Security and Defensive Democracy in Israel

A Critical Approach to Political Discourse

Sharon Weinblum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317584490
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

This book scrutinises how political actors in the Israeli parliament (the Knesset) have articulated the security-democracy nexus in their discourses.

Security crises expose political leaders to an uncomfortable dilemma: guaranteeing the safety of citizens while at the same time preserving democratic principles, basic rights and liberties. In this respect, Israel represents an archetypical case. Defining itself as a democracy, the state of Israel has been in quasi-constant conflict with its neighbouring countries while facing terror attacks repeatedly. This situation has resulted in the upholding of the state of emergency since the establishment of the state in 1948 and in the enactment of security measures that are often in conflict with democratic values.

The tension between security and democracy is not a new question: it has been at the centre of political thought from Rousseau and Locke to Lasswell and Dahl and stood at the core of political debates after 9/11 and the 2005 terror attacks in London. Many studies have questioned how political actors manage this tension or how they could – properly – balance security and democracy. Yet, in spite of the abundant literature on the issue, the manner in which political actors conceptualise and frame this tension has been rarely explored. Even less has been said on the effects of this conceptualisation on the democratic regime.

Drawing on discourse theory and on an innovative narrative analysis, the book examines 40 debates held in the Knesset on security-oriented laws enacted in two different contexts: the period of relative calm preceding the first Palestinian intifada (1987) and the period following the eruption of the second intifada (2000). More specifically, three types of laws and discussions are examined: laws establishing a relation between freedom of expression and security; laws linking the category of 'the enemy' to democracy; and finally those connecting the right to family unification and residence of Palestinians with terrorism.

Through a comparative analysis of the political actors' discourses in 1985 and between 2000 and 2011, the study demonstrates that two main narratives have constantly competed: on the one hand a marginal narrative anchored in basic rights and on the other a defensive democracy narrative, which has become dominant. The latter has legitimised the restriction of freedom of expression, freedom to participate in elections, freedom of movement or the right to citizenship. The book shows how the increasing dominance of the defensive democracy narrative has had a fundamental impact in reshaping the polity and the identity of Israel's democratic regime. The analysis ultimately opens the possibility to rethink the conventional approach of the security-democracy dilemma and to reflect on processes in other states, such as the United Kingdom or the United States during different security crises.

This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, Israeli politics, democracy studies, political theory and IR in general.

1 Beyond the security–democracy opposition

DOI: 10.4324/9781315741888-2

The management of “violence in a democratic way” (Sabbagh 2002) has been a recurrent subject of research and questioning. This chapter offers a theoretical discussion of the way this issue has been most commonly discussed and how it is approached in this book. It makes the argument that the dominant paradigm according to which there would be a contradiction between the guarantee of security and democratic principles is problematic on three accounts: it reifies the notions of “security” and “democracy”; it legitimises the limitation of democratic principles; and it imposes a very particular understanding of the democratic regime. For this reason, this chapter develops an alternative approach, informed by critical security studies and discourse theory, in which neither security nor democracy are taken as given realities but are rather understood as discursive constructs. Therefore, this chapter (and this book) does not start from any pre-given definition of democracy or security, but rather examines how these notions are constructed in relation with other discursive categories, and how both are interconnected when discussing security crises and emergency.

In the first section of this chapter, I present the way security crises have been addressed in classical political thought and unravel the underlying postulates of this approach. In the second section, I highlight the permanence in contemporary discourse of these classical premises and their consequences for our understanding of the regime. The third section details why opposing “emergency” to democracy can be seen as a facile understanding of the (in)security–democracy dynamic. It argues that emergency (measures) is not necessarily opposed to the so-called normal democratic functioning of the regime and claims that the opposition of “normal democracy” against security is a discursive construction. In the fourth section, I give an account of the way linguistic securitisation theory informs the analytical framework of this book and explicate to what extent this study departs from it. Lastly, this chapter presents the specificities of the discourse approach and of the methods adopted in this book. It develops a conceptual framework and methodological tools inspired by narrative analysis, which permit unpacking and complicate the notion of a tension between security and democracy.

The security–democracy opposition in classical political thought

The question of insecurity has long been consubstantial of theoretical reflection on the political regime (Robin 2004). Political philosophers, including Machiavelli and Hobbes, made insecurity and fear core elements of their political thought, or even for Hobbes the philosophical justification of the political regime (Machiavelli 1996 [1531]; Hobbes 1996 [1651]). With the development of Enlightenment thought, political philosophers have been increasingly interested in the dynamic between (in)security and the regime. Faced with apparently incompatible stakes, they have attempted to answer the following questions: how should a regime react in times of security crises? Are existing institutions apt to respond to security threats? And if not, can a regime curb its own values and principles in order to preserve security?

Locke was one of the first thinkers to investigate these issues in an articulate way. In his Second Treatise of Government, he conceptualised the response of the regime to security crises in the following way. Examining the possibility of grave security perils threatening the community, Locke made the claim that in times of danger the “moderate” regime, based on separation of powers, sovereignty and liberty of the people, was unable to “foresee, and provide by laws, for all that can be useful to the community” (Locke 2003 [1690], 344). According to the author, complexity and slowness of action rendered the moderate regime incapable to face extraordinary unplanned circumstances. Therefore, while acknowledging that the legislative branch should normally have supremacy, Locke nevertheless estimated that the people should sometimes accept the renunciation of their sovereignty and pass the prerogative to the executive branch, i.e. “the power to act according to discretion, for the public good, without the prescription of the law, and sometimes even against it” (Locke 2003 [1690], 344). Even in cases in which basic rights and liberty were to be curtailed by the executor of the law, the prerogative was still justified by Locke on the grounds that “the fundamental law of nature and government, viz. that, as much as may be, all the members of the society are to be preserved” (Locke 2003 [1690], 344). By favouring the preservation of the community over people’s sovereignty and liberty, Locke thus paradoxically drew on:

a range of strategies from a decidedly non-liberal tradition: reason of state [which] holds that besides moral reason there is another reason – reason of state – […] according to which power […] should be exercised according to whatever is needed to maintain the state.

(Neocleous 2007, 136)

By doing so, the father of classical liberalism not only introduced mechanisms in apparent contradiction to the basic tenets of his ideal government, he also implied that security (of the society and its members), rather than the liberty and sovereignty of the people, is the underlying norm of the regime. In fact, it is its precondition.

Locke is not the only political philosopher who introduced what might appear to be a twist in his model when addressing the question of (in)security. For Rousseau, the non-liberal designer of the volonté générale and of the indivisible power, the quest for security also generated a clash with the basic principles of his république. In his reflection on Roman dictatorship, Rousseau claimed that although the ideal regime was one in which the people directly govern through laws, “the inflexibility of the laws, which prevents them from being adapted to emergencies may in certain cases render them pernicious and thereby cause the ruin of the state in times of crisis” (Rousseau 1998 [1762], 124). Due to the inability of the people’s general will to react properly and efficiently to the situation, Rousseau argued that the people should temporarily delegate their power to another authority entitled to “silence all the laws and suspend, for a moment the sovereign authority” (Rousseau 1998 [1762], 124). In similar reasoning as Locke’s, such suspension of the people’s sovereign power was not in contradiction with his model for “the general will is not doubtful and it is clear that the primary intention of the people is that the state should not perish” (Rousseau 1998 [1762], 124). As in Locke’s reflection, this step, despite being in contradiction with many principles of the republic, was in line with another overarching value of the regime and, in fact, its real raison d’être: the demand of the people that the state survives. By developing this reasoning, Rousseau thus embraced even more explicitly the premises of reason of state than Locke. It is not in order for the “members of the society” to be preserved but in the name of the state itself that core principles of the political regime can be truncated.

Despite considerable divergences in their ideal models of government, Locke and Rousseau thus deployed strikingly analogous analyses when discussing the political management of (in)security. First, both of them acknowledged the existence of a tension between the normal functioning and the basic principles of the regime on the one hand, and the guarantee of survival on the other hand. Second, and consequently, while promoting a regime in which liberty, rights and/or sovereignty of the people are the backbones, the authors both agreed that when security is at stake the regular regime should leave room for another form of government, one where the sovereignty of the law is suspended and replaced by a sovereign executive branch or by a temporary dictator. For the sake of survival of the people or of the state, fundamental features of the regime could, as an exception, be curtailed and compromised.

Reproducing the security versus democracy opposition in contemporary discourse

Despite the considerable evolution of the political regime, even centuries after Locke and Rousseau’s writings, the premises of classical thought continue to pervade contemporary reflection and public discourse in at least three ways.

First, contemporary reasoning maintains the notion of a tension between security needs and the normal functioning of the (democratic) regime. It assumes that the latter is an obstacle to the former and therefore acknowledges that, “The constitution [should not be] in its application in all respects the same, in cases of Rebellion or invasion, involving the public Safety, as it is in times of profound peace and public security” (Lincoln 1863). Scholars have disagreed on whether this extraordinary form of government should be seen as a temporary outgrowth of the regular regime (Kelsen 1988; Hickman 2005), as “an extra-constitutional recourse to harsh policies, necessary but not legal” (Schlesinger in Finn 1991), or as the only real and radical manifestation of the sovereign regime (Schmitt 1985 [1922]). Yet most legal, political and academic discourses have been underpinned by the notion of an opposition between regular regime acting under normal circumstances through regular techniques, and the emergency situation in which the system of government is “temporarily altered to whatever degree is necessary to overcome the peril and restore normal conditions” (Rossiter 2002, 5; Gross 2003; Le Coustumier 2008; Saint-Bonnet 2001; Pasquino 2003). At the legal level, this has been translated by the inclusion in constitutions of provisions allowing the establishment of special emergency governments that are allegedly better equipped to face wars, internal crises, rebellions, insurrections or states of siege. In France, the existence of “a serious and immediate threat to the institutions of the Republic”, for instance, allows the granting of almost absolute powers to the President of the Republic (French constitution, Article 16), and an état de siege permits giving intensified powers to the police and military forces (French constitution, Article 36). In Israel, the state of emergency declared during the 1948 war and never repealed similarly confers extraordinary powers to the executive branch in a series of arenas.

Second, in continuity with classical thought, principles said to form the basis of our regimes have also been framed as an obstacle to security. Serious security circumstances have therefore recurrently justified the curtailment of principles otherwise defined as the core of democracy, such as the habeas corpus, freedom of expression, freedom of movement or the right to privacy (Lasswell 1950; Chalk 1998; Donohue 2008). The curtailment of these principles has in fact often been anchored in the very documents originally conceived to protect them. The Constitution of the United States, for instance, provides that, “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it” (US constitution, Article 1, Section 9, Clause 2). The European Convention on Human Rights allows for the limitation of several human rights guaranteed by the charter if these “are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety” (European Convention on Human Rights, Section 2 of Articles 8, 10 and 11). In addition to the temporary suspension of democratic principles, many states have adopted permanent pieces of legislation that allow the government and the courts to restrain rights that are usually granted to residents in order to face particular types of threats. Confronted with terrorist separatist movements, Spain has for instance put in place special courts for persons suspected of terrorist crimes. Similarly, after the establishment of direct rule in Northern Ireland, the British authorities promulgated regulations that allowed derogating the habeas corpus for persons suspected of direct or indirect participation in acts of terrorism (Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act 1973), an act updated periodically until it was integrated into the Terrorism Act of 2000 (Neal 2012). More recently, the Patriot Act passed by the United States a month after the terrorist attacks of September 2001 allowed the quasi-indefinite detention of aliens suspected of terrorist acts (USA Patriot Act, Section 412) and greatly facilitated the access of security services to private information on individuals by different means, including property searches and wiretappings (USA Patriot Act, Title II). In Israel, too, a series of laws and regulations dependent or independent on the state of emergency enable resort to special procedures, such as the establishment of military courts or administrative detention in order to deal with terrorism or in the interest of state and public security (among others the Defence Emergency Regulations 1945, the Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance 1948 and the Emergency Powers (Detention) Law 1979).

Finally, and relatedly, the claim that democratic principles would be opposed to security has gone hand in hand with the idea that, in times of danger, a balance between security and liberty or rights should be struck (Tsoukala 2006; Neocleous 2007). Judicial institutions in many states have been central in spreading the discourse of the quest for a fair “democratic balance” between the protection of rights guaranteed by democracy and the preservation of security (Hofnung 1996a; Rehnquist 1998; Kretzmer 2002; Porat and Cohen-Eliya 2008). The European Court of Human Rights has, in this respect, explicitly and repeatedly emphasised that its role should be to determine a “fair balance […] between the demands of the general interest of the community and the requirements of the protection of the individual’s fundamental rights” (European Court of Human Rights, Sporrong and Lönnroth v. Sweden 1982). Alongside with courts, political actors too have mobilised the balance metaphor when addressing security measures. As Tsoukala mentioned in her study of the political discourse on the fight against terrorism:

In the immediate aftermath of September 11th, the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• List of Hebrew and Arabic words
• List of cited political parties
• Introduction
• 1 Beyond the security–democracy opposition
• 2 The discourse of insecurity in Israel and its institutions
• 3 Freedom of expression as a threat and the defence of democracy
• 4 Defining the enemy and the borders of loyalty
• 5 The security–immigration nexus: between terrorist and demographic threat
• 6 Narrating insecurity, reshaping democracy
• Bibliography
• Index