Israeli Politics and the First Palestinian Intifada

Political Opportunities, Framing Processes and Contentious Politics

Eitan Alimi

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134171811
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Sostegno politico

As the Palestinian/Israeli conflict continues to be of major importance in the Middle East, this book employs a new agency approach to understanding the conflict, examining the unprecedented challenge mounted by Palestinian insurgents to Israeli military rule in the West Bank and Gaza between 1987 and 1992. In particular the book discusses how the Palestinians learned about their occupier and how knowledge of Israeli political divisions were used, as well as exploring the various ways in which oppression led to shared grievances and discontent, and the development of organizations to maintain the Intifada.

It has received an award by the Israeli Political Science Association for the best book on Israeli politics in English.

1 Constructing political opportunity

Framing is a key element in political processes of contention, a cognitive process of interpretation and social construction. It is only through exploring the ways social movement activists frame and reframe their sociopolitical environment that we can argue convincingly that a particular change in the political conditions acted as an incentive for contentious politics. Hence the study of framing allows for a deeper and more dynamic analysis of contention. Specifically, the attentiveness to framing/reframing processes increases our understanding with regard to:

1 The relationship between various groups within a movement and the overall internal dynamics of the movement;

2 The role of cognition;

3 The historical specificity of the conditions upon which contention develops and triggers;

4 How movements cope with their various opponents’ attempts at repression; and

5 The link between strategy and tactics.

This chapter is devoted to reviewing the frameworks provided by collective action research for the questions why and how framing processes and political processes are interrelated and to establishing the integrative framework that will be used in the study of the Intifada.

This chapter is divided into three parts. The first two parts are devoted to insights into the dynamics of conflict and collective action grounded in the classical and contemporary sociopolitical writings of Marx, Simmel, and Weber, and Social Constructionist and Neo-Marxist thinkers such as Goffman and Gramsci. Based on those insights, the third part of this chapter will be devoted to a synthesis of framing processes-oriented theories and political process-oriented theories on the study of collective action, and to the development of a dynamic model of collective action, based on such a synthesis.

Marx, Simmel, and Weber

The sociological tradition provides us with useful insights regarding the emergence and dynamics of collective action. I shall briefly introduce some of those insights as they are rooted in the writings of Marx, Simmel, Durkheim and Weber.

Karl Marx (1818–83)

Marx may not have taken the political conditions for collective action as the crux of his writings, although he provides the basic structural context of conflict, namely, the material conditions of oppression, which set up conflicts that are played out, in every available political and cultural setting, between those who have control over the means of production and those who have not. While Marx showed the origins of class conflicts, he lacked a theory of mobilization. His frequent overemphasis of structural analysis, later to be named as the “mechanistic” interpretation of Marx (Ritzer 1988), prevented him from seeing that the link between grievance and collective action is problematic. Yet, Marx did raise questions about, first, the opportunities for resistance generated by intra-elite conflicts, splits, schisms and, second, framing efforts that promote solidarity and political consciousness within the challenging group.

The “superstructure” facing the potential challenger is a formidable, interlocking set of the political, juridical, and cultural realms. Yet such an interlocking system is not immune to contention. The “superstructure” can be threatened; a crack in the formidable “superstructure” can be opened. It may occur because one apparatus outweighs the other (say the legislative over the economic) or because differences of opinions and values among the ruling elite unfold. In his German Ideology (1845–6) Marx introduces what was later conceptualized as relative autonomy, a feature of the “superstructure” that might lead to political opportunity for challengers. On this feature, Marx writes the following:

The division of labor … manifests itself also in the ruling class as the division of mental and material labor … Within this class this cleavage can even develop into a certain opposition and hostility between the two parts, which, however, in the case of practical collision … there also vanishes the semblance that the ruling ideas were not the ideas of the ideas of the ruling class and had a power distinct from the power of that class.

(Tucker 1978: 173)

A fracture in the ruling class’s facade reveals to the subordinated class – the proletariat – the false foundations upon which their subordination rests. Marx does not systematically theorize the beginning of contentious politics, yet in his later writing, especially in the Eighteenth Brumiare of Louis Napoleon, he introduces a revealing if ad hoc insight into the reframing process. He sees such a process as central to the molding of readiness to act contentiously,

And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something entirely new … they anxiously conjure up the spirit of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.

(Tucker 1978: 595, 614)

Contention, then, entails reframing, in order to cope with the risks it involves. Reframing involves the use of language as a vocation for construction of meaning and, simultaneously, motivating action. While we are not in a position to know whether Marx had the idea of crisis in the ruling class in mind when he wrote this passage in 1851 (although the proximity is revealing), the conditions for the triggering of framing process are of importance.

Georg Simmel (1858–1918)

Simmel’s treatment of conflict dynamics provides additional insights into the opportunities for contention. For our purpose, the most straightforward insight from Simmel deals with the lack of a group’s inner cohesion as a signal for its antagonist to act. Conflict, Simmel tells us, is essentially a form of communication between conflictants.

Through contention, the two parties gather information about each other. When one party to the conflict identifies weakness in its antagonist, such as lack of inner cohesion, the likelihood of contention increases: “In view of the incomparable utility of unified organization for purposes of fight, one would suppose every party to be extremely interested in the opposed party’s lack of such unity” (1955: 90). Thus, conflict enhances mutual interest among the conflictants, who want to know each other’s strength, and through contention the parties acquire such knowledge.

Max Weber (1864–1920)

The writings of Max Weber are useful for our purpose in that they provide valuable insights into framing efforts by a group. Weber’s central contribution is to examine the way groups of individuals provide meaning and meaningful symbols for their joint action. It is the process of interpretation that allows individuals to provide themselves and others meaning and, consequently, motives for action. For Weber, groups commit themselves to collective definitions of the world and of themselves. Such definitions incorporate goals and standards of behavior. His notion of social action and social relationship is evident in the following citation:

We shall speak of “action” insofar as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to his behavior … [and] … Action is “social” insofar as its subjective meaning takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course … [as such] … The term “social relationship” … denotes the behavior of a plurality of actors insofar as, in its meaningful content, the action of each takes account of that of the others and is oriented in these terms.

(1978: 4, 26)

A less developed aspect in Weber is his notion of mobilization. Weber explicitly stresses the need for resources a group must mobilize in order to initiate action. This includes a well-defined antagonist, shared location, commitment and leadership.¹ Taking these two contributions within the framework of Weber’s work on religious movements and the role of the charismatic leader, leadership becomes crucial in coping with organizational challenges such as maintaining the group members’ political consciousness and commitment.

In conclusion, all three social thinkers contribute to our attempt at bridging political processes with framing processes. The ways such a bridging was further developed in two more recent traditions constitute the second part of our theoretical discussion.

Social Constructionism and Neo-Marxism

Social Constructionism and Neo-Marxism sprang from the classical sociopolitical legacy only to modify and expand their intellectual predecessors. Additional insights from both traditions can be lumped together to provide a revealing link between political processes and framing processes.

Perhaps the most significant contribution of the two traditions can be traced in their treatment of agency and structure as indissolubly linked. Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman, for example, provided us with the idea of structured lenses for the organization of experience: Frame. A frame, according to Goffman, provides the individual and/or the group with ready-to-hand answer for the question “what is it that’s going on here?” Nonetheless, in Goffman, as in other Social Constructionist scholars, it is the interplay between structure and agency that is of importance, since, while experiences are framed we can frame our experiences.

From a different angle, several Neo-Marxist thinkers contributed to the development of what they considered as the underdeveloped agency aspect in Marx’s writings. Such aspects include ideas such as hegemony, and active reader. These concepts, and others, were promoted for unpacking the traditional mechanistic interpretation of Marx with its overemphasis on economic determinism and the idea of the “superstructure” as a mere reflection of the “base.” In the main, despite various sub-approaches within Neo-Marxism, the traditional deterministic interpretation to Marx was unquestionably modified, opening the way to a more humanistic, agency-laden approach.

A central figure was the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci who, attempting to operationalize Marx, developed the idea of “historical passages” from one historical block to another, where each bloc is characterized by a specific type of hegemonic relations. Such passages rest on inherent cracks in any hegemonic mode, and that by essence any historical bloc “is an ambiguous, contradictory and multiform concept…” (1971: 423). While Gramsci introduced the idea of hegemony in the context of a political party’s attempt to produce consensus among its adherents, the concept of hegemony should not be confined solely to this tactic. The fact is no total hegemony or “dominio” exists² and the operation of hegemony never entirely excludes the existence of opposition and the possibility of true consciousness. Rather, we should perceive hegemony as “the relations of domination and subordination in their forms as practical consciousness, as in effect a saturation of the whole process of living” (Williams 1977: 110). Thus we should be careful never to think of hegemony as an abstract totality.

Yet, as much agency as such theorizing emphasizes in comparison to Marx, it lacks (1) the mechanism through which people organize their experience, and (2) explicit treatment of event/noise, which has the potential for stimulating questioning of commonsense. Whereas Neo-Marxist theorizing provides us with the structural elements so poorly developed in the social constructionist school, it fails to specify the source for, and process during which built-in contradictions and uneven developments between structures come to be socially recognized. Specifically, Neo-Marxism falls short in delineating the connection between talk, consciousness, and action. This is where the Constructionist notion of event/noise as a key factor in the process of tension and strain in commonsense comes to the rescue.

Mills in his Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motives (1963) illuminated the link between talk and motives by situating the emergence of motives. For Mills, talk and language are vocation; words can lead to action or inaction, to resistance or submission. He writes:

Motives are words … they do not denote any elements “in” individuals. They stand for anticipated situational consequences of questioned conduct. Intention or purpose … is awareness of anticipated consequence; motives are names for consequential situations, and surrogates for actions leading to them … [as such] … A motive tends to be one which is to the actor and to the other members of a situation an unquestioned answer to questions concerning social and lingual conduct.

(p. 443)

If that is so, the question remains as to what triggers the shift from accepted frames to the process of reframing. Acknowledging there is no state of affairs in which the dominant motive entirely forecloses debunking, Mills went further to guide our attention to question as speech form. He considered the question to be the sign of crisis that typically involves the emergence of alternative frames. Sticking to his guns, Mills reminded us that “question is distinguished in that it usually elicits another verbal action, not a motor response. The question is an element in conversation…” (1963: 440).

Conversing about politics is an integral component of framing and/or reframing, of reinvigorating your worldviews and beliefs or questioning them. Still, what has the potential for constituting a crisis, what leads to questioning, is conflict/noise/strain. This theme was already rooted in the Pragmatist School. The source of reframing is the encounter with new experience that destabilizes opinions and beliefs. Thus, according to William James,

The individual has a stock of old opinions, but he meets a new experience that puts them to a strain … the result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions.

(cf. Adler and Adler 1980: 23)

However, while for some people an event is perceived as threat, for others the same event can lead to illumination, an opportunity.

Modifying a set of beliefs or opinions is not the same as transforming it; most people would tend to stick to their long-held beliefs. After all, changing or questioning your beliefs may lead to social marginalization. Whether an individual follows one path or another is strongly contingent upon his interaction with others. Collectivization and the sharing of potential challenging beliefs in a public way are crucial for reframing.

Events can act as catalysts for a changing ratio between perceived opportunities and threats. For a discontented challenger who searches for signs of weakness in its antagonists, a particular event may act as a trigger, as incentive. In that case, it is reasonable to expect a process of reframing. When cracks in the assumptions about existing power relations unfold, the process of reframing is imperative for diffusion of new ideas. If events stimulate a contest between dominant and challenging frames, it becomes clear that reframing implies opportunity, and opportunity implies reframing.

As we will see, research on collective action has long been influenced by the tension between positivist/structuralist and humanist/culturalist paradigms, as reflected by the tension between the culturally oriented Framing Processes approach and the structurally oriented Political Process Model. In what follows, I will show how the above-developed interrelatedness between reframing and opportunity can be useful for synthesizing the two contending paradigm-driven approaches. It is to the synthesis of framing processes and shifts in the structure of political opportunities (the key concept of the Political Process Model), and to the development of a dynamic model of collective action, based on such a synthesis, that the discussion now turns.

A paradigmatic synthesis

The basic tenet of the Political Process Model is that changes in the structural context in which social movements operate are major factors in the dynamics of contentious politics. Whereas contentious politics begins when ordinary people collectively make claims on other people, claims which if realized would affect those others’ interests, contentious politics is triggered when changing opportunities and constraints create incentives for social actors who lack resources on their own (Tarrow 1998). Changes, then, in the political conditions (i.e., the structure of political opportunities [POS]) can explain (1) the shift from a short-term, sporadic mode of action to a wide-scope, sustained contention, and (2) the rise of contentious politics in a certain historical period and not in others.

This line of reasoning became a very influential perspective in the field. Nonetheless, and in a dialectical fashion, a growing number of works flagged the importance of cultural dynamics during which social movements’ activists perceive, construct, interpret, and assess such structural changes as incentives. A useful and representative place to begin our synthesis is with the development of the Resource Mobilization approach. It is representative because many students of collective action consider the Political Process Model a variant of this approach.³

Resource mobilization – rational actor model for social justice

By definition, a social movement is a dynamic sociopolitical phenomenon both internally (i.e., among its groups and actors) and externally (i.e., between the movement and its opponents and/or allies). Yet, its dynamism has been reified through, among others, the gradual neglect of cognition and structural conditions. The relative neglect of dynamics in social movement theory has mostly been the product of the Resource Mobilization approach, specifically the model outlined in John McCarthy and Mayer Zald’s “Resource Mobilization and Social Movement...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword by William A. Gamson
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Constructing political opportunity
• 2 The why question of the Intifada
• 3 The how question of the Intifada
• 4 The when question of the Intifada
• 5 The Intifada: tactics for expanding political opportunities
• 6 Conclusions and the future of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict
• Postscript: the contentious 1990s and the 2000 Intifada
• Methodological appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index