Israel’s Securitization Dilemma

BDS and the Battle for the Legitimacy of the Jewish State

Ronnie Olesker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000423877
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines how the Zionist movement, and later the state of Israel, have dealt with various longstanding efforts to delegitimize Israel's standing in the international community, including by the Arab League Boycott, the United Nations, and the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Through historical and archival research, as well as discourse analysis of legal and governmental documents, public statements of Israeli officials, and interviews with Israeli policy makers, this book argues that Israel has constructed perceived and real challenges to its legitimacy as ontological threats that undermine its national security, and has securitized its Jewish identity in response to these threats. As a result, the state has adopted extraordinary measures, often marked by illiberalism. Rather than enhance Israel's international legitimacy, these measures have undermined it further, especially among liberal audiences in the West, whose support is critical for Israel's continued international legitimacy. Therefore, Israel is locked in a securitization dilemma—where actions taken to enhance its security through increased legitimacy result in further delegitimization. Highlighting the ways this securitization dilemma is at the heart of Israeli policymaking today—particularly in the context of the recent BDS movement—this book brings into focus key problems that Israel faces as it attempts to combat delegitimization movements against its self-constructed identity as a Jewish state.

This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and policy makers engaged with critical security studies and delegitimization, Israeli studies and Jewish identity, and policymaking in the Middle East.

1 Israel’s securitization dilemma

Since the country was first formed, the notion of legitimacy has been central to Israel’s security. This can be seen throughout Israel’s history, and politicians, academics, intellectuals, activists, and citizens consistently express their understanding of the state and its existential security through the notion of legitimacy for the Jewish identity of the state. Many of the key laws and acts relating to the formation of the state—including The Balfour Declaration, the establishment of the British mandate over Palestine, and UN Resolution 181 from 1947 (which suggested the partition of Palestine into two states, Jewish and Arab)—all played a role in legitimizing the Jewish character of the state. Because of this historically central role legitimacy has played in Israel, it has long been part of Israel’s policies.

As a matter of empirical fact, Zionism has achieved its political objective—the establishment of the national homeland for the Jewish people. But the legitimacy of this home remains in question, and the existential anxieties of Jews in Israel regarding the legitimacy of their claims remain acute. Consequently, legitimacy continues to be front and center in discussions of security, something that can be seen, for example, in the country’s recent legislation. In July 2015, several Members of Knesset (MKs) introduced the bill: Israel—The Nation State of the Jewish People, which aimed to anchor, in constitutional law, the exclusive national rights of Jews in the state of Israel. The MKs that introduced the bill argued that it was necessary, particularly in times when there are those who seek to deny the right of the Jewish people to a national homeland in their own country. By introducing and passing this law, Israel demands of its enemies to recognize it as the national state of the Jewish people and asks of its supporters the backing for this demand.¹ By anchoring this demand in its own laws, Israel is seeking to underline the legitimacy of its claim that Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people.²

Similarly, as noted in the introductory chapter to this book, in 2015, the Knesset introduced an amendment to the Entry Law of Israel (the amendment was later passed in 2017) to allow the Minister of the Interior to deny entry to Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) activists and supporters. In the explanatory notes to the law,³ legislators argued that Israel was facing a new campaign in the war against it, and that until the law was introduced, the state was prevented from preparing for this campaign adequately. Moreover, legislators argued that letting BDS activists into the country would expose Israeli citizens to harm (Harkov 2018).

These laws represent only some of the manifestations of Israel’s approach to responding to delegitimization efforts against it. The BDS movement is seen as a growing threat to Israel’s Jewish identity. As a result, and similar to how Israel has responded to other threats to its Jewish identity in the past, Israel’s response to BDS is characterized by a securitization process which constructs legitimacy as a national security asset and, in turn, the delegitimization movement as a national security threat. However, Israel’s securitization of legitimacy has led to contradictory outcomes. This securitization, although widely supported among the Israeli-Jewish population, is not supported by all international audiences. Since some of those international audiences are essential for Israel’s legitimacy, the securitization of delegitimization has often paradoxically led to increased insecurity for Israel and undermined its legitimacy as a democracy in the eyes of certain international groups, especially Western liberal audiences, who play key roles in Israel’s successful response to delegitimization. This paradoxical outcome may be called Israel’s securitization dilemma.

The objective of this chapter is to orient the reader to the main theoretical claims and their application to the Israeli case. The argument presented throughout this book is that securitization was used as a tool to resolve Israel’s ontological insecurity through the conceptualization of legitimacy as a national security asset and the securitization of the delegitimization movement as a national security threat. The first section of this chapter therefore introduces the reader to securitization theory. In Israel, I argue later in this book, securitization of the Jewish identity was used by Zionists as means of legitimizing their national claims. Next, I discuss the meaning of ontological security and how it impacts states’ behavior. In the Israeli case, ontological security of Jews was resolved through the securitization of the Jewish identity of the state. I explore the meaning of legitimacy in the securitization process and how legitimacy itself may be securitized, as was the case with Israel’s response to BDS. The main theoretical contribution of this chapter is in conceptualizing the securitization dilemma model which results in increased insecurity even when the securitization process is completed successfully. By highlighting the tension between domestic audience acceptance of securitization strategies and external audience rejection, the model of the securitization dilemma can bring into focus and conceptually clarify how securitization can be successful and increase insecurity at the same time. The use of legitimacy as a referent object of security is at the heart of this paradoxical outcome that is captured in the securitization dilemma model.

Securitization theory and practice

With the goal of broadening the agenda of international security studies, the leaders of the Copenhagen School of International Relations—Barry Buzan, Ole Waever, and Jaap de Wilde (1998)—developed “securitization theory.” The concept of securitization refers to a process by which actors who are credibly able to “speak security”⁴ present an issue as an existential threat, requiring emergency measures that fall outside of “normal politics” (Buzan, Waever, and De Wilde 1998, 24); that is, of routine policy making via existing institutions and processes. Securitization is an intersubjective and socially constructed process (Buzan, Waever, and De Wilde 1998, 31). It requires the creation of a new social fact—a threat—through a process of intersubjective reasoning (Balzacq 2012, 63), which involves an exchange between securitizing actors and their audiences. It also emerges from social processes—the speech acts—that allow the state to suspend normal politics and adopt extraordinary measures (Buzan, Waever, and De Wilde 1998, 24). Since securitization is based on speech acts—that is, utterances that are performative—they create reality (Austin 1955). Actors must be in a position to discuss security issues with their audiences in ways that are convincing. Politicians are in obvious positions to securitize, but other actors in the system, such as the media, may also contribute to securitization (Croft 2012).

By referring to an existential threat that cannot be met within the confines of the “usual” procedures and actions (Huysmans 2011, 373), security rhetoric legitimizes policy makers’ authority to move from normal political and governmental procedures to exceptional political measures. Thus, securitization theory has a practical application: policy makers, especially in democracies, find the process of securitization appealing because it stretches the boundaries of normative political action, affording them greater power.

During securitization, state actors (politicians, media, etc.) will sometimes identify something or someone as a threat to the state merely as a result of the way the state is being referred to in speech (Balzacq 2012, 63).⁵ Nevertheless, those speech acts are often sufficient for a state to argue that something or someone poses an existential threat to the state, allowing the state to propose decisive exceptional actions to address that threat. This study is particularly concerned with securitization that comes through observable changes in the securitizing agent’s behaviors that are explained (in words) in the context of the identified threat (Floyd 2016). Exceptional action is evident, for example, when new executive powers are authorized by new laws. These actions must not exhibit fundamental changes or require new institutions. As Floyd notes, “existing institutions and policies may simply gain new dimensions” (2016: 684). Once the intended audience accepts that construction of the threat and the proposed response as necessary, the securitization process is complete.

The Israeli government’s securitization response to the BDS movement—such as denying BDS supporters entry into Israel and framing the movement as a threat to Israel’s Jewish identity—is a good example of this securitization. Other examples include the way Israeli politicians construct other boycott attempts as threatening the state’s existence. For example, in 2015, following a Palestinian Authority’s campaign to ban Israel from the international soccer federation (FIFA), Likud party Member of Knesset (MK) Anat Berdo likened the move to terrorism stating that:

The real meaning behind this delegitimization and boycott campaign is a call for our destruction. … [W]hat happened in FIFA was terrorism no matter how you look at it. …I consider that to be nothing less than an extension of the massacre of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. It is diplomatic terrorism, but it is still terrorism in every sense of the word, since it undermines the most basic aspects of Israel’s existence.

(emphasis added Mualem 2015)

Such rhetoric constructs diplomatic, non-violent Palestinian international initiatives as akin to “terrorism.” Indeed, the very notion of “diplomatic terrorism” is an oxymoron, yet accepted as legitimate through securitizing speech acts. Because Israel has identified delegitimization as posing a security threat to its security as the Jewish state, it has adopted numerous securitization strategies in response to those delegitimization efforts, which, as I explain further in subsequent chapters, has caused Israel to enter into a securitization dilemma where its efforts to combat delegitimization are frequently counterproductive.

Securitization scholars have emphasized the social aspect of securitization through the importance of audience acceptance. For second-generation securitization scholars such as Thierry Balzacq, securitization is audience-centered, and it is a pragmatic approach in which the power of both the speaker and listener is at play (Balzacq 2005). The audience in the securitization process is not merely a passive receiver of the constructions of the securitizing actor. Rather, the audience is an active participant in a two-way process in which it can choose to accept, reject, or modify the construction of threat and the proposed actions to address it. In other words, the audience is an active negotiator of security (Buzan, Waever, and De Wilde 1998, 26). However, securitization is context-dependent. Articulations that might work on one audience might not convince another, and this tension will become critical in later discussions of Israel’s securitization dilemma.

Israel’s securitization dilemma is the result of the ongoing securitization processes that relate to the identity of the state. Securitizing its Jewish identity as existential to the survival of the state and its people has allowed Israel to adopt policies, which overtly exclude members of its polity—non-Jews—from the national ethos (Olesker 2014a, 2014b); it afforded it the ability to securitize demography (Abulof 2014) and to introduce new demands into the peace process with the Palestinians such as the demand for recognizing Israel’s Jewish identity as a pre-condition for continued negotiations (Olesker 2018a). These securitizations were justified through an intersubjective pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Israel’s securitization dilemma
• 2 Ontological insecurity and the securitization of the Jewish identity of the state
• 3 The Arab boycott and early Israeli debates on the threats of delegitimization
• 4 BDS and the battle for Israel’s legitimacy
• 5 The losing battle
• 6 Resolving the securitization dilemma
• Index