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Israeli Political Culture in Israel's Relations with the United States Israeli Political Culture in Israel’s Relations with the United States over the Palestinian Question 1981-96 Submitted for PhD in International Relations At the London School Of Economics and Political Science Jonathan M. Rynhold 1998 1 UMI Number: U119145 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U119145 Published by ProQuest LLC 2014. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 F 765 S b^S% Thesis Abstract This thesis makes a contribution to the study of Israeli foreign policy, Israeli-American relations and the role of Israeli political culture in foreign policy. First, all the works on American-Israeli relations focus on American policy. Second, works examining the role of Israeli values in foreign policy focus primarily on the values of the Israeli right, usually purely in regard to the Palestinian question and use a concept of political culture that is static. In contrast, this thesis examines, US-Israeli relations from the Israeli view point and encompasses the impact of the Israeli left's values on policy. Moreover, it uses a concept of political culture that is fluid rather than static. Following a brief introductory section outlining the interpretative concept of political culture employed, the thesis turns towards a section on Israeli political culture. Here two main sub-cultures are identified; a universalist orientation which views Israel as a normal country and which aspires to normalisation and a particularist orientation which sees Israel as 'a nation that dwells alone', with a particular mission to fulfil. From this basis, four approaches within the Israeli elite towards relations with the United States over the Palestinian question are drawn out. The next section then examines and accounts for shifts in Israeli political culture, first towards particularism and then towards universalism, as well as the impact of these shifts on underlying foreign policy attitudes and their political strength. The third section consists of a number of chapters which demonstrate the role of the various approaches, motifs, values, and developments within Israeli political culture on relations with the United States over the Palestinian question 1981-96. It covers the main issues that arose in that period including the Lebanon War, the London agreement, the Madrid Conference, the loan guarantees question and the Oslo accords. The final part of this section focuses on relations between Israel, pro-Israel groups in the US and Congress. I acknowledge the generous support of the University of London Central Research Fund. 2 Contents PAGES Chapter 1: Introduction: Political Culture and Foreign Policy 4-22 Chapter 2: Universalism and Particularism in Israeli Political Culture 23-51 Chapter 3: Political Culture into Foreign Policy: the Nexus. Israeli 52-93 Attitudes to the Palestinian Question and the United States Chapter 4: The Development of Israeli Political Culture since 1967 94-125 Chapter 5: ‘The Radicalism of Style and Substance’ in Israel’s 126-148 Relations with the US over the Palestinian Question 1981-83 Chapter 6: Progressivism Frustrated: National Unity Government 1984-88 149-172 Chapter 7: The Fall of the National Unity Government 1988-90 173-192 Chapter 8: Radical Pragmatism Defeated 1990-92 193-208 Chapter 9: Progressivism, Mamlachtiut and the Oslo Breakthrough 1992-6 209-237 Chapter 10: The Special Relationship: Beyond the Executive 1981-96 238-264 Conclusion 265-268 Bibliography 268-295 Chapter 1; Introduction, Political Culture and Foreign Policy The Thesis as a Contribution to Knowledge This thesis covers new ground in a number of respects. First and foremost, there has been no previous study about the impact of Israeli political culture on Israel's relations with the United States over the Palestinian question. Nor has there been an empirical study of Israel's relations with the United States over the Palestinian question since Camp David. Some research has been done which, while not explicitly referring to the term political culture, nonetheless uses similar concepts to analyse the impact of Israeli attitudes on foreign policy in general and over the Palestinian question in particular (Sandler, Benvenisti). Some studies have also examined both the changing nature of these attitudes and the changing nature of the policy norms themselves. Occasionally, these developments have analysed in relation to wider changes within the belief systems prevalent in Israeli society at large (Inbar, 1991, 1991a, 1995, 1996a; Auerbach and Ben Yehuda 1991, 1993). There are also journalistic, literary and academic works which examine the relationship between Israeli political culture and the Israeli approach towards the question of the territories and the Palestinians (Arian 1996: Friedman 1990; Frankel; Grossman). Most of these, however, have focused on the Revisionist or religious nationalist right-wing approaches to the Palestinian question (Peleg). Only very recently, during the course of my research, did works examining the developments within the centre and left of Israeli political culture, and its changing attitudes towards the Palestinian question, begin to be published (Klieman 1994; Keren 1994; Inbar 1996). Several journalistic and academic surveys sought to identify Israeli attitudes towards America and in particular towards American Jewry (Friedman 1990; Frankel; Schiff 1987/8; Sheffer 1996; Gruen 1988; Golan 1992), but there is virtually nothing written on the impact of Israeli values and political culture on its policy towards and relations with the American executive, barring some informal observations in several journalistic works (Friedman 1990; Frankel). The bulk of the academic literature analysing American-Israeli relations focused either on American policy processes and the American framework of reference (Schoenbaum; Ball; Quandt 1992; Novik 1984, 1986) or on questions of 4 leverage within the relationship (Efrat and Bercovitch; Bar-Simantov 1987, 1988; Ben Zvi 1986, 1993). Overall, the underlying assumption seems to have been that there was no need to analyse the Israeli policy process as it was simply seeking to maximise its leverage whatever the ultimate purpose. One of the main contributions of this thesis is to demonstrate how the different political sub-cultures within Israel and subsequently the different existential and instrumental values of the policy elite have led to differing approaches, both in theory and practice, to relations with the United States as pertaining to the Palestinian question. In addition, although this thesis is not primarily a historical survey, in the course of my research I have been able to uncover some important new facts regarding Israeli policy. For example, regarding Prime Minister Shamir's willingness to withdraw from the Golan Heights in return for peace with Syria and the pressure put on George Shultz in 1987 by hawkish elements within the American Jewish community to not back Peres’ London agreement. Again, although this thesis should not primarily be understood as a case study of political culture's influence on foreign policy, nonetheless, it does provide a distinct contribution to foreign policy analysis (FPA), given that the conception of political culture employed here has only just begun to be used in the field (Katzenstein). This will be demonstrated more clearly below. Defining Political Culture and Finding a Methodology Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the future controls the present George Orwell, '1984'. The most fundamental failure of totalitarianism was its failure to control thought Francis Fukuyama, 1992. In the International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. Lucian Pye defines political culture as: “the set of attitudes, beliefs and sentiments which give order and meaning to the political process and which provide the underlying assumptions and rules that govern behaviour in the political system. It encompasses both the political ideas and the operating norms of a polity” (215). 5 A useful analogy is to look at the role of political culture as if politics was a sport. Rather than representing the flow of play in a particular sporting event, political culture can be seen as describing, “the larger framework that sets up its overall nature: the rules of the game; the contrasting ideas about it, even its purpose in the larger scheme of things, believed in by opposing coaches; the kind of people the two teams tend to recruit, their values, and their consequent style of play; who their traditional enemy is, towards whom they orientate themselves; and their sense of identity, of cohesion (Kelley xv). However any single definition of political culture can only take us so far. Of the hundreds of definitions available in the literature (Tucker: 1), why pick one over another? Why indeed are there so many definitions? The answer, I believe, lies in the fact that the vast array of definitions are symptomatic of the contested nature of the concept of political culture; a fact which is due to it touching on one of the key debates in the philosophy of the social science: that of agency and structure. The agency-structure problem relates to many of the meta-theoretical controversies within social science regarding dichotomies such as individual and society, actor and system, voluntarism and determination and so forth. In Gibbens (1989), Brint (1991) and Welch’s (1993) studies on the use of political culture, the main differences between definitions and usage related to the agency-structure debate. While some focused on individual orientation, others focused on collective orientation. Some defined political culture as embracing beliefs and behaviour, while others defined it in terms of beliefs alone.
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