The authors of these volumes on aspects of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are each struck by what they frame as partially successful social movements. Yael Zeira poses a puzzle in The Revolution Within: she asks how, given an organizationally weak setting of occupation and domination in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip could sustain the campaign of mass unarmed resistance known as the “Intifada” or “uprising.” Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler and Cas Mudde focus on the “Israeli settler movement,” whose overriding objective in the territories Israel occupied in the 1967 war was to prevent the independence from Israeli rule that the Palestinians waged their struggle to secure. In The Israeli Settler Movement, the authors’ task is not to solve a puzzle. Instead they seek to describe and measure the settler movement’s success in debunking exaggerated images of the settlers’ omnipotence and to demonstrate that conceptual tools within the sprawling social movement literature can be synthesized to map patterns and mechanisms of settler mobilization and the prodigious, if not complete, success of the settler movement.
Both books anchor their approaches in four decades of work on “social movements.” Given that Zeira focuses on Palestinian mobilization under conditions of systematic state efforts to illegalize, repress, and punish political activity by non-Israeli inhabitants, it is not surprising that she emphasizes the contributions of network theorists such as Mark Granovetter and Timur Kuran: they directed attention to questions about how collective action can occur against unpopular and repressive regimes, despite the individual irrationality associated with high risks and low expected payoffs. In contrast, because the vast majority of Israeli citizens who participate in activities associated with the settler movement need not defy the state, break laws, or run risks of punishment by so doing, Hirsch-Hoefler and Mudde find no use for, and make no reference to, the collective action problem as it pertains to social movements or to the informational cascade mechanisms now popularly used to help explain how it is solved.
Ironically, both books identify the Israeli state as providing the means for successful mobilization by both Palestinians and Israelis. But the irony appears in very different ways. For Zeira it is explicit—she finds it ironic that the very institutions of the state engaged in repressing the Palestinians became vehicles without which Palestinians would have been unable, or much less able, to challenge Israel with mass unarmed resistance. By offering sites for likeminded Palestinians to broaden their personal networks, raise their consciousness, and give them access to wider associational frameworks for political mobilization, state-authorized secondary schools and prisons had the unintended effect of boosting political participation rates and creating the conditions necessary to overcome collective action problems at the national level. She ends her book with a brief consideration of unarmed risings in Soweto in 1976 and in Egypt in 2011 to suggest the importance of similar mechanisms in those cases.
Both the substance of the argument advanced by Hirsch-Hoefler and Mudde and the organization of its presentation argue that a full account of social movement activity and success can be presented only by applying the categories of a half-dozen typologies, each designed to capture a key dimension of variation appearing in literatures on social movements. These include three dimensions of success—policies, resources, and support; three branches of a social movement—institutions, networks, and influentials; three available action repertoires—moderate, radical, and extreme (violent); three levels of analysis—subnational, national, and supranational; three political arenas—state, civil society, and society; etc. The irony in their book is inadvertent but strong. Although their analysis is designed to highlight the n-dimensional, complexly interdependent, and social character of social movements, in the Israeli case, as the authors accurately depict it, it is the state that turns out to be the overwhelmingly decisive factor.
One of eleven Israeli Jews lives across the 1949 armistice lines in settlements ostensibly created by “the settler movement.” As Hirsch-Hoefler and Mudde repeatedly stress, however, a small but important vanguard of ideologically driven Jews only represents a minority of the settler population. Most settlers live where they do because astoundingly generous government subsidies have made standards of living accessible to them in these communities across the “Green Line” that simply would be unavailable on the other side of it. As the authors implement the categories of their various typologies to describe the history and activities of the “settlement movement,” they unavoidably provide a mountain of evidence that it has been the actions and policies of the Israeli state—including most if not all Israeli governments since 1967, dozens of cabinet ministers and deputy ministers, key elements of the bureaucracy, and both high- and middle-echelon military officers—that explain the steady growth of settlements in the occupied territories and their crucial political significance in shaping Israeli policies toward the Palestinian issue. Indeed, in the authors’ account, the state appears as both a necessary and, as it sometimes seems, nearly sufficient explanation for the “movement’s” success. As authorizer, retroactive legitimizer, cooperator, sponsor, funder, designer, protector, infrastructure provider, and builder, the Israeli state’s contribution to the settlement enterprise was so immense and pervasive that what figures as but one small category in the elaborate network of typologies offered by the authors, in fact, does an outsized proportion of the work in accounting both for the striking success of the settlement enterprise and for its limited but significant failures.
This point is dramatically apparent in the book’s two case study chapters, one illustrating “extreme success”—the large, prosperous, and fully integrated settlement of Ariel in the center of the northern bulge of the West Bank—and the other of “extreme failure”: the tumultuous but ultimately fully implemented evacuation of all settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005. The former shows how thoroughly, how dependably, and for many years, political leaders, Knesset members, and ministers from across nearly the entire Israeli political spectrum, along with multiple state institutions, worked to make Ariel a success. The latter shows how decisive was the defeat of settler activists when the power of the state, under Ariel Sharon’s premiership, was placed on the other side of the scales. In the vocabulary used by the authors, the political opportunity structure enjoyed by settlers, permeated as it was by the state, was so supportive that it overdetermined general success while ensuring failure when the state chose to act decisively against it.
The conceptual difficulty underlying this problem in the Hirsch-Hoefler and Mudde volume is the absence of a clear distinction between state and society—a nagging problem for many political scientists that is largely ignored by the coauthors and perhaps by most social movement theorists. In a fractal kind of way, it reappears at a lower level of analysis in The Israeli Settler Movement in the difficulty the authors have distinguishing the “settler movement” from the “settler population.” With less impact, the problem appears in Zeira’s volume as well, because the reader must wonder how appropriate it is to consider Palestinian secondary schools, even if restricted by Israeli military policies regarding curriculum, as institutions of the Israeli “state” or “regime.” It would be asking the authors of these books too much to have solved this problem. But it would have been useful for their analyses, and for the broader literatures that they skillfully synthesize, had they highlighted the difficulties that application of the state–society distinction to their cases brought to light.
Both books do the hard work of bringing large literatures pertaining to social and political mobilization and participation into conversation with the details of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Both do a very good job of drawing on the substantial scholarship detailing Israeli policies of domination and the Palestinian predicament of, mostly, powerlessness and unsuccessful opposition. Even so, Zeira seems to omit or deemphasize two critical elements in the Palestinian shift toward bottom-up mobilization in the mid- to- late 1980s: (1) widespread resentment and dissatisfaction with the corrupt way “steadfastness” funds were being distributed by PLO elites in cooperation with the Jordanian authorities and (2) the well-documented political dynamic of fierce competition among factions within the PLO producing ever widening circles of recruitment and mobilization.
Zeira does open a new and exciting window on patterns of Palestinian participation in resistance activities by reporting the results of a “retrospective survey” of 600 Arab residents of the West Bank. She looks for correlations between the self-reports of her respondents, who had different education histories and different experiences in prison or had family members or friends who were imprisoned or put on trial, and recollections as to whether they participated in various “oppositional” activities at various times. Zeira offers statistical assessments (sometimes thin but precise) in support of her argument that educational, judicial, and punishment institutions of the state contributed to the ability of Palestinians to conduct mass unarmed resistance against the regime of control they live within.
Zeira also applies herself carefully to questions about the reliability of her instruments, taking into consideration possibilities of reverse causality, biased sampling, experimenter demand, and the like. She is very clear that what she is able to measure, and explain, is not how much protest or resistance activity respondents engaged in, but whether they did so at all. That is a relatively weak measurement of collective action, which is unable to distinguish a respondent who reports having attended one meeting or demonstration from one participating for months or years in very risky mobilizational and organizational activity. As noted, she makes good use of work on informational cascades to provide theoretical support for her hypotheses, although it is a bit puzzling, given her strict focus on nonviolent or “unarmed” resistance, that in using literatures to frame her problem she draws significantly on research devoted wholly to armed rebellion and civil war.
Both books err by describing East Jerusalem, and the more than 350,000 Palestinian residents living there, as having been “annexed” by Israel in 1967. In fact, Israel calculatedly did not “annex” or declare “sovereignty” over East Jerusalem but rather expanded the municipal boundaries of the Israeli city of west Jerusalem so that the inhabitants of the east (and its environs) would not be citizens of the State of Israel but only citizens of the municipality. This error matters much more for Hirsch-Hoefler than for Zeira because more than one-third of Israel’s settler population resides in the 71 square kilometers of occupied territory Israel designated as the area to be added to the “municipality of Yerushalayim” in June 1967.
Read together, these volumes suggest the validity, and yet complexity, of understanding the ambit of the Israeli state to include not only those territories and peoples located within its internationally recognized boundaries but all those whose life chances are determined by it, whether Jews or Arabs, citizens or subjects, and whether living on one side of the Green Line or the other. By applying the same body of theory to the study of Jewish and Palestinian political mobilization within the domain of the same state, and by demonstrating how much those movements rely on and evolve as functions of the character of that state, these books push scholarship on Israel/Palestine in new and important directions.
