Summer 2000
Volume 26, Number 4

Setting
In this essay I analyze critically the structure of a regime I have termed ethnocracy, and its impact on the position and identity of peripheral minorities. 1 To this end I will probe the resistance to the Israeli Jewish ethnocratic regime emerging from two peripheral minorities, namely Palestinian Arabs (used interchangeably with Arabs) and Mizrahim in the development towns, the peripheral Mizrahim.

My main argument is that Israel's ethnocratic regime, which facilitates the colonial Judaization of the country, has buttressed the dominance of the Ashkenazi Jewish ethno-class and enabled the "blunting" and silencing of the resistance of both Palestinian Arabs and peripheral Mizrahim. Thus, despite notable differences, the marginalization of Palestinian Arabs and Mizrahi Jews is linked, deriving directly from the very same Judaization ("de-Arabization") project that positioned these communities in cultural, geographic, and economic peripheries. This was partly achieved by a duality in the Israeli state between a democratic facade and a deeper undemocratic regime logic, which facilitates the dispossession, control, and peripheralization of groups that do not belong to the dominant ethno-class. Thus the very nature of the settling ethnocracy, which combines expansion, settlement, segregation, and ethno-class stratification, militates against the effectiveness of challenges emanating from peripheral groups. The selective openness of the regime, which allows for public protest, free speech, and periodic elections, is largely an illusion: the ethnocratic regime has arranged itself politically, culturally, and geographically so as to absorb, contain, or ignore the challenge emerging from its peripheries, thereby trapping them in their respective predicaments.2

The two peripheral groups are trapped by the lack of available choices through which to mobilize against their collective marginalization. But the predicaments of peripheral Mizrahim and Arabs are quite different: the former are trapped inside the Israeli Jewish ethnocracy, while the latter are trapped outside its boundaries of meaningful inclusion, a key difference that I explore later. Yet the emergence of an ethnocratic settling regime in Israel has worked to significantly marginalize both groups. The protest campaigns also indicate that the two groups are developing collective identities to counter the marginalizing logic of the regime. The Arabs are gradually disengaging (though not separating) from the state to form an Arab region, while the Mizrahim emerge as a deprived but "moral" ethno-class. Two other notable responses to the predicaments of the two sectors have been the powerful emergence of Islamic and Jewish religious movements and a more recent secular mobilization around ideas of multiculturalism and binationalism, all of which offer mobility and identity outside the existing symbolic grid of the state.

1. The term ethnocracy. has been mentioned in previous literature. See David Little, Sri Lanka: The Invention of Enmity (Washington, D.C., 1994), p. 72, and Juan J. Linz, "Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes," in Macropolitical Theory, vol. 3 of Handbook of Political Science , ed. Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby (Reading, Mass., 1975), pp. 175Ð411. However, as far as I am aware, it was generally used as a derogatory term and not developed into a model or a concept, as attempted here. For an earlier formulation, see Oren Yiftachel, "Israeli Society and Jewish-Palestinian Reconciliation: `Ethnocracy' and Its Territorial Contradictions," Middle East Journal 51 (Autumn 1997): 505Ð19. The term minority refers here to marginalized groups of different ethnic backgrounds to that of society's mainstream. These are constructed as minorities as part of the constellation of powers.

2. As I show elsewhere, despite the many violations of democratic principles by the Israeli regime, a wide agreement that Israel is a democracy exists in the literature, although a debate on the matter has grown stronger in recent years. See Asher Arian, Harepublica hashniyya (The second republic) (Tel Aviv, 1997); Ralph Benyamin Neuberger, Ha-demokratyah ha-Yisre'elit (Democracy in Israel) (Tel Aviv, 1998); Yoav Peled, "Ethnic Democracy and the Legal Construction of Citizenship: Arab Citizens of the Jewish State," American Political Science Review 86 (June 1992): 432Ð43; Gabriel Sheffer, "Has Israel Really Been a Garrison Democracy? Sources of Change in Israel's Democracy" Israel Affairs 3, no. 1 (1996): 13Ð39; and Sammy Smooha, "Ethnic Democracy: Israel as an Archetype," Israel Studies 2 (Winter 1997): 198Ð241. For my previous critique, see Yiftachel, "`Ethnocracy': The Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine," Constellations 6 (Sept. 1999): 364Ð90. See also the recent critiques by Uri Ben-Eliezer, "The Meaning of Political Participation in a Nonliberal Democracy: The Israeli Experience," Comparative Politics 25 (July 1993): 397Ð412; Nadim N. Rouhana, Palestinian Citizens in an Ethnic Jewish State: Identities in Conflict (New Haven, Conn., 1997); As'ad Ghanem, "State and Minority in Israel: The Case of the Ethnic State and the Predicament of Its Minority," Ethnic and Racial Studies 21 (May 1998): 428Ð48; Baruch Kimmerling, "Religion, Nationalism, and Democracy in Israel," Constellations 6 (Sept. 1999): 339Ð63; Yossi Yonah, "A State of All Citizens, a Nation-State, or a Multicultural State? Israel and the Boundaries of Liberal Democracy," Alpayim 16 (1998): 238Ð63 and "Fifty Years Later: The Scope and Limits of Liberal Democracy in Israel,"Constellations 6 (Sept. 1999): 411Ð29; and Lev Grinberg, "Demokratiya medumyenet beyisrael" (Imagined democracy in Israel), Sotsyologyah Yisre'elit (Israeli sociology) 3, no. 1 (2000): 209Ð40.