Description

Lecture: Contrary to expectations, the number and intensity of protests staged by Israel’s Arab citizens decreased after the al-Aqsa riots in October 2000. The paper tests the validity of competing theories of contentious action in explaining this outcome and suggests modification of the political opportunity model to include variables addressed in theories of international relations. Collective action and violence, especially in bi-national polities situated in unstable geo-strategic settings, is heavily influenced by geo-strategic factors and the way they impinge on the dominant community and the state elite. Within this modified framework, the cohesion of the state elite, long regarded as the major independent variable in explaining the level of protest and violence by the competing minority becomes an intervening factor. When the Israeli Arab inter-state conflict seemed to be ebbing, divisions within the dominant community deepened over the Palestinian issue, creating opportunities for Israel’s Arab citizens to achieve their goals through protest. The reemergence of the inter-state conflict in the past decade, with the rise of the Iranian-Hizballah and Hamas threat, has led to greater cohesion in the Jewish public with the result that Arab Israeli protests have also declined. The validity of this argument for other bi-national settings in troubled geo-strategic settings is also explored.

Speaker: Hillel Frisch is an associate professor in the departments of Political Science and Middle East Studies in Bar-Ilan University, and Senior Research Associate at the BESA Center for Strategic Studies. His latest books are The Palestinian Military: Between Militias and Armies (Routledge, 2008) and (co-edited with Efraim Inbar) Islamic Radicalism and International Security: Challenges and Response (Routledge, 2007). He has recently published in Studies of Conflict and Terrorism (2009) a commentary in International Security, which was reprinted in Contending with Terrorism: Roots, Strategies, and Responses (MIT Press, 2010), an article on Islamic radicalism and Arab nationalism in Critical Review (2010) and a forthcoming piece on the persistence of monarchies in the Middle East in the Review of International Studies. His book Israel’s Security and Its Arab Citizens will be published by Cambridge University Press. He can be contacted at hillel.frisch@gmail.com.