Abstract
Israel is a small state with few natural resources, and has no accepted position in the regional, and predominantly Arab, states system. Still, Israel’s presence in the region is felt in every corner of the Middle East. It is the ‘logic’ of Israel’s problematic regional relations which is the theme of this chapter.
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Notes
The following quotation gives one reason for excluding Israel from studies of the Middle East: ‘... [F]or the present, official Judaism, European cultural affinities, the political strength of the Ashkenazis [Jews of European extraction], and the intimate connection with the United States make Israel unique in. and thus different from, the region. As a result, we define The Middle East as excluding Israel, but including eigtheen Arab states, Iran, and Turkey.’ J. P. Piscatori and R. K. Ramazani, ‘The Middle East’, in W. J. Feld and G. Boyd (eds), Comparative Regional Systems (New York, NY: Pergamon Press, 1980), p. 275.
B. M. Russett, International Regions and the International System (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967), p. 11.
L. J. Fein, Politics in Israel (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), p. 65.
Carsten Holbraad, Middle Power in International Politics (London: Macmillan, 1984).
There are numerous works covering different aspects of the ‘Special Relationship’ between Israel and USA, see for example N. Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle. The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (London and Sidney: Pluto, 1983);
B. Reich, The United States and Israel. Influence in the Special Relationship (New York, NY: Praeger, 1984);
N. Safran, Israel. The Embattled Ally (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).
‘The Middle East’ was apparently first applied by the American naval strategist A. T. Mahan in a study from 1902 about British maritime strategy. R. H. Davidson, ‘Where is the Middle East?’, Foreign Affairs, XXXVIII (1960): 665–75.
A. Hareven, ‘Is Another Arab War Coalition Possible?’, The Jerusalem Quarterly, No. 49 (1989). Judging from the experiences of the recent Gulf war, it is unlikely that these four Arab states will join forces in a conflict with Israel in the forseeable future.
See Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony. Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), especially Chapter 8.
H. Lamar and L. Thompson, The Frontier in History (New Haven, CN and London: Yale University Press, 1981) p. 312.
For a more detailed discussion of this concept, see N. A. Butenschøn, ‘The Frontier State at Work: Patterns of Contemporary Israeli State-Building’, Chair in International Conflict Studies, Working Papers, No. 9 (1988) (Oslo: University of Oslo, Institute of Political Science).
There are some exceptions; see B. Kimmerling, ‘Boundaries and Frontiers of the Israeli Control System: Analytical Conclusions’ in B. Kimmerling (ed.), The Israeli State and Society. Boundaries and Frontiers (New York, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989) and
G. Shafir, ‘Changing Nationalism and Israel’s ‘Open Frontier’ on the West Bank’, Theory and Society, XIII (1984).
As late as 1925, 43 years after the first Zionist ‘wave of immigration’, the Zionist organisation had only established 42 such settlements with a total of 4353 inhabitants (the rest of the Jewish population lived in towns or Jewish settlements outside of the Zionist movement’s control). See A. Ruppin, The Agricultural Colonization of the Zionist Organisation in Palestine (Westport, CN: Hyperion Press, [1926] 1976) p. 78.
Cf. for example S. Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1981). Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky was just as dominant a figure on the Zionist Right as Ben-Gurion was on the Left. Jabotinsky’s movement, The Revisionist Party, had Italian Fascism as one of its most important sources of inspiration.
The Israeli sociologist S. N. Eisenstadt has written extensively on these matters, see for instance his classical work Israeli Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967) especially Chapter 4.
See Rosmary Sayigh, Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London: Zed Press, 1979) for an analysis of the class structure of the Palestinian society and how it has been effected by the conflict with the Jewish settlers.
This was for instance expressed in the well-known talks between the Zionist leader (and later president of Israel) Chaim Weizmann and Feisal ibn Hussein (son of the Sharif of Mekka and later king of Iraq). See W. Laqueur and B. Rubin (eds), The Israel-Arab Reader (London: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 18–22.
Meron Benvinisti, The West Bank Data Base Project. A Survey of Israel’s Policies (Washington and London: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1984) p. 9.
Emphasis in the original. M. I. Handel, Israel’s Political-Military Doctrine, Occasional Papers in International Affairs No. 30, Harvard University Center for International Affairs (Cambridge, MA, 1973), pp. 64–68. Handel mentions several other points, but they are chiefly amplifications and explanations of the points I have included. A similar formulation of Israel’s security doctrine, quoted in Middle East International, 22 February 1991, occurs in
S. C. Pelletiere, D. V. Johnson and L. R. Rosenberger, Iraqi Power and US Security in the Middle East, published by the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College in 1990.
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© 1992 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Butenschøn, N.A. (1992). Israel as a Regional Great Power: Paradoxes of Regional Alienation. In: Neumann, I.B. (eds) Regional Great Powers in International Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12661-3_5
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