Sucharov M.1998. Regional Identity and the Sovereignty Principle: Explaining Israeli-Palestinian Peacemaking
Sucharov M.1998. Regional Identity and the Sovereignty Principle: Explaining Israeli-Palestinian Peacemaking .Geopolitics, Vol.3(1),pp.177-196
Focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian case, I argue that the sense that a state has of its own sovereignty confers a 'national role conception' of the state, which in turn helps to determine its orientation toward territorial disputes.
p.177
Role theory therefore predicts a state's foreign policy on the basis of its self-perceived function in the international system, combined with the behavior expected from it by other.
p.177
State conceptions of sovereignty
Sovereignty is both a crucial element in territorial conflict (and particularly in cases of contested self-determination) and an illustrative example of role in international politics.
p.178
Sovereignty 'is a relational identity that exists only by virtue of intersubjective relationships at the systemic level.
p.178
Ronald L. Jepperson, Alexander Went and Peter J. Katzenstein, 'Norm, identity, and Culture in National Security' in Katzenstein (ed.), The culture of National Sovereignty: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press 1996), p.59
Moreover, identifying particular national conceptions of sovereignty helps to unravel [denouer] the tension between changing Westphalian notions of borders and the increasing prevalence of irredentist and secessionist claims.
p.178
To construct my model, I draw upon three indicators of sovereignty conception: symbolic attachment to land; the tension between pan-national and state sovereignty; and the propagation of exclusionary discourse.
p.178
hawkishness: A person who favors military force or action in order to carry out foreign policy.
'National role conception" is determined by 'sovereignty conception' which is itself determined by three indicators: state sovereignty versus pan-national sovereignty, symbolic attachment to the land, and exclusionary discourse of political community.
p.180
Pan-nationalism sovereignty versus state sovereignty refers to the degree to which a state identifies itself as a member of a multi-state, sovereign collective.
p.180
The second indicator, symbolic attachment to land, refers to the polity's international relationship to the territory; important is the shared meanings scribed to the land by members of the given national group.
p.181
Finally, the process of shaping an exclusionary discourse of political community refers to the sovereign state's tendency to define its own citizenry –within the state's boundaries- as an ideational 'in-group' existing apart from, and in opposition to, an 'out-group' outside of the state's boundaries. Discourse includes not only language, but also actions and symbols that serve as boundary delineators, as well as the degree to which other, competing discourses are permitted.
p.181
As the treaty of Westphalia enshrined the notion of sovereignty within the territorial aesthetic, so too did sovereignty come to be seen as a natural, unproblematic condition of the global order so much that 'the sovereign territorial ideal became the only imaginable spatial framework for political life'.
p.181
Alexander B. Murphy, 'The Sovereign State as Political-Territorial Ideal: Historical and Contemporary Considerations', in Thomas J. Biersteker and Cynthia Weber (eds.), State Sovereignty as Social Construct (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996)p.91
Thus, this paper understands sovereignty as having important ideational components which shape national beliefs about the state's role in the international system. These ideational components are combination of the state's 'intrinsic properties' (i.e., territory, degree of population homogeneity, domestic legitimacy accorded the state), and properties that are relationally defined within the international system (i.e., symbolic and legal recognition from surrounding states and the international community).
p.182
State Sovereignty versus Pan-national sovereignty
Palestine
The Arab World has historically been wrought [travailler] by a tension between defining is component states as separate, sovereignty entities, versus viewing the entire Arab world as a single nation – the doctrine of Pan-Arabism.
p.182
The 1958 Egyptian-Syrian union in the form of the United Arab Republic, which was aborted after only three years, served to underscore this tension.
p.183
While the sources of Palestinian nationalism are much contested, and no doubt evolved in part of as a response to Zionist settlement in Palestine, Palestinian identity has revolved around a call for self-determination as a legitimating force for furthering Palestinian territorial aspirations over the contested lands that comprise Israel and the occupied territories.
p.183
Paradoxically, Israeli, and at times, rhetoric has also served to entrench a Palestinian identity separate from the Arabs: the right-wing Likud party's 'Jordanian option', would effectively become a 'Palestinian state', created resentment within a Palestinian nation committed to establishing a separate Palestinian Arab state in at least part of historic Palestine.
p.183
Further complicating matters, however, is the Palestinian national movement's complex relationship with its Diaspora.
p.183
Israel
The modern Zionist movement represents the embodiment of Jewish national sovereignty and departure from Diasporic Jewish identity.
p.183
Not only was Israeli statehood seen to represent a departure from the passivity and weakness of the Diaspora, but the role of the state in achieving legitimacy vis-à-vis nationalistic and messianic ideologies has historically been contested.
p.184
In addition to the ultra-orthodox factions refusing to recognize the Jewish state until the presumed arrival of the Messiah, the ring-wing Jewish settler movement has struggles with the state o define the limits of Jewish sovereignty.
p.184
In the Palestinian case, and despite the complexity of the refugee, it is clear that visions of state-sovereignty ultimately prevailed over Pan-Arabism in the period prior to the DOP.
p.185
Symbolic Attachment to Land
The debate surrounding place names has figured prominently in the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
p.185
Some Arab villages in pre-1948 Palestine that were abandoned during the 1948 War were renamed with Hebrew equivalents leading to contestation over municipal rights; the Arab village of Ein Houd, for instance, was re-established in 1953 as the Israeli artists' colony Ein Hod.
p.185
Territory is imbued with religious and nationalistic symbols which both strengthen a sense of belonging to, and legitimize national ownership over, the land in question.
p.185
Palestine
The Arabic world for Jerusalem, for instance, is al-Quds, meaning 'the holy'; from a nationalist perspective, it is clearly difficult to concede sovereignty over an area deemed metaphysical. The issue of Jerusalem therefore serves as a rallying point for Palestinian nationalism, and as a reference point for staking out negotiating stances.
p.186
Palestinian national identity rests largely upon the desire to reclaim the land – both actual and mythologised – from which current Palestinians, and their parents and foresparents, hailed.
p.186
The call for Palestinian statehood has likewise been an emergent phenomenon, so central was the original goal to reclaim land.
p.186
Israel
Through the period of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine prior to state-formation), the Jewish community rapidly established institutions for renting and allocation the land to Jews, such as the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and the Israel Land Authority.
p.186
The blue, tin donation boxes of the JNF, a ubiquitous symbol across Jewish homes in the Western Diaspora, came to symbolize an institutionalized link between the Diaspora and Zion.
p.186
Two mouths prior to the announcement of the DOP, Rabin stated, 'the city is our capital, united under our sovereignty. There will be no compromise of any kind on this issue'.
p.187
However, the prospect for a strategic shift is not helped by statements such as one by then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who deferred judgment on the status of Jerusalem, characterizing it as 'an almost theological discussion'.
p.187
Thus, then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin stated during July 1993, 'I am making a clear distinction between Israeli sovereign territory, incorporating unified Jerusalem, and the territories not under our sovereignty'.
p.187
Despite statements emanating from elite ranks which describe the polity's relationship to particular local, symbolic attachment to land is ultimately a broadly encompassing phenomenon in which the entire nation participates in creating and reshaping the historical narrative
p.187
Exclusionary Discourse of Political Community
As Rozanne Doty observes, 'the inside/outside boundary is a function of a state's discursive authority…its ability, in the face of…uncertainty, to impose fixed and stable meaning about who belongs and who does not belong to the nation, and thereby to distinguish a specific political community – the inside- from all other.'
Roxanne Lynn Doty, 'Sovereignty and the Nation: Constructinf the Boundaries of National Identities', in Biersteker and Weber (eds.), State Sovereignty as Social construct
Finally, defining a national territorial space serves to 'communicate the authority of the controller of territory over people and things' and 'reify power'.
p.189
First, state discourse is the primary mechanism by which political community is defined and shaped. Second, crisis of order provide focal point around which the 'sovereignty effect' is manifested whereby the instability inherent in crisis situations forces the state to redefine itself in the international order.
p.189
Located within a region hostile to its existence as a sovereign state, Israel has been sensitive to the need to propagate an exclusionary discourse to legitimize itself.
p.189
Israel has historically nurtured an ambivalent relationship to immigration, oppressed Jewry in the former Soviet Union, Ethiopia and Syria, for instance, while at the same time, representing a new version of Jewish life –one divorced from the passivity of the Diaspora.
p.189
Commonly referred to as "Israel's Vietnam', the 1982 Lebanon War the most controversial in Israel's history. Having served under the slogan 'war pf no alternative' (any breira) since the state's inception, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) ere now forced to confront themselves as the aggressor, which in turn, fueled the cause of the Israeli peace movement and encourage society at large to re-examine the issue of national security.
p.190
The combination of the Lebanon War and the Intifada can thus been seen to have constituted a crisis of national role, and the identity and image of the military Israel's national security doctrine, and the identity and image of military – a crucial nation-building institution in the Israeli context.
p.190
In June 1993, Israel permitted a group of 200 Libyan pilgrims to visit the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem.
p.190
The intifada was merely one example of this, whereby the uprising began as a grassroots criticism of the Palestinian leadership in Tunis almost as much as it was a challenge to Israeli occupation.