The Tyranny Of The Minority The Effectiveness Of Policy Making In Israel

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: Near East, Near Orient, grade: 1,0, University of Potsdam, language: English, abstract: The Tyranny of the Minority: The effectiveness of policy making in Israel. Introduction to Israel's Political System As a fledgling nation facing a unique set of social challenges and physical threats, the democracy of Israel was created in an incredibly volatile environment. Nonetheless, in certain respects Israeli democracy has shown itself to be remarkably stable-for example, not once in Israel's sixty-five year history have the results of a major election been challenged. In other respects, however, Israeli democracy has presented itself as fundamentally unstable and subject to perpetual inefficiency. This is further exacerbated by the fact that unlike most Western democracies, the state of Israel lacks a formal constitution; instead, Israel has passed a set of Basic Laws intended to fill the gap. One symptom of this perpetually unstable condition is the frequency in which Israel changes the makeup of its governing coalitions-in Israel's brief history of sixty-five years, there have been thirty-one different governments. The question becomes, to what extent is such an erratic democracy able to set policy and govern effectively? In what follows, this question will be analyzed thoroughly, with an emphasis placed on the role that Israel's multiparty political system plays in this process. The political system in Israel is a parliamentary system based strictly on proportional representation. This was a system Israel adopted in the aftermath of the period of the British Mandate in order to accommodate the starkly different social, political and religious groups-and particularly the vast waves of immigrants-that composed its population. In Israel's parliamentary system, a party receives seats in the Knesset in proportion to the number of votes that they received in the legislative electio

In recent decades international and regional human rights norms have been increasingly applied to constitutional provisions, revealing significant tensions between primary political arrangements, such as power-sharing institutions, and human rights norms. This book argues that these tensions, generally framed as a peace versus justice dilemma, are built on an individualistic conception of justice that fails to account for the empirical reality in places characterized by ethnically based political exclusion and inequalities. By introducing the concept of 'Collective Equality' as a new theoretical basis for the law of peace, this timely book proposes a new approach for dealing with the tensions between peace-related arrangements and human rights norms. Through principled, pragmatic, and legal reasoning the book develops a new paradigm that captures more accurately what equality and human rights mean and require in the context of ethno-national conflicts, and provides potent guidance for advancing justice and peace in such places.

There is growing interest in Israel's political system from all parts of the world. This Handbook provides a unique comprehensive presentation of political life in Israel from the formative pre-state period to the present. The themes covered include: political heritage and the unresolved issues that have been left to fester; the institutional framework (the Knesset, government, judiciary, presidency, the state comptroller and commissions of inquiry); citizens' political participation (elections, political parties, civil society and the media); the four issues that have bedevilled Israeli democracy since its establishment (security, state and religion, the status of Israel's Arab citizens and economic inequities with concomitant social gaps); and the contours of the political culture and its impact on Israel's democracy. The authors skilfully integrate detailed basic data with an analysis of structures and processes, making the Handbook accessible to both experts and those with a general interest in Israel.

While most current studies on law and politics in Israel focus on the legal aspects of public policymaking within the courts, this book explores the relationship between law and government from a positive perspective. That is to say that the question asked is: how the political relationships between the three branches of government affect public policy and hence social outcomes. The eleven contributors to this volume concentrate on Israel from theoretical, comparative and critical approaches, and hence the analysis presented could as well be applied to other polities. This book was published as a special issue of Israel Affairs.

National minorities and their behaviour have become a central topic in comparative politics in the last few decades. Using the relationship between the state of Israel and the Arab national minority as a case study, this book provides a thorough examination of minority nationalism and state-minority relations in Israel. Placing the case of the Arab national minority in Israel within a comparative framework, the author analyses major debates taking place in the field of collective action, social movements, civil society and indigenous rights. He demonstrates the impact of the state regime on the political behaviours of the minorities, and sheds light on the similarities and differences between various types of minority nationalisms and the nature of the relationship such minorities could have with their states. Drawing empirical and theoretical conclusions that contribute to studies of Israeli politics, political minorities, indigenous populations and conflict issues, this book will be a valuable reference for students and those in policy working on issues around Israeli politics, Palestinian politics and the broader Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

This volume examines the status of the Palestinian citizens in Israel and explores ethnic privileging and the dynamics of social conflict.