Civil society has been variously defined as a sphere of private,
largely economic social activity autonomous of the state, and as a
sphere of voluntary public activity, autonomous of both the state
and the market. Sometimes the term "civil society" is used to
describe not that particular social sphere, but the entire society
where such a sphere exists (Seligman in this issue). During the
1990s it was generally believed that Israeli society was evolving
from a state-dominated, highly mobilized frontier society towards a
civil society in the former, narrower sense of the term. The
further evolution of Israeli society towards civil society, in the
broader sense, was seen as an open question (Peled and Ophir,
2001). This historical evolution was understood to involve massive
restructuring of the economy as well as political, legal and
cultural liberalization. One expected outcome of this process was
political accommodation with the Palestinians. Today, almost five
years after the collapse of the Oslo peace process, we can assess
the evolution of civil society in Israel and its impact on
Israeli-Palestinian relations.
Liberalization and the Evolution of Civil Society
Until the mid-1980s, the Israeli state, forged in the context of a
colonial frontier struggle with the Palestinians, was a highly
intrusive but formally democratic state, engaged in intensive
mobilization and control of societal resources, both directly and
through the Histadrut (General Labor Federation). Aside from being
an umbrella labor organization, the Histadrut, a pillar of
pre-statehood Zionist colonization, possessed an economic empire
encompassing, at its height, agricultural, manufacturing,
construction, marketing, transportation and financial concerns, as
well as a whole network of social service organizations. Until the
1990s, this conglomerate controlled about 25 percent of the economy
and employed about 25 percent of the labor force. About an equal
share of the economy, plus virtually all land, was owned directly
by the state. As long as the Labor Party was in power (1933-1977),
this political-economic structure played a crucial role in
maintaining the political and cultural hegemony of the Labor
Zionist movement, thus ensuring the privileged position of a large
segment of the veteran Ashkenazi community.
Ironically, it was this privileged sector of society that since the
mid-1960s has been pressuring the state to liberalize the economy
and make room for civil society. The motivation behind this
pressure was a desire to join the process of economic globalization
on the side of the winners. A political party formed by this sector
in 1976, the Democratic Movement for Change (a precursor of the
present-day Shinui party), brought Labor down and enabled Likud to
take power in 1977. As soon as Likud assumed control of the
government, it launched an economic liberalization program designed
to dismantle the political-economic structure that was the mainstay
of Labor's power. However, since it failed to capture the
Histadrut, which refused to cooperate with it in imposing wage cuts
and massive lay-offs in the public sector, Likud's economic policy
brought the economy to the brink of hyperinflation (450 percent a
year in 1985). As an unintended consequence, perhaps, the high
inflation rates contributed to the weakening of Labor's economic
institutions and in this way hastened the downfall of the
Histadrut. In 1985 a national unity government, in which Labor and
Likud shared power, instituted the Emergency Economic Stabilization
Plan (EESP) that halted the inflation and laid the groundwork for
successful liberalization of the economy.
When Labor returned to power on its own, in 1992, a momentous
struggle developed between its neo-liberal wing (aided by Labor's
smaller, more clearly liberal sister party, Meretz) and its
welfare-oriented wing, whose power base was in the Histadrut. The
aim of the neo-liberal Laborites, headed by Yossi Beilin and Haim
Ramon, was to dismantle the Histadrut and the public-sector economy
in general, and to undermine the welfare state, in order to enable
the economy to be thoroughly liberalized. The major issue over
which this clash between the two wings of the party took place was
the Histadrut's extensive health-care system, which provided
health-care services to about 70 percent of the population. After a
brief struggle, the health-care system was nationalized in 1995,
causing the Histadrut membership to decline by two-thirds and
opening the way for a private health-care industry to
develop.
Naturally, liberalization was not limited to the economic sphere
alone. Important political changes were also introduced. These
changes can be grouped under three headings: electoral reform,
human-rights legislation, and the strengthening of professional,
non-elective institutions at the expense of democratically elected
ones.
In the electoral system, two important changes were instituted:
intra-party primary elections and personal election of the prime
minister by the entire electorate (making the prime minister a
semi-president, U.S. style). The effect of these changes was to
weaken the major political parties and, paradoxically, the prime
minister as well, and to increase the influence of large donors who
could help finance electoral campaigns. By the end of the 1990s,
these reforms were largely undone, as part of the anti-liberal
reaction that had swept the country, politically and culturally -
but not economically.
In the human-rights field, two important Basic Laws (enjoying
constitutional status) were enacted: "Human Dignity and Freedom"
and "Freedom of Occupation." By some interpretations, these two
laws together amounted to no less than a "constitutional
revolution," in that they allowed, for the first time, for judicial
review of primary legislation. However, the rights guaranteed by
these laws have to be interpreted, according to Israel's Supreme
Court, in light of the country's values as a "Jewish and democratic
state." This has limited their applicability in the areas of
religious freedom and the rights of Israel's Palestinian citizens,
not to mention those of non-citizen Palestinians. No less
significantly, the rights guaranteed by these two laws are civil
and political rights only, including the right to property, but not
social rights. Thus these laws aid, rather than hinder, the
undermining of Israel's relatively progressive labor relations and
social welfare legislation, that have come under attack in the
process of economic liberalization.
The introduction of judicial review of primary legislation, or,
more accurately, the assumption by the Supreme Court of that right,
signified a major power shift from the elected legislative branch
to the non-elected judiciary. This was one manifestation of the
trend, in Israel as elsewhere, of political power shifting from
elected to elite institutions, as an aspect of liberalization.
Another major institution that became much more powerful in that
period was the Bank of Israel, whose authority to determine
interest rates made it a powerful actor in the determination of
economic policy.
On the cultural front, liberalization entailed, first and foremost,
secularization of Jewish Israeli society. All four elements of the
status quo that had traditionally governed the relations between
the state and religious Jews in Israel - the monopoly of Rabbinic
courts in matters of family law, observance of the Sabbath and of
kashrut (kosher laws) in the public sphere, and the exemption of
yeshiva students from military service - had been challenged by
liberal, secular Jews. These challengers had found important allies
in the Supreme Court and in the one million immigrants from the
former USSR, many of whom are not Jewish according to the Orthodox
religious definition. (For a survey of broader cultural changes,
see Ram, in this issue).
Economic, political and cultural liberalization was not sufficient,
however, to ensure that Israel would benefit from the process of
economic globalization. The international opportunities open to
Israeli businesses, both in terms of their own operations abroad
and in terms of foreign investments in Israel, had been limited
because of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The secondary Arab boycott
and general considerations of economic and political expediency
made cooperation with Israeli firms risky for many foreign
companies. For 20 years the occupied territories provided a partial
substitute for the international market and a clandestine trade
outlet to the Arab world. But the economic benefits of the
occupation - a cheap and reliable labor force and a captive market
- were sharply reduced already by the first intifada. By the late
1980s, the costs of the occupation to the Israeli economy had come
to overshadow its benefits.
For these reasons, settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -
meaning, in effect, reaching some accommodation with the PLO -
became an economic necessity for Israel. The intimate connection
between economic liberalization and political moves designed to
reduce the intensity of the Arab-Israeli conflict had already been
established: In 1977, while launching its liberalization program,
the first Likud government also launched the peace process with
Egypt; in 1985, the same national unity government that adopted the
EESP also withdrew Israel's forces from much of Lebanon. And
indeed, after the Oslo agreement, many foreign markets that had
been closed to Israeli firms, in the Middle East and beyond, opened
up, leading to unprecedented economic prosperity in the country. By
the same token, foreign direct investment in the Israeli economy,
that had been virtually non-existent before, reached $1.5 - 2
billion a year. The support granted the Oslo process by the
majority of the Israeli middle class was motivated, then, by two
principal considerations: their interest in downsizing the state
and opening up a space for civil society, and their desire to
integrate into the international economy (Shafir and Peled 2000;
Shafir and Peled 2002).
Civil Society, Uncivil State
Proponents of civil society have assumed, naively perhaps, that a
civil society, concerned with economic prosperity or the promotion
of post-materialist values, would be less likely to engage in
violent conflict. The time period since the outbreak of the al-Aqsa
intifada has witnessed a strange phenomenon in this respect: While
its conflict with the Palestinians has reached new heights of
violence and brutality, the Israeli state continued, even
accelerated its withdrawal from the economy through economic
liberalization. And while the liberalization of other spheres of
society has been halted or even reversed, voluntary public activity
has been flourishing, much of it in response to the vacuum left by
the withdrawal of the state (Ben-Eliezer, in this issue).
One area where this phenomenon is painfully apparent is the area of
welfare services. Israel's welfare regime had survived the first
fifteen years of liberalization (1985-2000) relatively unscathed.
As a result, during that period transfer payments and welfare
services had a considerable effect on the alleviation of poverty.
Surprisingly, however, it was the renewal of violent conflict with
the Palestinians that enabled Ariel Sharon's government to
undertake a major retrenchment of the welfare state, leaving
hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients to fend for themselves
(Shalev, 2003). What enabled the government to do so, under
conditions where social solidarity and cohesion seemed to be more
necessary than ever, was the untold number of non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) that have stepped in to provide essential
commodities and services to the needy.
Adam Seligman, a prominent student of civil society, has noted,
sarcastically, that civil society may indeed be a panacea to
society's ills, if we could only decide what the term meant. On
either one of the two meanings I alluded to above, civil society in
Israel has been thriving. This has not prevented the Israeli state
from pursuing a policy of brutal repression against the
Palestinians, nor from assaulting the economic well-being of most
of its own citizens.
References
Yoav Peled and Adi Ophir, eds., 2001. Israel: From Mobilized to
Civil Society? Jerusalem: the Van Leer Institute and Tel Aviv:
Hakibbutz Hameuchad (Hebrew).
Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled, eds., 2000. The New Israel:
Peacemaking and Liberalization, Boulder, CO: Westview.
Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled, 2002. Being Israeli: The Dynamics of
Multiple Citizenship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Michael Shalev, 2003. "Placing Class Politics in Context: Why Is
Israel's Welfare State So Consensual?" a paper presented at the
conference "Changing European Societies: The Role for Social
Policy," Copenhagen, 13-15 November.