Peace Among States Is Also Peace Among Domestic Interests: Israel's Turn To De-escalation

Yagil Levi

Center for Studies of Social Change
June 1995

Demilitarization and de-escalation of violent conflicts have seemed to prevail during the last decade. The most significant event -- the collapse of the Soviet Union with the end of the Cold War --has stimulated scholars of international relations (IR) to retest the power of major theories to both explain and forecast the shift in the Soviet Union' 5 foreign policy from competition to cooperation with the U.S. (similar to shifts undergone by other states). Scholars generally agree that the economic crisis in the Soviet Union in a world system dominated by the U.S. played a key role in the former superpower's failure to extract the domestic resources needed to maintain its position of rivalry vis-à-vis the U.S., thus propelling it to embark on a new road. Still, scholars have debated with respect to the shift's timing and the origins of the trajectory opted for by the Soviet Union toward cooperation relative to other options, such as further competition as a means of ongoing internal-state extraction and control. This debate also highlights the analytical weaknesses of the realism/neorealism school of thought when taken against the background of the collapse of the bipolar, competitive world system on which this school has staked so much.

There are alternative outlooks within and outside the boundaries of neorealism. Neo-liberal and constructivist scholars -- who reject the neorealist perspective privileging exogenous structure over processes -- have argued that the breakdown of the Soviet Union highlights the significant role played by the flow of values and ideas in reshaping national interests and inducing leaders to autonomously deal with the world system divorced from the predicament of built-in anarchy (see for example Deudney and Ikenberry, 1991; Wendt, 1992; 1994; Lebow, 1994; Risse-Kappen, 1994). Other scholars suggest that reconsideration of the gains of competition might generate reorientation -- within the neorealist context of security interests in an anarchic system -- toward cooperation (see for example Glaser, 1994/95).

Notwithstanding the explanatory power of these outlooks, they ignore the structural, domestic transformation that gave rise to the new trends and enabled leaders to mobilize the needed political support to execute a shift in the internal arena beyond the decisionmaking circle (addressed by Wohlforth, 1994/95). Thus, scholars have adduced only a partial explanationfor why the specific policy was chosen over alternative options. This flaw will be further illustrated in the present paper through an analysis of a parallel event, namely the de-escalation of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Faced with the existing lacunae, the paper proposes a suggestive explanation for Israel's shift from force to peace-oriented behavior during the 19908, with the Israel-PLO historical agreement in September 1993 and other moves. The shift's sources merit explanation since previously Israel had sought to retain at least part of the territories occupied in 1967 and had refused to negotiate with the PLO which it branded a terrorist organization.

By testing explanations informed from contingent realism, my argument is that the regional system has always offered Israel at least two strategic options with relative costs and gains. Israel, however, preferred the force-oriented thrust in the past and embarked on de-escalation from the end of the 1970s. Since the fluctuations in the external arena remained limited relative to Israel's basic degrees of freedom to act in this arena, significant fluctuations in the internal arena more affected the state's degrees of freedom to act externally and so it is a better explanatory factor for Israel's shift. By factoring in the main social groups' interests, I argue that the prolongation of the conflict enabled the dominant groups to earn gains at low cost, hence their readiness to assume the burdens of the conflict in a manner that permitted the state agencies to formulate their anarchy-inspired military doctrine uninterruptedly. However, the more the domestic costs of the conflict grew and its gains declined from the mid-1970s, the more these groups were prone to work for the downscaling of the conflict by restraining the state's capacity to use force combined with active and passive support given to peace moves. In short, the problematic of a significant change in military doctrine leads us back to a consideration of the internal arena to explain.

 

The Erosion of Israel's Military Doctrine

During its 45 years of existence, the State of Israel has faced the challenge of conducting effectively a violent conflict against the Arab states while reducing the human, political, social, and economic costs entailed by such conflict. Military doctrine was designed to meet this challenge (Handel, 1973; Safran, 1978; Horowitz, 1985; 1987; Evron, 1987; Levite, 1988; Shimshoni, 1988; Aronson, 1992; Wald, 1994, 41-48; Yaniv, 1994; Inbar and Sandier, 1995).

The point of departure is that Israel, viewing the Arab states as fundamentally hostile and unreliable, defined its national interest in military terms. A key part of military doctrine - - beyond ensuring the sheer survival of the state -- was the expansion of security margins to bridge over Israel's inferiority vis-à-vis the Arab countries (in both territorial and demographic terms) in a conflict viewed as an extreme "zero sum game." Several strategies aimed at meeting this orientation.

First, Israel expanded its borders with Arab states concurrent with retaining a Jewish majority within the state. Israel then opted to base its security upon territorial/demographic holds rather than, contrary to its leaders' declared goals, make concessions for attaining peace with the Arab states over which it could militarily triumph but could not impose political settlement. The basic milestones were the 1948 War, the 1967 War, and the 1982 Lebanon War.

Second, Israel was inclined to prevent the Arabs from jeopardizing its dynamically defined security interest by retaining military superiority over the Arab states as a means of both deterrence and defense. Israel therefore did not hesitate to use force in cases of a perceived Arab provocation or threat. This was either by means of preventive wars (the 1956 Sinai Campaign and 1982 Lebanon war) or preemptive strike (the 1967 Six-Day War).

Third, Israel has employed an ambiguous nuclear deterrent since the 1960s and has insisted on holding a monopoly on nuclear weapons in the Middle East, in addition to a massive conventional, military buildup based on mass conscription. Fourth, beyond acting in accord with self-reliance, Israel also made efforts to ally with one of the Western powers such as France (in the 1950s-60s) and later the U.S. to assure political support and supply of weapons systems. Finally, military doctrine was adapted to the state's limits of power, both externally (a demographic-territorial inferiority vis-à-vis the Arab countries) and internally (the ability to mobilize resources in the domestic arena) . Israel therefore employed effective strategies of war preparation that facilitated maximum extraction of internal resources, primarily by employing mass conscription in the IDF (Israel's Defense Forces) (see Barnett, 1992). This was combined with the conversion of the initial defensive doctrine to an offensive one aimed at neutralizing the effects of regional uncertainty and shortening the duration of war and thus decreasing its costs.

The wars subsequent to the Six-Day War (1967) -- the war in which Israel achieved a swift victory over Egypt, Syria, and Jordan -- marked, however, the decline of its doctrine and demonstrated significant limitations on the use of Israel's military power. Israel then not only faced difficulties converting military achievements into political gains, but further, in accomplishing its military objectives.

The lengthy War of Attrition, fought along the Suez Canal from 1969 to 1970, exacted a heavy toll in Israeli casualties. This war originated in Israel's perpetuation of the occupation, and particularly the decision to hold the east bank of the Suez Canal as a rigid defensive line, so preventing the waterway's reopening. In response, Egypt launched the war in order to get the canal reopened to civilian shipping. Despite its failure to do so, Egypt's use of antiaircraft missiles seriously impaired Israel's air superiority (see Yariv, 1985, 21-23; Wald, 1987, 195; Bar-Siman-Tov, 1988). This round was completed in the October War (1973). It broke out with a surprise attack executed simultaneously by Egypt and Syria. Despite the adverse opening conditions, the IDF was able to contain the offensive but Egypt and Syria benefitted politically by the interim agreements which followed the war.

The Lebanon War was initiated by Israel in 1982 to eradicate the PLO-controlled quasi-state that had been formed in Southern Lebanon and that was perceived as a threat to the Israeli population living by the border. The government expanded the original, partially agreed by the main political parties, goals of the war to include the reshaping of the political order in Lebanon, a move that entailed an unsuccessful military clash with the Syrian army stationed in Lebanon. Consequently, the IDF was forced to remain on south Lebanon's land for almost three more years as a conquering army, suffering heavy losses. Eventually, Lebanese Shute groups were successful in their resistance to the Israeli occupation when the government ordered the IDF to withdraw without achieving a formal agreement with the Lebanese government to assure the security of the Israeli population (see Horowitz, 1983).

Subsequently, the Intifada that erupted in 1987-- the violent uprising by the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip against Israel's military rule -- aggravated the erosion of military doctrine. Moreover, the army was criticized by both the right and left wings for its manner of quelling the uprising (Shalev, 1990, 141-142; Lustick, 1993, 409-417). This critique intensified when the Intifada spread into Israeli cities, causing many casualties.

The Intifada's effects interlocked with the Gulf War initiated in 1991 by an American-led international coalition against Iraq. Israel was not a formal part of the coalition but was subjected to Iraqi missile attacks aimed at Israeli cities, causing considerable property damage, although only a few people were killed. However, Israel refrained from retaliation under American pressure despite the wishes of the Defence Minister Moshe Arens (Arens, 1995, 177-217). Israelis then became increasingly aware of the new threat to their existence, namely, the potential nuclear capabilities that had been gradually acquired by Iraq, Iran, and Libya.

It follows that traditional military doctrine proved ineffectual at several levels. First, the doctrine's insistence on holding the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip as "defensible borders" providing strategic depth gradually lost a great deal of its significance "both against the knife and the missile" as maintained by Shimon Peres the foreign minister at the period (Israel Television, April 14, 1994). Simply put, the IDF's weakness was exposed. Second, the problem was in part subjective rather than objective: A basic component of Israel's doctrine, namely, deterrence, was gradually diminishing because Israel, unlike its behavior in former cases, displayed indecisiveness about using force as a means of retaliation against the Lebanese Shutes, resident Palestinians, and Iraq.

Israel, then, failed to maintain its reputation for using force. By the same token, Arab forces' attacks on Israel signified a failure of deterrence. Self-restraint originated from both external and internal sources: American pressures increased insofar as the U.S. became an hegemonic power in the region and thus no longer needed to use Israeli aggression as a stick against the Soviet Union. In addition Israel's formal/tacit security arrangements established with Egypt, Jordan, andSyriahadrestrainingeffects (Bar-Siman-Tov, 1995; Inbar and Sandier, 1992; 1995; Kleiman, 1995). These agreements coincided with growing domestic debates over the boundaries of use of force which limited military leverage (Inbar and Sandier, 1992).

Third, increasing debates over the allocation of resources for security brought about a constant decrease in expenditures (Inbar and Sandier, 1995). In consequence, the growing scarcity of material resources devoted to military buildup increased the tension between allocation of resources to deal with the Intifada and other proximate threats, and the resources geared to deal with far-distant threats. Hence, the military and political elites' necessity to take a stand. Against this background, the call for shifting from pffensive to defensive military doctrine was amplified, advocating the IDF's adaptation to its shrinking resources (Levite, 1989). Israel, against this background, displayed greater flexibility in its policy toward some Arab countries. Reducing the costs of carrying out the conflict was crucial.

Beginning in 1979, Menachem Begin's Likud government signed a peace accord with Egypt at the price of full withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula, contrary to the previous, more "hawkish" stand took by the Labor governments and the Likud as the major opposition party. This agreement, alongside with parallel, tacit security arrangements established with Jordan and Syria, further restrained Israel's use of military force against other Arab states (Inbar and Sandier, 1995). Although the same Likud-led government embroiled Israel in the Lebanon War three years later, a grand coalition Likud-Labor government subsequently ordered the IDF in 1985 to unilaterally withdraw from Lebanon, again, contrary to the embedded post-1967 mode of action. The Intifada that erupted during the tenure qf the grand coalition government accelerated the efforts to settle the Arab-Israeli conflict. The road was paved for negotiations between Israel and the PLO, beginning with the convening of the Madrid Conference in 1991, the first international peace conference since 1949 with the participation of Israel and the Arab states. The formal, albeit fruitless, framework established at Madrid generated the secret Oslo Talks, which eventually culminated in the signing of the agreement on September 1993. This last and crucial move was completed by Yitzhak Rabin's Labor government, which took power following the 1992 elections (see Peres, 1993, 1-32).

These moves triggered an advance in other sectors as well: The peace accord signed in October 1994 by Prime Minister Rabin and Jordan's King Hussein; advance in the talks with Syria; establishing low-level diplomatic relations with Morocco and Tunisia; and the holding of multilateral talks on a range of issues with Persian Gulf states.

By moderating its foreign policy Israel could lay the foundations for achieving several goals. The first goal was neutralization of the Arab hostility that was fueling nuclearization of the Middle East concomitant with the rise of fundamentalist Muslim movements inspired by Iran, in favor of establishment of a new regional order based on economic cooperation and security institutions (see Peres, 1993). A second goal was the decrease of friction with Arab neighbors as a means to restore Israel's deterrent. Formal demilitarization of the borders would make manifest Israel's determination to act in case of the other side's violation, and would minimize frictions, such as the Intifada and those with the Shute militia in South Lebanon, that exposed Israel's innate weakness (Yaniv, 1989). Third, a diversion of resources, previously required to manage the conflict in the proximate geographical arena, to the procurement of munitions that would serve to meet long-distance threats (see Ben, 1993). Fourth, as some critics claimed, reshaping of a "cheap occupation" was at work. The Israel-PLO agreement, at least for the short term, has not eliminated the Israeli occupation over the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip but formed a new division of labor -- Israel has retained its formal, sovereign rule over the territories while the control over the hostile population was assigned to the new Palestinian Authority (see Raz-Krakotzkin, 1993).

But do these strategic calculations plausibly explain Israel's reorientation?

 

The Analytical Puzzle

In fact, the IR explanation echoes contingent realism as a more optimistic version of realism, namely, the decreasing of gains and capabilities entailed by competition-oriented use of force conjoined with a change in Arab states' orientation toward Israel, generated Israel's policy reorientation from war to de-escalation. Israel could now take part in creating new regional institutions that would reduce the perceived Arab threat. Regional cooperation displaced regional anarchy as a system of Self-Help (see on the Israeli case Inbar and Sandler, 1995; on contingent realism see Glaser, 1994/95). Notwithstanding this explanation, it is open to two points of critique: The manner in which security interests are to be defined and changed and the manner in which the defined interests are to be executed. Both points exemplify the general flaws of neorealism.

To begin, security interests, according to the neorealist approach, dominated the state's overall interests because of the anarchic nature of the world system. It thus could be changed had the external system changed: it creates new constraints by change in relative power (see Waltz, 1979; Gilpin, 1984; Keohane, 1986; Levy, 1989, 224-228). Israel, as we show, saw its security interests in military, rather than political, terms. Simply put, there is nothing in the regional system that could have prevented Israel from taking a counter road: either defining its interests in political terms in the past or to adhering to its military rigidity in the present.

Despite the traditional perception of their intransigence, Arab leaders had displayed pragmatism given some historical evidence that Israel had shared in missing opportunities to de-escalate the conflict. During the early 1950s the militarily inferior Arab states were ready to recognize the new state's existence as part of a political compromise aimed at terminating the conflict. This entailed territorial and demographic concessions by Israel based on the U.N. resolution of November 1947 dividing Palestine between Jewish and Palestinian states. Israel's reluctance to undertake such concessions played a key role in escalating the conflict, culminating with the Israel-initiated Sinai Campaign/Suez War in 1956 (see Rabinovich, 1991; Pappe, 1992; Morris, 1993; Slater, 1994).

Israel displayed a similar pattern during the post-1967 period, placing obstacles in the way of the option to withdraw from the territories it occupied in the Six-Day War in return for peace treaties, or for interim agreements at least with Egypt which might havebeenattainable (see, Rabin, 1979, 338-360; Touval, 1980, 71-77; Gazit, 1984; Yaacobi, 1989). The situation was aggravated by the Israel-initiated Lebanon War in 1982 against both the PLO and Syria. Ironically, Israel then rejected an option to establish a functional division of labor with the PLO similar to that which it erected in 1992, i.e., quasi-state in return for military calm. The Israeli center-left basically perceived the war -- the whole course or at least the expanded goals to reshape the political order in Lebanon -- as completely unnecessary (see, Yariv, 1985; Horowitz, 1983).

In short, Israel could employ strategies of de-escalation instead of escalation to test the Arabs' willingness for peace. It also seems logical in contingent realist terms to initiate moves of de-escalation aimed at neutralizing a military threat by political, rather than military means and thus even to bring about change of attitudes. De-escalation thus might have solved the classic "security dilemma" which is not solvable by resorting to violence (see Levy, 1989, 226-227 on "security dilemma" and Yaniv, 1994 for Israel's failures). Still, all of this is not to historically judge whether Israel really could have advanced the peace process in these periods -- we cannot evaluate the Arab side's possible reaction -- but only to address Israel's avoidance of fully exhausting the potential for furthering the process. It also follows that the "Arab threat" is not an objective fact based solely upon the manner in which Arab countries communicated their intentions in Israeli eyes (see Glaser, ibid, 67-70). Threat is perceived according to leaders' power, outlooks, and interests rather than by scientific methods. Hence, weak Arab state pragmatism in the early 1950s could be perceived as threat.

Israel's interest therefore could have been defined in political terms and still realized its security interests, namely to achieve peace/to downscale the conflict even at the price of territorial concessions and readiness to reabsorb part of the Palestinian refugees. Then, Israel could have more easily advanced the Zionist project of building a state attracting world Jewry and avoided a prolonged, heavy military burden.

On the other hand, Israel, as a security-seeking state, could remain jealous of its military-defined, security interests when the regional system seemed to be significantly changed: The decline of the Soviet Union, formerly the Arabs' chief ally, impairing the military power of both Syria and the PLO; sharp decrease of defense expenditure (Inbar and Sandler, 1992, 5); a deep crisis in the PLO; disintegration of the united Arab front against Israel following the Gulf War; etc. Israel then could have displayed a tough position toward the Arabs insofar as they were viewed as accepting Israel's unquestionable military superiority. Indeed, this logic was adopted by the Israeli right wing (see Netanyahu, 1995). Moreover, as RisseKappen (1994) argued with respect to the Soviet Union, Gorbachev went beyond the requirements of a "realist repertoire" by employing reform-oriented strategies. By the same token, the Israeli government could retain a moderate version of status-quo/de-escalation-oriented policies aimed at decreasing the conflict's costs -- such as freezing the settlement project in the West Bank as was demanded by the U.S. (who backed Israel's reluctance to hold direct talks with the PLO) or filibustering the talks with the Palestinians -- without turning to excessive de-escalation.

Israel, moreover, shifted from a passive to an active posture in seeking to reshape Arab hostility. Israel's passivity was shown, for instance by its refraining from enhancing allied Jordan's position in the West Bank vis-à-vis the PLO by declining an interim agreement (the Jericho Plan) in 1974 that triggered the empowerment of the PLO (Golan, 1976, 221-222). By contrast, rescue of the PLO from disintegrating or an attempt to contain Islamization of Arab politics by means of regional, peace economy (see Beilin, 1993, introduction; Peres, 1993) attest to the metamorphosis from passivity to activity, from expansion of security margins into the logic of taking risks in return for convertible political, partially long-term, assets and, above all, from "zero-sum-game"- to "we can both gain"-driven, to paraphrase Kenneth Waltz's famous dictum (1979, 105). Israel, by adopting a new approach, in fact communicated its non-offensive intentions as a means to build confidence in the Arab side, which on several previous occasions reacted aggressively to what it had perceived as Israel's aggression (such as on the eve of the Six-Day War).

True, the new international atmosphere following the end of the Cold War has possibly affected Israeli behavior but it remains to be considered why the Israelis construed these particular changes in a manner that accelerated the peace process, whereas earlier opportunities were missed. Nor was the fall of the Soviet Union the motivating force of the process. In the past Israel had chosen not to follow up political opportunities for resolving the conflict, opportunities which had arisen despite, or perhaps because of, Soviet intervention as, for instance, the effort to reach an Egyptian-Israeli interim agreement in 1971-2 which was interlocked with the American-Soviet detente (Rabin, 1979, 338-360; Shlaim, 1994, 46).

To sum up, in contingent realist terms, both strategies at each historical milestone are equally rational. The regional arena offered a repertoire of vast options, each of them with gains and costs. So, this external-arena-centered rationality cannot solely explain the chosen route. In this regard realism in general and realism-informed explanations for Israel's shift in particular leave us in the dark. Since the external fluctuations remained limited relative to Israel's basic degrees of freedom to act in this arena, we should inquire in which arena fluctuations were more significant relative to the state's degrees of freedom to act externally. Internal changes are maybe a better explanatory factor for Israel's shift.

One should note, however, that Israel's self-assessment of its relative power had inclined it to overlook past chances for deescalation while reassessment led to more flexible stand. This still casts us in internal processes. It is necessary to address the manner in which the state mobilizes internal legitimacy and resources upon which its military power is conditioned, i.e., strategies of war preparations (Barnett, 1992) dovetailed with internal augmentation of the state's position (see Mann, 1988; Skocpol, 1988; Tilly, 1992a). Said otherwise, addressing the state's execution of the defined security interests is at stake. Mobilization also involves successful inculcation of the Arab threat in the Israeli public as a means to legitimize war preparation. By the same token, a reversal route, a decline of relative power, might involve a process by which war preparation become less legitimate, hence, the erosion of societal consent to both allocation of resources for military buildup and the use of force as a political vehicle. It follows that material distribution of power is of less importance as an explanatory factor than the manner in which a state perceives its relative power, mainly through the societal legitimation to employ violent force.

Thus, a definition of national interest and the underlying threats are an outcome of an internal political process rather than just a rational calculation. It involves identity formation by which the political community dynamically determines itself in relation to the external system, while collective interests are endogenously rather than exogenously defined in relation to identities (see Andrews, 1984; Wendt, 1992; 1994). Neo-liberal scholars, against this background, challenged neorealism by illuminating the manner in which democracy restrains war orientations (Lake, 1992; Russett, 1990; Russett and Maoz, 1990; Weede, 1992).

This highlights the importance of political disputes that arose in several historical conjunctures between rival camps regarding the formulation of military doctrine in accordance with interpretation of the Arab intentions (as documented by Barzilai, 1992; Yaniv, 1994). Subsequently, the domestic process, whether materially or ideologically, by which the dominance of the chosen formula was brought about should be projected. This aspect of statecraft is generally ignored by neorealists, including the revisionist wing attempting to escape the structural rigidity of the classic approach by bringing into play the manner in which a state rationally calculates the advantages of its built-in force-oriented approach. Studies of the Arab-Israeli conflict centering on the Israel side replicate the same flaw and hence, the initial winning formula -- the force-oriented one based on a military-informed interest -- is taken as point of departure to explain Israel's behavior.

Nevertheless, the mentioned neo-liberal and constructivists who deal with the case of the Soviet Union have partially addressed domestic debates informed by external occurrences. However, the domestic conditions by which Gorbachev's group mobilized support beyond decisionnmaking circles to prevail over other groups, i.e., the process by which a certain set of ideas was selected, is overlooked (see for example, Deudney and Ikenberry, 1991; Lebow, 1994; Risse-Kappen, 1994). Further, constructivism implicitly perceives the state as a unitary actor while its domestic dimension plays a secondary role relative to the international system (Wendt, 1992; 1994). Thus, the manner in which the state filters external information and converts it into an action has not been theorized.

All roads lead to social interests. It seems safe to assume that leaders' success in mobilizing support and resources for their calculated rationale and visions is stipulated on a reconciliation of social groups' interests to a new expected situation. Thus, the gains produced/lost by Israel through the conflict ought to be addressed. These gains, however, relate not only to the state level but also to the social-group level, a point overlooked by IR scholars (such as Snidal, 1991; Glaser, 1994-5). Evidently, the Israeli political elite demonstrated an effective capacity to mobilize the required support for carrying out the conflict up to the Lebanon War. And it also was successful during 1993-95 in mobilizing support for peace moves contrary to the previous "hawkish" thrust and the deeply embedded force-oriented images. Social agents' withdrawal from the original adherence to military force demands an explanation by exposing the origins of the former position in relation to social interests that previously supported the state of war. Here again, this shift suggests that the domestic arena fluctuated more dramatically than the regional system, hence the diminishing degree of freedom enjoyed by decisionmakers.

Before we turn to this project, "social interests" should be defined: They are "those purposes implied in the performance of social practices, and therefore implicitly and practically held by participants in these practices" (Isaac, 1987, 99). It follows that interests do not necessarily express the declared, conscious preferences of social agents, hence they inferred from the manner in which agents act.

During the state's first years, a strategy of legitimation was employed to legitimate the Ashkenazi dominance. This worked mainly through the state's ideology, Mamlachtiyut (statism), that symbolized the individual/group contribution to the state, primarily via military service, as a supreme idea (Peled, 1992). Then, Ashkenazi groups were more successful than their Oriental counterparts in parlaying their part in carrying out the conflict through military service into social prestige -- with the symbol of the "fighter" at the center (see Kimmerling, 1971) -- by which they, in fact, legitimized their dominance (see Levy, 1994). The IDF then acquired the ability, as both an institution and conglomerate of social groups, to produce social prestige from military performance and to convert it into influence on political decisionmaking and promotion of retired officers in the political system (see Pen, 1983). This gave the IDF an interest in the entrenchment of the conflict.

Further, Mamlachtiyut was solidified as a universalist ideology through the state's excessive appropriation of roles that had been filled during the pre-state period by the labor parties with the Histadrut -- the general federation of labor -- in the center (see Migdal, 1989; Shalev, 1992, 103-107; Kimmerling, 1993a) . By itself, successful state expansion was stimulated due to the statist role in conducting an external conflict by which it acquired capacity to mobilize political support and extract material resources for the war effort (see Kimmerling, ibid., Carmi and Rosenfeld, 1989; Barnett, 1992; Ben-Eliezer, 1994).

From the 1970s, strategies of mobility combined with splitting were at work. Central to this process was the creation of new state-controlled reservoirs of material and symbolic resources due to the outcome of the Six-Day War by which the state could improve the two ethnic-class groups' standard of living without altering the basic social structure. Thus, the war increased the state's capacity to legitimize the unequal social structure.

The war produced a cheap, mass labor force by speedy incorporation of the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip into the Israeli economy. Consequently, the Ashkenazi upper middle class and business corporations were able to accumulate greater capital by exploiting about 120,000 Palestinians who streamed to Israel as cheap labor and by marketing goods to Palestinians. Subsequently, from the early 1980s, lower-middle-class groups were rewarded by being given the opportunity to buy cheap, state-subsidized housing in the new settlements established in the territories.

Finally, driven by Israel's empowerment relative to the growing strength of the Soviet regional encroachment, the United States vastly increased its economic and military aid to Israel (from $77 million in 1968 to $600 million in 1971) after years of political coolness, allowing Israel to fund a massive military buildup and dramatically expand the public sector (Ofer, 1986; Barnett, 1992, 196-202, 231; Yaniv, 1994, 167-173). Both processes benef itted mainly the organized, Ashkenazi-dominated labor force and emerging large business corporations -- private, Histadrut-,and state-owned alike. Washington also accepted Israel's occupation of the territories and even its settlement drive without bringing pressure to bear for a withdrawal as in the wake of the Sinai Campaign (Shlaim, 1994, 41-47).

Consequently, with the military buildup financed by the U.S., there was no need for the state to pay for it by slashing the standard of living; instead, the state could improve its citizens' well-being (see Sussman, 1984). Indeed, real wages increased at about 19 percent in1968-1973 (Ben-Porath, 1986, 11). Inotherwords, thearmsbuildup produced no immediate social or political costs that might have fed new interests associated with a different policy -- withdrawal as a mean to terminate the high-cost conflict -- but on the contrary, rigidified social group's interests in favor of the entrenchment of the occupation/conflict. Against this background, Israel's governments could consistently miss opportunities to settle the conflict peacefully.

Overall, the war's outcomes and notably the entry of the Palestinians into the Israeli labor market affected the Oriental segments differentially. By and large, the economic boom dramatically decreased the unemployment, which mainly struck the Orientals, from about 10 percent in 1967 to about 3.5 percent in 1970 (Ben-Porath, 1986, 20-21). Many Orientals, moreover, improved their lot by moving up from peripheral professions -- most had had blue-collar jobs, now taken by the Palestinians -- into the bureaucratic machinery, where more manpower was needed as a result of the postwar economic boom. The military also worked to increase Orientals' mobility within its ranks with the creation of new accessible positions (compare Ben-Gurion, 1981, 10 to Smooha, 1984, 19 to illuminate Orientals' mobility). At the bottom line about 50 percent of the Orientals enjoyed mobility.

Nevertheless, many other Oriental workers, mainly in the Moroccan community concentrated in the peripheral towns, remained in the secondary labor market and were even pushed down into the underclass. They received poorer wages than the organized workers in other sectors because the entrance of the Palestinian labor force worked to decrease wages and the direct competition they faced from the Palestinians gave them less leverage to fight for better pay. Many of them, moreover, did not enjoy mobility within the army due to the combination of cultural alienation and lack of motivation with objective ineligibility for promotion. Many others were not drafted at all with a higher rate of self-selection among women. Evidently, the gap between blue-collar and white-collar workers was widened primarily because the return for education grew in general and among women in particular (Amir, 1986) (on the social structure see Farjoun, 1983; Kimmerling, 1989, 273-274, 277-278; Shalev, 1992, 261-262; Grinberg, 1991, 66-70, 75-97; Smooha, 1993).

Suffering from enduring deprivation but also enjoying more autonomy relative to the Ashkenazi establishment due to the rise in standard of living, Orientals could protest. Many of them (about 60%) flocked during the 1970s from the Labor party to the Likud party, bringing about historical change of government in 1977 (Shamir and Arian, 1982). Subsequently, during the 1980s, many of the non-mobile Orientals in particular shifted to ultra-orthodox religious political parties, particularly the newly formed Shas (Sephardi Torah Guardians).

These parties took advantage of the Six-Day War's aftermath in which the encounter between the Israeli Jewish community and historically venerated sites, such as the Old City of Jerusalem and Hebron, was renewed. By invoking primordial traditionalism as the basic identity of the Israeli-Jewish community, the religious parties attracted those Orientals who were alienated from the dominant Ashkenazi-secular culture identified with secular Israeliness. The rise of traditionalism therefore gave many Orientals a sense of belonging to the society as equal partners without blurring their ethnic distinctiveness. Moreover, this status was not conditional on contribution to the state -- primarily through military service -- as entailed by Mamlachtiyut. Equally if not more significant, this redemarcation distinguished the Orientals from the Israeli Palestinians and hence underscored their preferential position within Israeli society. For the orientals, participation, whether practically or symbolically, in the Arab-Israeli conflict became an asset in its own right (see Kimmerling, 1985; Liebman, 1989; Fischer, 1991; Peled, 1991; Shapiro, 1991, 164-172).

Shas party not only did impressively well in the electoral domain from 1984 (it accounts for about 5 percent of the total electorate), but effectively worked to establish an autonomous educational-cultural system funded by the state to promote the traditional Oriental culture supplanted by Mamlachtiyut. By funding Shas's effort to establish its own system, the state in practice channeled the Orientals' protest into the cultural sphere -- rather than the sphere of social class -- lest it challenge the underpinnings of the social structure.

Splitting of the Oriental communities, moreover, also applied to the working class as a whole since the Oriental-dominated working class was in competition with the Palestinian workers, Israelis and residents of the territories alike. Hence, conditions were created to increase hostility between these segments: witness the elections of 1984 in which about 25,000 voters (1.2 percent of the total), mostly Orientals from development towns and poor city neighborhoods, supported Meir Kahane's racist party, Kach. It advocated expulsion of the Palestinian population to retain Jewish homogeneity. Orientals in peripheral neighborhoods, the victims of the serious unemployment that prevailed at the time due to the Likud-Labor-led grand coalition government's economic program, attributed their position to low-wage Palestinian workers (Peled, 1990; Kach disqualified to participate in subsequent elections).

In sum, the state's very actions in the management of the conflict have had the unintended consequences of, simultaneously, enhancing the dominance of the Ashkenazi-dominated middle class and splitting the Oriental collective and the working class as a whole. One part of this collective continued to try to assimilate into the middle class by means of social mobility, while the other part turned to fortify its cultural uniqueness. Consequently, the inequitable, social structure was reproduced at low cost, relative to that might have been created had Orientals fought to alter the social structure.

The state bureaucracy, the IDF, and the main Jewish social groups therefore held an interest in entrenching the state of war as a lever for both material and symbolic resource accumulation, which, by itself, ran at low costs. They thus worked for or at least accepted the political and military elites' inclination -- originating from the elites' own anarchy-inspired reading of the external arena -- to refrain from exhausting the potential for peace at the price of territorial concessions.

For illustration, (1) the Ashkenazi middle class was associated with the dominant labor parties which consistently accepted the ascendancy of the military thought despite their initial "dovish" stand (see Shapiro, 1991, 151-159). Moreover, the Ashkenazis' passive support was nowhere more blatant than in the absence of a mass peace movement if the insignificant, late appearance of the Peace Now movement from 1978 onward is put aside. (2) The IDF, staffed and led by Ashkenazi groups and mobile Orientals and insofar as it enjoyed social prestige, advocated a militant approach toward the Arab world. The army's imprint on civilian statecraft was particularly striking in several cases: The initiation of the 1950s' reprisal raids culminating in the Sinai Campaign (Morris, 1993); the leadup to the Six-Day War (Yaniv, 1994, 179-193), the expansion of this war's goals (Benjamini, 1984); the reluctance to withdraw from the Suez Canal in the early 1970s as a means to achieve interim Israel-Egypt agreement (Rabin, 1979, 338-360); and the initiation of the Lebanon War (Schiff and Yaari, 1984). (3) Orientals, for their part, gradually increased their electoral support in the "hawkish" Likud.

To sum up, the internal arena furnished the state agencies with a prolonged, high degree of freedom for adherence to a war-prone approach (see Horowitz, 1987; Barzilai, 1992; Kimmerling 1993b; Yaniv, 1994), by which the state could extract the needed resources and legitimacy for maintaining military power (Barnett, 1992). Taking this power together with the set of internal interests, competitive orientation toward the Arab world was most likely to be selected relative to other options. But such a state of affairs could not last forever.

 

The Reconstruction of Social Interests

Taking the interconnectedness between social interests and conflict maintenance as a point of departure, my argument is that since the prolongation of the conflict increased its own costs and decreased gains, the underlying interests were reconstructed and shifted from adherence to the entrenchment of the conflict to downscaling of the conflict with the external arena still offering two equal, contradictory options. Practically, two processes ran simultaneously: social agents worked to delimit the state capacity to carry out the Arab-Israeli conflict and, in tandem, those and other agents accepted moves of de-escalation, by themselves fueled by the former process.

1.  Burden and Protest

Contrary to the state's trend to reduce the burden of carrying out the conflict, the post-1967 wars manifested a gradual increase. First, the total casualties of these wars were about 4500, about 0.15 percent of the total Jewish population. Second, a considerable extension of compulsory military service ran up during the years: Males were required to serve 36 instead of 30 months after the War of Attrition; the expansion and altered nature of reserve duty, with routine-security assignments on a large scale, added to the original exclusive function of preparing for war. In general, this burden became 60-100 percent higher than the 1950-1972 levels and thereby both increased the rates of Jewish emigration from Israel (Cohen, 1988) and, subsequently, undermined public faith in the equitable distribution of the military burden among the members of the society (Arian, 1995a, 21). Third, the economic costs of maintaining the conflict rose to 12-16 percent of the GDP (GNP without the American aid) compared with 8-10 percent in the 1960s (Trop, 1989, 52), with a rise in direct taxation of the GNP from 12 percent in 1967 to 24 percent in 1976 following the October War (Barnett, 1992, 229).

At the same time, the state offered no symmetric compensation for this. Further, a gap was created between material interests and the entrenchment of the c9nf lict. The state suffered from a fiscal crisis which was no more blatant than in the ballooning of the national debt from about $350 million in 1969 to more than $1.5 billion in 1977. The growing American aid from $600 million in 1971 to $1750 in 1977 helped deal with the national debt and compensate for both the war's losses and the growing costs of energy following the Arab oil boycott (Barnett, 1992, 231).

Drawing from Shalev (1992, 236-306), instead of promoting economic growth and working to decrease social disparities, the tied-hands state pumped its resources including the U.S. aid into the rewarding of preferred groups and capital, in several ways: Subsidizing costly military industries, encouraging concentration of capital in the hands of a few giant corporations, and empowering strategic trade unions in the public sector. Consequently, the state's available resources for meeting various domestic demands were reduced. Nonetheless, the standard of living continued to grow, particularly under the Likud-led government. In consequence, beginning in the mid-1970s, a spiraling inflation was set in motion that by the early 1980s stood at an annual rate of about 400 percent. It showed the state's inability to function autonomously in the face of conflicting political demands, mainly capital growth, military buildup, and maintaining welfare systems. Subsequent to the government's success in reducing the inflation in the mid 1980s, a deep unemployment (7-10 percent) and economic stagnation evolved by the early 1990s.

The combination of growing standard of living with heavy loses and military-economic burden had an innate tension. This burden was incongruent with the materialist syndrome that became dominant in Israeli society in the 1970s (see Gottlieb and Yuchtman-Yaar, 1985; Talmud, 1985). Further, the newly available private resources brought higher levels of education, greater exposure to the media, and more leisure time -- circumstances that tend to heighten public awareness and stimulate political involvement. Thus, the security burden became heavier in proportional rather than absolute terms as long as people had more attractive options for their time and their money than participation in war preparation. Paradoxically, the more the state worked to raise the standard of living as a means, in practice, to legitimize its rule and the military burden, the more it increased the social groups' expectations, placing materialism and militarism as competing, not mutually supporting, values.

Indeed, an analysis of the GNP indicates that from the mid-1980s onward, governments have faced growing domestic pressures to divert resources from defense to private consumption, a trend that worked to decrease the defense budget to the level of the mid-1960s relative to GDP (Trop, 1989). As a result, the IDF's capacity to manage the conflict was decreased (Inbar and Sandler, 1995). Materialism also made military service an disruptive factor, hindering those youngsters drawn from the middle class from translating their initial wealth and high-level schooling into rapid incorporation into civilian tracks, especially as those tracks became more competitive than ever. A result was the growing motivation of Oriental soldiers to advance in the military relative to middle-class groups (see Zamir, 1987 and see Margalit, 1995 for a report on an unpublished survey made by the IDF). Symptomatic was the stand taken by Ashkenazis who in greater numbers than their Oriental counterparts advocated a cut of the security budget and criticized the inequitable distribution of military burden among Jewish citizens (Arian, 1995, private communication) . In short, a gap was gradually created between material interests and the entrenchment of the conflict. Said otherwise, agents dynamically reconstructed their interests in accordance with their material stand and the manner in which the state promoted this stand.

This tension intensified as long as the military was criticized for demonstrating incapacity against the Arab forces. Paradoxically, the state's survival was perceived as stable in light of the Arab countries' similar military deficiency, which even increased following the Gulf War. The state, then, doubly failed in functioning as a mechanism of protection (in the sense offered by Tilly, 1985b) : It was not able to offer a convincing argument that an existential danger existed but it took unsuccessful steps to remove the amorphous danger that produced high casualties and economic burden. Said otherwise, consumers gradually paid a greater price for purchasing goods of lesser value (see Lake, 1992).

Prior to the 1967 War, a similar asymmetry had been partially resolved by the material and symbolic assets allocated by the state to some groups in the aftermath of the Six-Day War (Levy and Peled, 1994). However, when the costs of maintaining the conflict rose without a commensurate increase in the quid pro quos, many groups came up with new demands. Drawing theoretically from Tilly (1985a), social groups who had previously mustered resources allocated to the military (be they money collected in taxes or free time extracted by conscription or call up for reserve duty), attained/demanded access to political control in exchange for their contribution. To put it differently, the higher the price of protection sold by the state to its citizens (consumers), the higher their motivation to restrain the state by means of collective action (Lake, 1992). Indeed, the post-1967 wars inflamed political protests that played a pivotal role in eroding the military doctrine.

Most striking was the "Letter of the High-School Seniors." Sent to Prime Minister Golda Meir by a group of students on the eve of their draft, the letter called the government to follow through on the peace process in order to justify their future military service. It was written in the direct aftermath of the refusal by the Prime Minister to approve a meeting between Nahum Goldmann, the president of the World Zionist Congress, and Egyptian President Nasser, at the latter's request. The "Letter of the High-School Seniors" sparked a public furor because its authors were a part of the hard core of the social elite and because its style was unconventional in terms of protest that was expected from the young generation in the era's prevailing political culture. After all, they made military service contingent upon a moral justification instead of unquestioned obedience (see Yaacobi, 1989, 20). Potential soldiers were then demonstrating their ability to invoke military service to legitimize political action, an expression of the deep embedded military patterns in the political discourse upon the degree of constituting "rules of discourse" (see Blain, 1994, 828).

Subsequent to the October War, protest groups composed of reservists emerged almost as soon as the guns fell silent, demanding the government's resignation for its mishandling of the war. Finally they triggered the resignation of the Israeli government in 1974. A late appearance of a similar kind was the Peace Now movement. It was an extra-parliamentary mass movement founded in 1978, urging the government to show greater flexibility in order to expedite the peace process, which had taken a dramatic turn following the visit to Israel by President Sadat of Egypt in 1978 (Bar-On, 1985). Invoking their participation in the war to legitimize political participation, Peace Now, like the earlier groups, sought a role in making policy decisions. They were no longer willing to assume a passive role that gave the government a free hand in piloting the ship of state.

Possibly, the movement's emergence was also triggered by the increased presence of Orientals in the army, no longer an exclusive Ashkenazi stronghold. So, if in the past Ashkenazi youngsters had favored a bellicose approach, as that was a contributing factor to the group's social dominance, after they lost their exclusive hold in the army while viewing an army career as less worthy, some Ashkenazis could employ a more autonomous stand. Thus, they took a critical position, downgrading the symbolic assets that military service conferred.

Equally significant, on the other wing of the political map, new forms of protest emerged as well, namely Gush Emunim and Oriental groups. Gush Emunim ("Bloc of the Faithful") founded in 1973 by religious Ashkenazi youngsters, demanded the application of Israeli law in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the establishment there of Jewish settlements. Gush Emunim staged protest demonstrations that included illegal settlement in the Occupied Territories (Lustick, 1988) and, subsequently, resistance to the two-stage peace moves with Egypt made by the Rabin (the interim agreement of 1975) and Begin governments.

Gush Emunim's appearance was attributable to two main factors. The main factor was the renewal of the political debate over the state's borders in the aftermath of the 1967 war which legitimized the entry of new groups into the political arena -- mainly the young religious -- which had not played a meaningful role in pre-1967 political discourse. The second factor was the difficulties religious groups encountered when trying to incorporate into the secular-dominated middle class. There, this group incorporation into the IDF as a major mechanism of social mobility was problematic as long as the army was dominated by the Ashkenazi, secular groups. An Israel television personality who grew up in a religious family, explained: "In the 1960s we who were members of the religious [young] generation felt inferior to the secular youngsters. They went to Unit 101 and to the [ultra-elite] reconnaissance patrols, while we tailed along behind them" (Israel Segal, Israel Television, April 4, 1994). It was against this background that a religious group tried to exploit its military contribution, which stood out in the Six-Day War and afterward, as a lever for substantive political involvement. Evidently, this group did not hesitate to clash not only with Peace Now, but also with the IDF when the latter attempted to contain Gush' 5 activity in the West Bank (Lustick, 1993, 409-417; Levy and Peled, 1994, 221-222). In sum, the dispute between Gush Emunim and Peace Now revealed an attempt to define the boundaries of the overall conflict far beyond the arguments taking place in 1967-1973 between "doves" and "hawks" (see Barzilai, 1992, 150-157).

At the same time, triggered by their heavy losses in the three post-1967 wars, Orientals put forward their ethno-social protest. They expected improvement of social position in return for their military contribution; as one of their activists put it: "It was precisely in the Lebanon War that a gross disparity revealed itself between the equality in victims and comradeship in battle, and the inequality in the society between the Oriental class and the Ashkenazi class" (Idan, 1983, 41). Against this background, the 1980s saw a wave of ethnic protest taking the form of the Orientals' shift from the Labor party to the Likud and later to Shas. Evidently, the force-based approach to deal with the Arab-Israeli conflict energized many Orientals who acquired social mobility by means of military service especially during the Lebanon War. They then clashed with the Ashkenazi-dominated left which practically devalued their military achievements by criticizing the military (see Ariely, 1983, 158).

Indeed, protest reached new heights following the Lebanon War when new forms of anti-war political action took place, including protests by soldiers, soldiers' parents, and civil disobedience (see Feldman and Rechnitz-Kizner, 1984; Menuchin and Menuchin, 1985; Zukerman-Bareli and Bensky, 1989). The Lebanon War marked the boundaries of the use of violent force as a political instrument. Center-left groups portrayed the expanded goals of the war (reshaping the political order in Lebanon) as a "war of choice," geared to achieve political objectives in the absence of an existential threat to the state's security. This, ostensibly, differentiated it from the previous wars of "no choice." Ironically, it was the right wing that exposed the falsity of the "war of choice" argument by trying to show that it was only emulating previous governments (Yariv, 1985, 19-21). However, "choice," as we show, is a subjective definition as much as "no choice," the equivalent of an objective, security interest in face of a regional anarchy.

True, Israeli governments had traditionally confined the wars' goals to those for which a large public support could be mobilized (Horowitz, 1987), but the change was now pronounced in the boundaries of consent (or of dispute) rather than in the goals themselves. To further illustrate, the shift in the center-left's behavior had already been demonstrated a year earlier, in June 1981, when the Israel Air Force bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor. The center-left had accused the government of timing the raid to win popularity in the election campaign that was then underway. In fact, timing reprisal raids to win electoral points was already a well-established pattern in Israel (Barzilai and Russett, 1990), although the phenomenon was not placed on the public agenda until 1981. Similar forms found their expression during the Intifada which created new political costs. The army found itself again at the center of a fierce political controversy. The IDF was criticized by the right for its impotence vis-a-vis the Palestinians. On the other hand, it was criticized by the left for its use of violence against civilians (Shalev, 1990, 141-142; Lustick, 1993, 409-417).

Consequently, the more political disputes over the use of military force were intensified, the more Israel's capacity to use force declined. The state bureaucracy and the military establishment enjoyed lesser autonomy to operate the military because they had to carefully calculate the expected political outcomes. Grasping these lessons, the self-restrained use of military force, along with considerations of international politics, was reflected in the relatively moderate policy taken by the Likud-led governments in the Intifada (the reluctance to use massive firepower to quell the uprising) and the Gulf War. Subsequently, the Labor-led government displayed a similar pattern by refraining from employing massive ground operations against the Shute militia in South Lebanon. Manifestly, the expansion of the boundaries of political debate over the use of force illustrates the linkage between social interests and deterrence. The more hesitation to use force, the less a deterrent enjoys credibility (Inbar and Sandler, 1992). Still, hesitancy originated from incongruence between the state's external posture and the main groups' social interests in reducing the conflict's burden. To a large extent, erosion of the military doctrine was social erosion as well. This is especially evident when the military itself displayed indecisiveness.

By and large, the IDF was driven by its sensitivity to its heavy losses. At the same time, it was also concerned with its internal integration and the social status upon which its power was unavoidably conditioned -- of both the institution and the individual officer, in and out of mufti. Inclined by this structure, the military traditionally rebuffed attempts to tarnish its universalist status by becoming embroiled in politics. Wars, however, showed that different groups interpreted the war' 5 results in a manner consistent with their social position and the war's effect on their status (witness the action~by Gush Emunim, Peace Now, protest movements, and the general critique). Hence, the probability that a war would be recognized as just, or even successful, by all its participants was highly reduced. Equally significant, the IDF's sensitivity to its social status was increased insofar as the materialization amplified the underlying clear linkage between the officer corps' social status and the ability of its members to convert this status into positions in the civilian labor market after their retirement.

Accordingly, the IDF's orientation was transformed. It took a position that would release it from being at a vortex of a political storm penetrating into its ranks and undermining its professional posture. Inclined by the same considerations that previously had prompted the IDF to advocate belligerent moves, it now turned its position toward playing an active role in de-escalation. The army supported the peace treaty with Egypt and was among the leading forces in bringing about the withdrawal from Lebanon. The next stage came with the declaration by Chief of Staff General Dan Shomron that the Intifada could be resolved only by political, not military, means, thus marking the boundaries of the use of military force. The IDF's support for the peace process was also reflected in the Military Intelligence opinion submitted to the government in 1991 stating that Syria was bent on reaching a political settlement with Israel because it realized that strategic equality with Israel was no longer a viable option. That assessment helped induce the Likud government to participate in the Madrid Conference. Finally, the army's support was demonstrated in its cooperation with the political level in working out the agreements with the PLO and in the public support given by the generals to the government's move. All of this was a departure from the "classic" division of labor between military and civilian institutions. Still, with this affirmative support, the government could overcome domestic resistance that otherwise would have erected more obstacles.

Clearly, the state's capacity to manage effectively its domestic strategies for war preparation was eroded at the level of both legitimation and material power, dialectically, due to its very action to make Israeli society more materialist. In sum, the more the capacity to use force and deterrence shrunk, the fewer options were available for statecraft other than to de-escalate the conflict, even for the purpose of restoring of deterrence as mentioned above (see Yaniv, 1989).

Taking the domestic-originated crisis of Israel's military doctrine with the promotion of the peace process, it is clear why conditions were created for opting for excessive de-escalation over other options, albeit rational, in realist terms, such as moderate de-escalation or adherence to the force-oriented thrust, as they were enumerated above. Only so the state could significantly decrease the conflict's burden which undermined the military doctrine. Israel's readiness to pay the price it had earlier been reluctant to pay, although it enjoyed military superiority over Arab armies in both periods, lends credence to this social interests-centered explanation. Further, given the role played by the underlining factors, it is possible to understand the fascinating fact that notwithstanding previous agendas, both right and left governments -- which followed one another during the period under discussion -- followed a virtually identical and consistent policy particularly as it was the Likud government that agreed to negotiate with a (indirect) PLO delegation within the Madrid Conference framework. All of this calls for a careful look at the structural sources that affected the action of state agencies. Still, simply put, in a situation of two equalized, but opposite, vectors taking the form of internal, political action, the state needed support for its moves beyond social constrains on its bellicose action.

2.  The Decline of Social Gains

Theoretically speaking, an end had come to the situation in which "the costs of conquest and ongoing costs of rule are less than the... value of future economic profits" (Lake, 1992, 29). Said otherwise, the conflict's gains diminished because the main drives of the post-1967 economic boom -- military industry and cheap Palestinian labor force -- were nullified from the end of the 1980s onward. The gigantic Israeli state-owned military industries suffered from the worldwide crisis in the arms industry as the Cold War wound down. So adverse was their situation that they have needed state subsidization to survive and subsequently turned in part to convert a significant part of their military production into a civilian one (Globs, March 31, 1995, 44; Yediot Aharonot, March 28, 1995, 9).

Concurrently, the Intifada, by disrupting the entry of Palestinian workers into Israel, caused serious problems in various economic sectors, particularly construction and industry. At the same time, Israel's economic dependence on the Palestinian work force was diminished thanks to the arrival of nearly half a million Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union beginning in 1989. Lacking an organizational infrastructure, the new immigrants were dependent on the state and could therefore be exploited for blue-collar work as a partial replacement for the Palestinians. Following the Russians' natural drifting out of this economic segment, the government authorized the importation of 70,000 foreign workers (at the time of this writing) from Thailand, Romania, Poland, Portugal, and elsewhere, a policy that was viable due to the decline of the Histadrut, the traditional opponent of moves of this kind. Thanks to this policy, the Rabin government was able to close off the territories sporadically from 1993 on and reduce the number of Palestinian workers entering Israel from 120,000 to 25,000 (Lewis, 1995). The closures -- justified in security terms -- worked to inject within the public the concept of separation between the two peoples. A military solution then promoted a political one. Further, the external arena (the Palestinian attacks) was invoked by politicians to overcome resistance in the internal arena, a pattern that has generally taken place in the new era of globalization (see Putnam, 1993). Clearly, the modernization of the Israeli economy beginning in the 1970s weakened the position of labor-intensive business corporations, which in the past had benef itted from the occupation and marketing in the occupied territories and so had a vested interest in the continuation of the occupation (see Teitelbaum, 1984).

Another economic lever that declined due to the Intifada was the massive housing boom in the occupied territories, which no longer could be a mechanism of improvement of standard of living. The decision made by the Rabin government in 1992 to freeze the establishment of new settlements further accelerated this decline. Nevertheless, the influx of immigration from the former Soviet Union restarted massive construction within the Green Line boundaries, indirectly and partially funded by American aid, by itself conditional upon freezing the settlement project in the occupied territories (see below). Clearly, a shift of social interests could not be set in motion unless the gains entailed in the status quo lost their relevance. For that reason, social groups remained mute even when Israel refrained particularly after 1967 from promoting peace options.

Gains produced by the conflict also declined relative to new options entailed in a "peace economy" becoming a reality insofar as the dialogue with the Palestinians made progress. This gave a boost to new economic forces, mainly business corporations, private, Histadrut-, and state-owned alike. In particular they looked to economic cooperation with the E.C. and the U.S. unrestricted by the Arab boycott, which gradually vanished as the peace process advanced. In like manner, other businessmen were motivated by the enormous potential for Israeli economic relations with the Arab world, particularly with the Gulf states (see Swirski, 1993; Rosenberg, 1995). Domestic forces thus played a key role in translating into peace moves the signals of the changing global system following the end of the Cold War.

Ideology was then actualized by interests. It was apparent in the discursive inculcation of new images of the Arabs inspired by the fact that Arabs were viewed by many Israelis as more equal due to their battlefield gains in Lebanon and the Intifada. Thus, the erosion of the military doctrine had constructive effects. Concurrently, new global-universalist cultural frames of mind emerged, displacing some of the post-1967 force-oriented phrases (Almog, 1993; Hareven, 1993). This development is worth emphasizing, as many people, primarily intellectuals, who had taken part in both constructing and injecting the post-1967 military-originated frames of thought, now became the forerunners of new trends (see Keren, 1989 on the post-1967 trends).

Viewed from a broader perspective, constructivists, as it will be recalled, have centered on the role played by the flow of values and ideas in driving the state's behavior (see for example Deudney and Ikenberry, 1991; Wendt, 1992; Lebow, 1994; Risse-Kappen, 1994). However, they ignore social interests by which these values and ideas are mediated. Alternatively, global trends possibly nurtured the new Israeli outlook on the Arab world in conjunction with previous confidence-building measures established with Arab states by means of military and political agreements (Bar-Siman-Tov, 1995). But, it seems safe to claim that global ideas would have signified no more than futile thoughts, as many "imported" ideas during former periods, in an absence of several conditions -- a fit between ideas of interests, real obstacles erected to maintain the state of war, and conditions that generated the dominant group's exposure to global trends, i.e., the state-led rise of standard of living.

Israel's relations with the United States further equated peace with economic growth. The change had come in 1985 when the U.S. converted its loans to Israel into grants to support the government's struggle against the enormous inflation (Shalev and Grinberg, 1989). As a result, Israel's security burden was cut by 8 percent of the GNP and the newly released funds were diverted to private consumption, over and above the growth in the GDP (Trop, 1989; Ben-Zvi, 1993). Since the American aid was not divorced from the formation of a moderate government in Israel -- the establishment in 1984 of a grand coalition government based on the Labor party and the Likud that conducted the IDF's withdrawal from Lebanon -- the linkage between military-political moderation and economic well-being was augmented.

The same pattern repeated itself when Washington approved loan guarantees worth $10 billion to help Israel absorb the influx of immigrants from the former Soviet Union. The guarantees were given to the Rabin government in 1992 only after it had agreed, in line with its political approach, to freeze the establishment of new settlements in the occupied territories -- a condition which had been rejected by the right-wing Likud government under Yitzhak Shamir a year before. Naturally, the increase in aid, that was conditional on the peace process, strengthened support for the government's new approach among the many groups that benef itted from the American largesse, in the upper middle class and particularly among the new immigrants who abandoned their initial "hawkish" stand and, accordingly, supported Labor in the elections of 1992 (Fein, 1995, 168-173). In sum, as one right-wing speaker claimed, the bourgeois left successfully made its materialist formula hegemonic (Unger, 1993). It is thus worth emphasizing that Israel's growing dependence on the American funds has not meant, by itself, erosion in its external autonomy (Barnett, 1992, 228-243), but rather in its internal autonomy vis-a-vis dominant groups inasmuch as the social order relied upon the role played by the funds in the permanent rising of the standard of living, albeit (or due to) a prolonged war. Thus, the American aid, mediated by social interests, worked to moderate the Israeli approach.

Gains originated from the conflict also declined when, from the dominant groups' perspective, the conflict lost its instrumentality and even became an disruptive factor with regard to the reproduction of the social structure. The more peripheral groups were disciplined due to the state's strategy of splitting, the more business corporations could flourish, and the more the state gained leverage to erode welfare systems under the pressures of the these corporations. Peacemaking and the social structure were then highly connected as figure 1 shows.

Evidently, unemployment was fixed at a rate of about 7-10 percent beginning in 1989 (a late effect of the economic program running from 1985), while in Oriental, new immigrant, and Israeli Palestinian neighborhoods the rate was significantly higher. Although the ethos of full employment had long been dominant in Israeli society (Shalev, 1984), the new situation was incompatible with the more recent internalization of another ethos, that of economic efficiency (Talmud, 1985) by which business corporations could improve their profitability. This ethos could be augmented under an absence of meaningful political opposition to the state's role in fixing the unemployment rate. Further, the policy of privatizing state- and Histadrut-owned corporations was run in the spirit which prevails in the West (see Katz, 1991) and impacted further centralization of private capital. At the same time, state institutions failed to impose taxation over stock-market profits because of the resistance of business corporations, those that had sprung up under the state's auspices; now the country's success in incorporating into global markets was depended on their functioning. Concurrently, the state constantly worked to decrease the level of taxation over the middle class. All of this was reflected in the gaps of income between Ashkenazis and Orientals that on average grew at about 10 percent from 1975 to 1992 among males while the gap among females is even greater (Cohen and Haberfeld in Davar, May 2, 1995, 4).

Equally significant, the new immigration from the former Soviet Union was absorbed mainly by market mechanisms, with the state playing a lesser role than it had in past waves of immigration. The rates of unemployment and homeless were high among those who did not enjoy social mobility (see Zarhi, 1991). This has led to calls for enacting selective immigration fitted to the country's needs and capacity to absorb newcomers. In consequence, a new social structure was shaping up in which the non-mobile Orientals and Palestinians were joined by non-mobile immigrants and foreign workers.

Still, the decline of the welfare state was also fueled directly by peacemaking because the welfare system was one of the levers by which the state mobilized groups for war preparation. Clearly, mass military participation entails effective welfare systems by which political-social consensus is attained and an obstacle to uninterrupted participation of peripheral groups in the military is to be lifted. If so, ceteris paribus, the more the state downsized its requirements from citizens by means of peacemaking, the greater its leverage to erode welfare systems without taking short-term risks in the domain of legitimation (see Shaw, 1988, 104-107 on the case of Britain).

No wonder that the new trend was significantly reflected in the professionalization of the IDF at theexpense of its functioning as a channel of mobility for Orientals. The 1980s saw a growing tendency, accompanied by an internal debate within the defense establishment, to replace part of the army' 5 standard armaments with high-tech weapons systems (see Yaniv, 1994, 389-390). Concurrently, more missions than ever were assigned to "special units," elitist and highly selective bynature (Wald, 1994, 59-63). Inspiredbydecreasingbudgets, Chief of Staff Dan Shomron stated that conception in a nutshell: Israel, he said, needed a "small, smart army." The likely result of that process -- the downsizing of the IDF through a greater use of sophisticated technology with the rise of a military-technological elite which might be also used to make the army more attractive in the eyes of middle-class youngsters -- would reinforce another idea broached at the time, to shift to selective conscription, as the Western armies already had done. Selective conscription would effectively exclude, for the short term, a certain proportion of the non-mobile Jewish groups from the army whose educational level is not equal to that of the Ashkenazis and mobile Orientals, who are better suited to the selective approach that the army seeks to introduce (see Gordon, 1992, 36). Indeed, evidence suggests the IDF in practice begun to increase selection (see Haberman, 1995). Such a stand fits in with the idea of establishing a "peace army" that would drastically reduce conscription.

To re-link the welfare policy and war preparation, not only was the welfare system one of the levers by which the state mobilized groups for war preparation but now it also became a lever by which these groups' capacity to convert war preparation into social demands was unintentionally downscaled. Paradoxically, with its very successful constructing of the inequitable social structure, the state lost part of its power vis-a~-vis dominant groups. It could hardly demand that dominant groups accept its internal penetration, taking the form of "welfare state" and "warfare state" because the payoff--the legitimation of social inequality through the management of the conflict--was unnecessary. Practically, the agents involved did not consciously define their action in the terms offered here. However, the more interethnic peace prevailed, the less dominant groups invoked national symbols to restrain peripheral groups' demands.

Overall, the state's decreasing capacity to extract resources and mobilize support for war preparation was solidified insofar as dominant groups lost their interest in prolonging the conflict concurrent with the state's decreasing capacity to legitimize mass mobilization for war preparation by means of welfare policy. In short, state-directed aggrandizement of the middle class and powerful corporations meant not only diminishing state autonomy in the socioeconomic domain (Shalev, 1992), but also in the military domain.

*   *   *

To sum up, many groups that previously had an interest in the conflict's perpetuation now reversed their position toward deescalation. Structurally, the mutual instrumentality between two processes -- state formation and conflict management -- was eliminated. The conflict had, simultaneously, energized and been energized by state formation by which strategies of war preparation were effectively employed and consequently augmented the state's internal control. These strategies, however, heavily relied on a constant, state-directed rising standard of living by which compatibility was constructed between the main social agents' interests and the perpetuation of war. Dialectically, the mass character of social mobilization for the war effort and the materialization involved increased the war's social costs in tandem with empowerment of social groups under the state's auspices. When the conflict's costs became greater than future advantages, incongruence was created between state bellicose action and the main social interests geared toward constant rises in the standard of living.

Social groups then worked to reverse the state action by unintentionally taking part in eroding its military doctrine. They then channeled the state to realign its operations to fit their interests by creating new opportunities for resource accumulation, mainly through the reduction of the conflict burden and the formation of peace economy. Their interests have remained fixed for the long-term (accumulation of resources) but their instrumental focus was reconstructed following a structural crisis and shifted from adherence to entrenchment of the conflict to de-escalation. The outcomes of state formation hinged on managing the conflict as much as the conflict itself overburdened the state's internal control. Pressures then amplified, leading to the state's possible partial withdrawal not only from the conflict but also from some of its societal holds such as in the welfare domain (see Cox, 1981 on the on incongruence between institutions and agents' capabilities).

3.  Supporting Moves toward De-Escalation

The change of social interests was reflected electorally when in 1992 the Labor party led by Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres returned to power. This reflected a constant trend of political moderation among the major groups including the "hawkish" Orientals (Arian, 1995b, 101-105). The Labor and the center-left bloc (Meretz) was further supported by the middle class because of the added votes from the Russian immigrants. Most of the Orientals, however, continued to support the Likud and the ultra-Orthodox parties, although there was a small Oriental shift to Labor (see Arian and Shamir, 1993).

Therein found its expression a significant point of linkage between social interests and the peace process, namely the passive support given to the policy. True, the "mainstream" right-wing revolving around the Likud organized protest activities against the new moves, but they were insignificant. The change in social groups' interest is blatant if we compare those minor actions to the mass demonstrations organized by the right in summer 1975 in order to interfere with Israel-Egypt talks to establish an interim agreement. At the time Israel had withdrawn from a small area in the Sinai Peninsula, whereas in 1993 it laid the foundation for withdrawal from the idea of the "Whole Land of Israel" on which the right had staked so much.

The change of government, moreover, was accompanied by creation of a unique political alliance between the non-mobile Orientals and the Ashkenazi-dominated middle class embodied in the coalition government formed between the Labor, the left-wing bloc, and Shas party (and, in part, the Israeli Palestinian parties). Shas's support for the agreement with the PLO began to splinter the Orientals' hawkish image. The modification of the hawkish stance is explained by the fact that Shas, as it will be recalled, did not represent the segment of the Orientals who enjoyed social mobility via military service. Consequently, part of this group was more prone than other Orientals to support a policy that would alter the force-oriented thrust of the Israeli society-- even though they themselves believed in force and had, in part, tended to support Rabbi Kahane's party. In practice, this group distinguished between the primordial source of its hostility toward the Arabs and the instrumental source of its pragmatic approach toward the peace process, whether for short-term political reasons or to build a bridge to the Ashkenazis. Taken all together, it is clear how the Labor-led government successfully mobilized political support even though it was effectively a minority government. The shift of interests embraced the majority of the middle class, regardless of its party affiliation as public opinion surveys show (Arian, 1995a).

True, the peace process is fragile. Its effective implementation depends not only on the Arab side's motivation and efficacy (particularly of the Palestinian partner), but also on the congruence between the process and the Israeli dominant groups' interests. An extreme change in internal power relations (for instance, re-emergence of Orientals' protests stimulated by the erosion of the welfare system), or disappointment in the process' effects on the improvement of the standard of living in Israel (see Rosenberg, 1995) might erect obstacles to the process and even reverse it. That is because, notwithstanding the underlying trend, domestic opposition exists and has even been strengthened insofar as the Palestinian Shute Hamas opposition movement intensified its attacks on Israeli targets (see Arian, 1995a) . However, as we show, social interests are rigid enough to set the shift despite some erosion in several groups' support.

The advantages of the process as they were outlined above by students of international relations seem true. Yet, another trajectory is possible. Growing consciousness of the threat emanating from countries with which Israel does not have a common border -- primarily Iran, Iraq, and Libya -- could keep the Arab-Israeli conflict viable, and indeed expand it into a Jewish-Muslim conflict. Still, the masses involved in maintaining the conflict would be considerably reduced because its interstate nature would be diminished and the army would rely on strategic weapons which do not require mass forces. Concurrently, the state would be able to retain the internal benefits entailed in maintaining war preparation toward an "abstract belligerence," to use Wolfe's term (1984, 245) with regard to the American politics during the Cold War, combining force-oriented rhetoric with minor demands for sacrifice (see also empirical evidence in Russett, 1989, 176-179). That would dovetail with the formation of "cheap occupation," as noted above, converting military rule into economic control (see Swirski, 1993).

 

Conclusions

The case of Israel represents an asymmetrical two-vector process. Theoretically, the international system in fact offers a repertoire of strategic options from which the state selects according to its position relative to strategic, social groups' interests. In the case of Israel, the regional system could have led the state both to status-quo policy or moderate de-escalation as it had been inclined in past milestones to prefer adherence to warmaking relative to more moderate options. So, the war-prone vector and the peace-prone vector were basically equal. Whereas the internal arena previously permitted the imposition of a militarily defined national interest, it now worked both to limit the state's bellicose action and to furnish it with the required support to embark on de-escalation. So, the peace-prone vector prevailed over its counterpart. Hence, the state enjoyed lesser degrees of freedom to maintain the conflict. Increasing costs and decreasing gains account for reconstruction of social interests by which the shift in foreign policy was brought about. Hence, the domestic arena is a better explanatory factor for Israel's shift because its fluctuations affected the state's chosen road more dramatically than changes in the external system.

A two-vector process was at work in which the state mediates between working forces in opposite directions in two arenas simultaneously. This was not a two-level game (Putnam, 1993) or two faces of state action (Mastanduno et al, 1989; Barnett, 1990). Central to these approaches is the implicit perception of state external action as divorced from the state's control internally. Accordingly, the state is only constrained by the domestic arena or seeks to mobilize its resources and political support for external moves. Alternatively, the state might be viewed as a mechanism of control over the domestic arena through which it constructs social order. Control is a dialogue between diversity of social agents and state bureaucracy aimed at construction of a compatibility between the main agents' interests, in many cases set in opposite directions, and state institutions' perceptions and predispositions. This is a dialogue by which the state retains capabilities to construct agents' interests while agents, thorough the nature of their very action, are able to reconstruct the state's orientation.

Agents' interests, moreover, are not divided between distinct state arenas of action. Seeking to improve their well-being, they are generally nonchalant with respect to differentiation between state resources collected by domestic economic growth or exploitation of external assets. Hence, the variety of strategies employed by the state to habituate these agents to external action is only one option (as it was rightly recognized by Mastanduno et al, ibid.). But, once this option is set in motion, balancing between war-prone and peace-prone vectors, external and internal alike, ought to be performed as long as gains and costs are appreciated by multiple social agents rather than high strategic thinkers.

There, constructivists like their realist counterparts pay little attention to the actual issues involved in processes leading to war or peace (see for critique on realism Levy, 1989, 227). After all, real assets are generally at stake, rather than images of systems, values, and ideas. However, those assets do not posses a value in their own right but are appreciated through groups' interests from which they expect to produce gains. Having tended to reduce particularist interests to state interests, statist theories are inclined to overlook this dimension (see the critique by Ashley, 1984, 239-240), while in revisionist versions of realism the state's stand vis-a~-vis the vertical social structure is not conceptualized (Ruggie, 1983; Mastanduno et al, 1989). Clearly, the state is informed by several domestic agents, not only external agents, responding to signals transmitted from the external arena according to internal groups' own preferences. The "mirror theory," suggested by Wendt (1992) -- dealing with the state's response to an external, other state action by which the anarchic vision is self-constructed -- is composed of multiple prisms, each of which breaks the original vision into its own interpretation. The state ultimately chooses between the "preferred signal" as the mediator between global trends externally and social groups' interests internally (see also the critique on world system-centered theories, Skocpol, 1977; Cox, 1981; Dale, 1984; Wendt, 1987).

Faced with this lacuna, the paper suggests an integrative IR-state formation-informed explanation to Israel's move to de-escalation, rather than solely drawing upon the IR outlooks. The social interests-centered explanation demonstrates several advantages over the alternative IR explanations, primarily by studying the original, war-prone, social structure and its innate crisis leading to a reversal route. Tilly (1992b, 188-189) schematized five pillars on which the explanation of war is grounded, namely, states, relations among states, domestic politics, military organization, and ambient economy. My analysis suggests that these pillars might explain peace as well.

 

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