Political culture, alternative politics and foreign policy: The case of Israel

Abstract

This article analyzes how sociopolitical dynamics within a state can help explaining foreign policy. We show that under certain conditions, the public can be involved in ways that extend beyond expressing opinions that act as constraints on policy makers, and also takes active initiatives that eventually shape foreign policies. The article explains how sociopolitical processes in Israeli society, which transformed the nature of citizen–politician relations from a top-down to a bottom-up orientation, gradually led to shifts in foreign policy regarding the conflict with the Palestinians. The Israeli public has adopted an approach to solving social problems by unilateral initiatives, as part of its attempts to shape foreign policy from the bottom up, due to continuous government failure to provide public services, combined with blocked influence channels. As long as Israeli politicians ignored these changes, they failed to mobilize support for policies imposed from the top down and lost their positions of power. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2005

Public attitudes towards the welfare state and public policy: the Israeli experience

“…In other words, when Israeli citizens are required to transform their declared attitudes into behaviour, support for a universal welfare state declines. Moreover, as explained in several studies, 63 various structural changes in the late 1970s and early 1980s including increasing non-governability, globalization, and economic crisis have significantly reduced the government's ability to provide high-quality public services. In a parallel process, the rise of individualistic values in Israeli society increased the demands for such services among the general population and motivated an ideological change towards neo-liberalism among elite groups.…”

Solving Problems Informally: The Influence of Israel’s Political Culture on the Public Policy Process

“…Nevertheless, as explained elsewhere, in the 1970s and 1980s the central systems consistently failed to respond to the demand for public services (Ben-Porat and Mizrahi, 2005). Faced with a situation that they interpreted as blocked influence channels, significant groups in Israeli .…”

“…As demonstrated in the literature (Ben-Porat and Mizrahi, 2005;Cohen 2012;Mizrahi, 2012;Mizrahi and Meydani, 2003), a variety of structural factors and social processes lead many members of Israeli society to adopt a pattern of behavior that can be described as creating faits accomplis.…”

“…The 1980s were characterized by a significant growth in the blackmarket economy -particularly the illegal trade in foreign currency (Bruno, 1993), greymarket medicine -the semi-legal, private supply of health services using public facilities (Chernichovsky, 1991;Cohen, 2012), grey-market education -the employment of privately paid teachers and the evolution of independent private schools (Yogev, 1999), and pirate cable television -all of which were alternatives to inadequate government services (LehmanWilzig, 1992). These processes intensified during the 1990s and the 2000s (Mizrahi, VigodaGadot andCohen 2010, 2009), when unilateral initiatives and alternative politics were expanded to other policy areas such as internal security, social welfare (Gidron, Bar and Katz 2003) and even the policy towards the Arab-Israeli conflict (Ben-Porat and Mizrahi, 2005).…”

“…18(1), 2013, article 9 , The Innovation Journal: The Public Sector Innovation Journal Arab-Israeli conflict. As Ben-Porat and Mizrahi (2005) explained, segments of the public may undertake semi-legal or illegal initiatives that eventually shape foreign policies. They define these initiatives as alternative politics.…”