A Cultural Approach to Foreign Policy Analysis: The Role of Political Ideologies in Shaping Israeli Policy Toward the Peace Process

Why was Israeli policy toward the peace process in the 1990s conflicted, inconsistent and even erratic?This study suggests that in order to understand Israeli foreign policy, we must analyze the country's domestic political movements.The dissertation takes a theoretically informed approach, which seeks to 'bring back' ideology to cultural frameworks of foreign policy analysis, to examine the Israeli case.The study argues that the political movements within Israel interpreted and reacted differently to the regional and global developments of the 1980s and early 1990s.These various perspectives were due to the fact that the ideologies of these movements were constructed in relation and opposition to each other, and as a result they differed on what it meant to be "Israeli," as well as what they considered the "national interest."Both the rise and the fall of the peace process should be seen as part of a larger ideological struggle between the Labor movement on the one hand and the religious and revisionist Zionist movements on the other, each of which sought to redefine Zionism and Israel in its own image and according to its own ideology.Israel's drive to peace in the early nineteen nineties was the result of the interaction between a new liberal Zionist ideology of the Labor movement and regional and global developments.In contrast the religious Zionist movement saw the peace process as part of the "Hellenization" of Israeli state and society and the abortion of the "divine redemptive process."The revisionists also opposed the peace process based on the movement's ideology that portrayed Israel as an isolated and vulnerable nation, which could only rely on military power, rather than iii political agreements, against an "anti-Semitic" and hostile gentile world.The shifts in Israeli foreign policy in the nineteen nineties were thus the result of the confrontation between these contrasting worldviews.subsequent years, the country's policy largely went back to its former prenegotiation position.These developments have also negatively affected the country's relationship with the United States, making it "dysfunctional" in the last few years according to one senior American diplomat.2 IR scholars have offered various explanations for the puzzling changes in Israeli foreign policy.Jonathan Rynhold argues that a cultural shift towards postmaterialism that led to the rise of a new generation of Israeli Left was the primary driving factor in the country's decision to pursue a negotiated settlement.This rise resulted in the success of the Labor party in the 1992 elections, giving the new Left an opportunity to change the country's foreign policy.Rynhold explains the collapse of the peace process as the effects of "domestic and international constraints," which eventually led to the marginalization of the liberal Left, 3 although a sufficient description of these constraints is not provided.Arie Kacowicz explains the rise and fall of the peace process by examining the conflicting narratives of both the Israelis and the Palestinians.Narratives shape identities and norms, creating self-fulfilling prophecies that provide a moral justification to the actions of each party.From the Israeli side the narrative was that territory and political authority was being relinquished to the Palestinians in exchange for security, however with the onset of suicide 2 See Lee Smith, "Have Obama and Bibi Made Up?," December 5, 2012, http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/118288/have-obama-and-bibi-made-up. 3 See Jonathan Rynhold, "Cultural Shift and Foreign Policy Change: Israel and the Making of the Oslo Accords," Cooperation and Conflict 42 (2007): 419-40.Palmer, 25 Schultz, 26 London et al 27 and Fordham.28 Another group of scholars, including Delaet and Scott, 29 Bartels, 30 McCormick and Wittkopf, 31 study the legislative voting behavior of politicians.A third group of scholars, including Holsti, 32 Wittkopf, 33 Holsti and Rosenau, 34 rely on elite surveys.Finally some 25

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