Does Democracy Tame the Radicals? Lessons from Israel's Jewish Religious Political Parties

Abstract

This article considers how participation in the democratic political process influences the platforms and strategies of Israel's Jewish religious political parties. Focusing on the religious political parties that contested the March 2006 election in Israel, the article suggests that party ideology strongly influences the extent to which Israel's religious political parties have taken up moderate positions regarding Israel's internal and external security policies, especially with regard to religion and state issues; the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; and Israel's withdrawal from the post-1967 occupied territories. Ideology, however, is not determinative – regular participation in the electoral process and access to government resources has over time also worked to moderate initially hardline party positions. The fact that religious political parties typically serve as pivotal parties in Israel's governing coalitions accounts for why these parties, and their constituents, have largely avoided extremism. As a result of the integration of religious political parties into Israel's proportional representation, multi-party system, extremist violence in Israel has tended to be extra-parliamentary.

I thank the journal's Editors and its anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this article. I also thank the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University for providing research support to this project.

Notes

1. This essay excludes the Arab Israeli parties, some of which have campaigned on a religious platform. Of the 31 political parties that participated in the March 2006 elections for the 17th Knesset, five were Israeli Arab parties. Of these, only one – Ra'am (the United Arab List/Arab Renewal) – ran on a platform calling for the expansion of Islamic religious court jurisdiction, and an increase in the budgets for holy sites. The remaining Arab Israeli parties (Da'am (Organization for Democratic Action); Hadash (The Democratic Front for Peace and Equality); the National Arab Party; and the National Democratic Assembly (Balad) are secular parties that advocate for Israeli-Arab civil rights; an end of the occupation and a return to the Green Line; and a Palestinian state alongside Israel. The Balad party can be considered anti-religious – it advocates that Israel should be a democratic secular state rather than a Jewish state and a “non-denominational country for all its citizens.” Ra'am – the United Arab List—garnered four Knesset seats in the elections, with Balad and Hadash each receiving sufficient numbers of votes for three seats each. The present essay excludes discussion of the religious Arab Israeli party Ra'am because my intent is to show how Jewish religious political parties in Israel have moderated over time as a result of their participation in the democratic political process.

2. For a notable exception, see Sultan Tepe, “Religious Parties and Democracy: A Comparative Assessment of Israel and Turkey,” Democratization Vol. 12, No. 3 (June 2005), pp. 283–307.

3. The extent to which Israel may serve as a model for other new, communitarian-minded democracies in the Middle East, Asia and other regions, particularly those which are unlikely to be comfortable with strict secularism or Western liberalism, is beyond the scope of this essay, but certainly warrants further attention.

4. In Israel's political system, national elections are held once every four years, but can occur earlier if the majority party cannot hold a winning coalition of at least 61 seats in the 120-member Knesset. Each political party's representation in the Knesset is proportional to the percentage of votes it wins in the election. A minimum of 2% of the total vote is required to be elected to the Knesset. Due to this low threshold, in Israel's history no political party has ever managed to attain a majority 61 votes, necessitating coalition governments. In the current electoral system, there is one national election for the Knesset. From 1992 to 2001 the system was changed to allow for the direct election of the prime minister, which affected the prime ministerial elections of 1996, 1999, and 2001.

5. In this essay, the “occupied territories” refers to the territorial areas under Israeli control since the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, including the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. Of these areas, only the Golan Heights was formally annexed in 1981; the West Bank and Gaza Strip were under Israeli military administration until 1993, when the Oslo peace process established a timetable for Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian population centers in the territories and the phased transfer of power of these areas to the newly formed Palestinian Authority. (East Jerusalem has yet a different set of administrative arrangements – in order to ensure a unified Jerusalem, Israel extended Israeli residency rights to east Jerusalemite Palestinians, including the right to vote in the city's municipal elections and access to the full panoply of social services available to all Israeli citizens. Israeli law was extended to east Jerusalem in 1967, even as the area was never formally annexed. Jerusalem was not included as part of the Oslo withdrawals; its status was to be determined in final status negotiations with the Palestinians.) Known as the Allon Plan, Israel's initial policy toward the occupied territories, with few exceptions, eschewed Israeli civilian settlement in these areas and anticipated a return of the lands to Arab states who would then grant Palestinians autonomy. Thus, by the late 1970s, only several thousand Israelis lived in the occupied territories. In 1977, however, with the shift in political power from Labor-led governments to the right-wing Likud party, Israel's settlement policy changed – the new Likud government authorized the development of numerous Israeli Jewish civilian communities in the territories (some deep in the heart of densely populated Palestinian areas). By 2004, when Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip, close to 400,000 Israeli Jews lived in the West Bank and Gaza, including the area known as Greater Jerusalem (i.e., east Jerusalem and several surrounding neighborhoods in the West Bank). As I show in this essay, since Israel's capture of the occupied territories from Jordan, Egypt, and Syria in the 1967 war, various constituencies and political parties have supported Israel's retention of the occupied territories and their eventual inclusion into Israel's sovereign territory. Over the years, but increasingly since the signing of the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, this “settlement project” has been contested by a majority of Israelis who insist that in the absence of territorial compromise and withdrawal from these regions, and peace with the Palestinians, Israel's long-term security and its status as a Jewish democratic state will be severely undermined. For useful overviews of the settlement issue and its salience to Israeli politics, see for example, Gideon Aran, “Jewish Zionist Fundamentalism: The Bloc of the Faithful in Israel (Gush Emunim),” in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Fundamentalism Observed (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), pp. 265–344; Aharon Kellerman, Society and Settlement: Jewish Land of Israel in the Twentieth Century (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993); Gershom Gorenberg, The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967–1977 (New York: Times Books, 2006); and Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel's Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967–2007 (New York: Nation Books, 2007).

6. The Israeli legal system is very different from those of other liberal Western nations. The system is at once pluralistic and also segregated by religion. Based on the Ottoman millet system of religious self-governance, which was adopted by the British during the Mandate period, separate state-funded religious courts serve a diverse set of religious communities in Israel. These courts have exclusive judicial authority in most matters of members' personal status. For an extended discussion of the deleterious implications of this system, especially for women, see Madelaine Adelman, “No Way Out: Divorce-Related Domestic Violence in Israel,” Violence Against Women Vol. 6, No. 11 (November 2000), pp. 1223–1254.

7. For more on the Israeli–Arab predicament, see Joel S. Migdal, Through the Lens of Israel: Explorations in State and Society (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), pp. 173–194.

8. For extended discussions see Ira Sharkansky, The Politics of Religion and the Religion of Politics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000) and Eliezer Don-Yehiya and Charles Liebman, Religion and Politics in Israel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

9. Oren Yiftachel, “‘Ethnocracy’: The Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine,” Constellations Vol. 6, No. 3 (1999), pp. 364–390 at p. 384.

10. Sammy Smooha, “Arab–Jewish Relations in Israel: a Deeply Divided Society,” in Anita Shapira, ed., Israeli Identity in Transition (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004). A spirited scholarly debate surrounds the contested nature of Israel's democracy. For arguments that Israel should not be considered a democratic state, see for example Yiftachel, “‘Ethnocracy’”; Baruch Kimmerling, The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society, and the Military, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2005); As'ad Ghanem, “The State and Minority in Israel: The Case of Ethnic State and the Predicament of its Minority,” Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 29, No. 1 (May 1998), pp. 428–448; Ahmad H. Sa'di, “The Peculiarities of Israel's Democracy: Some Theoretical and Practical Implications for Jewish–Arab Relations,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations Vol. 26, No. 2 (April 2002), pp. 119–133; and Amal Jamal, “Beyond ‘Ethnic Democracy’: State Structure, Multicultural Conflict and Differentiated Citizenship in Israel,” New Political Science Vol. 24, No. 1 (September 2002), pp. 411–433. For the claim that Israel's institutions, though imperfect, are characteristic of democratic governance, see for example Ezra Kopelowitz and MatthewDiamond, “Religion That Strengthens Democracy: An Analysis of Religious Political Strategies in Israel,” Theory and Society Vol. 27 (1998), pp. 671–708; Alan Dowty, “Is Israel Democratic? Substance and Semantics in the ‘Ethnic Democracy Debate’,” Israel Studies Vol. 4, No. 3 (Fall 1999), pp. 1–15; and Abraham Ben-Zvi, “The Limits of Israeli Democracy in the Shadow of Security,” Taiwan Journal of Democracy Vol. 1, No. 2 (December 2005), pp. 1–23.

11. Kenneth D. Wald and Samuel Shye, “Religious Influence in Electoral Behavior: The Role of Institutional and Social Forces in Israel,” The Journal of Politics Vol. 57, No. 2 (May 1995), pp. 495–507 at p. 498.

12. Gregory S. Mahler, Politics and Government in Israel: The Maturation of a Modern State (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), p. 74. See also Charles Liebman and Yaacov Yadgar, “Israeli Identity: The Jewish Component,” in Anita Shapira, ed., Israeli Identity in Transition (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), p. 163; Sharkansky, The Politics of Religion and the Religion of Politics, p. 49; and Kimmerling, The Invention and Decline of Israeliness, pp. 114–115.

13. Asher Arian, Politics in Israel: the Second Republic, 2nd ed. (Washington: CQ Press, 2005), p. 152.

14. Arian, Politics in Israel, p. 23. There have only been a few occasions when the major parties have been able to disregard the other issues that divide them in order to join forces against the smaller religious political parties. In 1988, for example, both the secular Labor and Likud parties found the demands of the religious parties too objectionable and forged a Likud–Labor national unity government so as to avoid having to give in to these demands. See Mahler, Politics and Government in Israel, pp. 69, 75.

15. A number of explicitly secular political parties also participated in the recent Israeli elections in 2006, campaigning on platforms that called for complete separation of religion and the state, the promotion of a secular lifestyle, and the limiting of Orthodox Jewish influence in the public sphere. Excluding the Arab parties, these included: Brit Olam (Eternal Covenant); Hetz (Arrow); Meretz; One Future; and Shinui (Change). Of these, only Meretz secured a sufficient number of votes (118,302) to be eligible for seats in the Knesset.

16. 3,186,739 votes were cast in the March 2006 elections – a voter turnout of 63 percent, by far the lowest in Israel's history. From 1949 to 1999, voter turnout has been 75–86 percent.

17. Yiftachel, “‘Ethnocracy’,” p. 378.

18. See the National Religious Party (Mafdal) platform for the elections for the 16th Knesset at http://www.knesset.gov.il/elections16/eng/lists/plat_13-e.htm. See also the interview with Effi Eitam, NRP leader at http://www.haaretz.com

19. Leading figures in the settler movement, including Hanan Porat, Shaul Yahalom, and Zvi Handel, and a number of right-wing rabbis, such as Haim Druckman, have all been Knesset members of the NRP since the mid-1970s. See David Newman, “From Hitnachalut to Hitnatkut: the Impact of Gush Emunim and the Settlement Movement on Israeli Politics and Society,” Israel Studies Vol. 10, No. 3 (Fall 2005), pp. 192–224 at p. 204.

20. Kopelowitz and Diamond, “Religion That Strengthens Democracy,” p. 673 and Laurence S. Hanauer, “The Path to Redemption: Fundamentalist Judaism, Territory, and Jewish Settler Violence in the West Bank,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism Vol. 18 (1995), pp. 245–270. For an extended discussion of the linkages between the Gush Emunim settler movement and the state, including political parties and the military, see Newman, “From Hitnachalut to Hitnatkut” and Oded Haklai, “Religious-Nationalist Mobilization and State Penetration: Lessons from Jewish Settlers' Activism in Israel and the West Bank,” Comparative Political Studies Vol. 40, No. 6 (June 2007), pp. 713–739.

21. Leaders of the Gush Emunim movement have participated in a variety of religious and right-of-center political parties: the NRP, Tehiya, and Morasha. However, not all Israeli settlers of the West Bank or Gaza have supported Gush Emunim or the right-wing religious/secular hybrid parties. Some settlers do accept the land-for-peace equation, and several political parties dovish on the issue of territorial concessions have received significant support from religious settlers, including Miemad (the Movement for Religious Zionist Renewal) which competed successfully in the 1999 elections.

22. David C. Rapoport, “Comparing Militant Fundamentalist Movements and Groups,” in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Fundamentalisms and the State: Remaking Polities, Economies, and Militance, Vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 449; Gideon Aran, “Jewish Zionist Fundamentalism: the Bloc of the Faithful in Israel (Gush Emunim),” in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, ed., Fundamentalisms Observed, Vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Ehud Sprinzak, The Ascendance of Israel's Radical Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 469–477; Ehud Sprinzak, “Three Models of Religious Violence: The Case of Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel,” in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Fundamentalisms and the State: Remaking Polities, Economies, and Militance, Vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 115–118; Kopelowitz and Diamond, “Religion that Strengthens Democracy,” p. 686; and Eliezer Don-Yehiya, “The Book and the Sword: The Nationalist Yeshivot and Political Radicalism in Israel,” in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements, Vol. 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 270.

23. Newman, “From Hitnachalut to Hitnatkut,” p. 198.

24. Kopelowitz and Diamond, “Religion that Strengthens Democracy,” p. 674.

25. Polls taken during the 1900s show that 75 percent of Israelis accepted the agreements signed by Israeli Prime Ministers Rabin, Peres, and Netanyahu, and that a majority surveyed believe that Palestinians deserve their own state and that Palestinian statehood is inevitable. This indicates “the first national consensus on security since 1967.” See on this point Myron J. Aronoff, “Political Violence and Extremism,” Israel Studies Vol. 4, No. 2 (Fall 1999), pp. 237–246 at p. 242.

26. Approximately 41 percent of Israeli Jews are Ashkenazi and 43 percent Mizrahi or Sephardic. The remainder are Russian immigrants who defy easy classification. See Yiftachel, “‘Ethnocracy’,” p. 369. About one-third of Israel's religious population can be considered haredi (ultra-orthodox), although this percentage is growing increasingly higher.

27. Shimshon Zelniker and Michael Kahan, “Religion and Nascent Cleavages: The Case of Israel's National Religious Party,” Comparative Politics Vol. 9, No. 1 (October 1976), pp. 21–48.

28. Tepe, “Religious Parties and Democracy,” pp. 291–292.

29. Mahler, Politics and Government in Israel, p. 185.

30. Yoav Peled, “Toward a Redefinition of Jewish Nationalism in Israel? The Enigma of Shas,” Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 21, No. 4 (July 1998), pp. 703–727.

31. Pikuach Nefesh refers to the principle that the saving of life takes precedence over other religious commandments, with the exception of idolatry, forbidden sexual relations, and murder. According to Shas rabbinic authorities, ceding parts of the Land of Israel is acceptable in order to avoid bloodshed, especially war with the neighboring Arab countries. In Rabbi Yosef's words, “Pikuach Nefesh suspends all mitzvot of the Torah, including the Messiah and redemption” (quoted in Kopelwitz and Diamond, “Religion That Strengthens Democracy,” p. 696). Furthermore, although Rabbi Yosef recognizes the prohibition lo tichonem, in his writings he suggests that Palestinian Muslims should not be considered idolaters to which the principle applies.

32. A very small group of ultra-orthodox Jews living in Israel consider the very notion of a Jewish state as blasphemous. The best knownof this group is the Neturei Karta (Guardians of the City) who claim that the establishment of the state of Israel was God's punishment for the Jewish people because Jews were meant to wait for God and the Messiah to reestablish the Jewish state. Thus Zionism is heresy and represents an abandonment of Judaism. The Neturei Karta stand in sharp opposition to religious Zionists, and indeed to other ultra-orthodox factions which have become increasingly Zionist in recent decades.

33. Peled, “Toward a Redefinition of Jewish Nationalism in Israel?,” p. 716.

34. Sprinzak, The Ascendance of Israel's Radical Right, p. 4.

35. Rapoport, “Comparing Militant Fundamentalist Movements and Groups,” p. 438.

36. The first Israeli territorial withdrawals from the Sinai in the 1980s created a crisis for the NRP's constituency. NRP supporters who could not condone these withdrawals exited the party for either the Kahane parties or the ultra-orthodox parties. The same dynamic reoccurred during the 1990s with Israel's withdrawals from the occupied territories under the Oslo peace process as well as following the recent withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. These crises for the settlement movement strengthened groups like Hazit but also United Torah Judaism. I am grateful to an external reviewer for pointing this out.

37. The amendment also ruled out any party that denied Israel's existence as a state for the Jewish people, effectively barring anti-Zionist Jewish or Arab parties. However, in 2002 the Basic Law: the Knesset was revised to prevent the disqualification of a party even if its platform rejected Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. Only parties that adopted illegal means to advance their objectives were prevented from running, thus allowing the participation of several parties advocating bi-nationalism in the 2003 and 2006 elections, as well as the Hazit party.

38. Sprinzak, “Three Models of Religious Violence,” p. 476; Don-Yehiya, “The Book and the Sword,” p. 283.

39. Wald and Shye, “Religious Influence in Electoral Behavior.”

40. Juliet Kaarbo, “Power and Influence in Foreign Policy Decision Making: The Role of Junior Coalition Partners in German and Israeli Foreign Policy,” International Studies Quarterly Vol. 40, No. 4 (December 1996), pp. 501–530.

41. Hendrik Spruyt, Ending Empire: Contested Sovereignty and Territorial Partition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 257.

42. Ron Pundak, “From Oslo to Taba: What Went Wrong?,” Survival Vol. 43, No. 3 (Autumn 2001), pp. 31–45 at p. 37.

43. Sprinzak, The Ascendance of Israel's Radical Right, p. 68.

44. From 1996 to 2004, when more than 100 unauthorized settlements were constructed on the West Bank, the Ministry of Construction and Housing was continuously run by ministers sympathetic to the settler movement. Right-wing parties and the National Religious Party made holding this government portfolio a requirement of their participation in any governing coalition. See Haklai, “Religious-Nationalist Mobilization and State Penetration,” pp. 17–18.

45. Anthony H. Cordesman, The Israeli–Palestinian War: Escalating to Nowhere (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), p. 158.

46. Jerusalem Post, September 6, 2004.

47. Cordesman, The Israeli–Palestinian War, pp. 159–160.

48. In response to the concern in 2005 that Jewish extremists might attack the Al Aksa Mosque on Jerusalem's Temple Mount in an attempt to derail the Israeli disengagement from Gaza, a religious ruling by over 20 rabbinic authorities forbade Jews from entering the compound. Jerusalem Post, January 19, 2005.

49. David Makovsky, Olmert's Unilateral Option: An Early Assessment (The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, May 2006), p. 20.

50. David Newman and Tamar Hermann, “Extra-Parliamentarism in Israel: A Comparative Study of Peace Now and Gush Emunim,” Middle East Studies Vol. 28, No. 3 (1992), pp. 509–530.

51. Liebman and Yadgar, “Israeli Identity: The Jewish Component,” p. 164; Sharkansky, The Politics of Religion and the Religion of Politics, p. 8.

52. Don-Yehiya, “The Book and the Sword,” In Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Fundamentalisms and the State: Remaking Polities, Economies, and Militance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), p. 72.

53. Charles S. Liebman, “Jewish Fundamentalism and the Israeli Polity,” in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Fundamentalism and the State: Remaking Polities, Economies, and Militance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), p. 72.

54. The parallel here to Hamas is important. Hamas also calls for the establishment of a theocratic state in Palestine, but has thus far failed to act on this message. Here, the constraints may be less related to parliamentary politics than to the religious identification of Palestinians. Like Israelis, the majority of Palestinians are not “religious” in their behavior. Hamas may well fear a backlash should their policies appear excessive.

55. Liebman, “Jewish Fundamentalism and the Israeli Polity,” p. 82.

56. Haklai, “Religious-Nationalist Mobilization and State Penetration,” p. 22.

57. See, for example, Spruyt, Ending Empire, pp. 234–263; Kaarbo, “Power and Influence in Foreign Policy Decision Making”; Miriam Fendius Elman, “Unpacking Democracy: Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, and Theories of Democratic Peace,” Security Studies Vol. 9, No. 4 (Summer 2000), pp. 91–126; and Miriam Fendius Elman, “Israel's Invasion of Lebanon, 1982: Regime Change and War Decisions,” in Miriam Fendius Elman, ed., Paths to Peace: Is Democracy the Answer? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).

58. Ezra Kopelowitz, “Religious Politics and Israel's Ethnic Democracy,” Israel Studies Vol. 6, No. 3 (Fall 2001), pp. 166–190.

59. For more on how political parties may resort to violence in order to compete for the vote in emerging democracies, see for example Mia M. Bloom, “Palestinian Suicide Bombing: Public Support, Market Share, and Outbidding,” Political Science Quarterly Vol. 119, No. 1 (2004), pp. 61–87. Although Israel's political parties and movements have not been allowed to maintain armed militias, it should be noted that the West Bank settlers do perform “frontier defense” duties and are fully armed by the IDF. It is thus possible to make the case that the Gush Emunim movement does indeed have an armed wing, albeit one that is wholly sanctioned by the state and the military.