and its vast ideological distance from Mapai is another matter entirely.

One clear instance of this relates to military service. Army duty is a central value in Israeli political culture.¹¹ The National Religious Party, for example, has always insisted that even advanced rabbinical students must suspend their studies in order to perform their military duties. But the Ultra-Orthodox made it clear that army service was an intolerable violation of their beliefs and their way of life. Although Agudat Israel has not been a part of the ruling coalition since 1952, its demands have been accepted by secular governments from the earliest years of statehood onward.¹² Ultra-Orthodox men have been granted what is, in effect, an exemption from army service. Even though the number of such exemptions has grown over the years from tens to hundreds to thousands, even though the public outcry is intense, there is no serious move afoot to alter this reality. Similarly, an Ultra-Orthodox educational system has been heavily subsidized by government budgets even though, once again, its educational message is anathema to the governments that support it.¹³

It should be emphasized that these and other consociational arrangements developed and became entrenched during the years of Mapai dominance. They did not derive from standard political interests such as forming a coalitional majority.¹⁴ Mapai deferred to the religious parties not because of ideological proximity but because of the potentially dangerous consequences of ideological distance. This is the heart of consociationalism.

The Decline of Consociationalism Religio-Politics in the Two-Camp Era

Even if the underlying cultural forces that support consociational politics persist in Israeli society, there is little doubt that the consociationalism of the two-camp era (that is, since the 1977 rise to power of the Likud Party) is very different from the consociationalism of the period of Mapai dominance. In effect, the dynamics of the two-camp system undermine consociational arrangements. Two-camp politics is marked by: 1) narrow electoral gaps between the two large parties; 2) the identification of most of the smaller parties with one of .the two major parties creating a two-camp system, each composed of a large party surrounded by its satellites; 3) the growing difficulty on the part of most smaller parties to court either of the larger parties, as was the case in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• Part I The Context of Israeli Politics
• Part II The Constitutional Framework of Israeli Politics
• Part III The Operation of Domestic Politics
• Part IV The External Setting: Foreign Affairs, Security, Peace
• Name Index