Thesis (M. A.)--Florida State University, 2006. / Advisor: David Levenson, Florida State University, School of Social Sciences, Dept. of International Affairs. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 18, 2006). Document formatted into pages; contains v,119 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

This multi-disciplinary research project explores the religious and cultural foundations within the “master commemorative narratives” that frame Israeli and Iranian political discourse. In articulating their grievances against one another, Israeli and Iranian leaders express the tensions between religion, nationalism, and modernity in their own societies. The theoretical and methodological approach of this dissertation is constructivist-interpretivist. The concept of “master commemorative narratives” is adapted from Yael Zerubavel’s study of ritualized remembrance in Israeli political culture, and applied to both Israeli and Iranian foreign policy. Israel’s master commemorative narrative draws heavily upon the language of the Hebrew Bible, situating foreign policy discourse within a paradigm of covenantal patrimony, exile, and return, despite the unrelenting hostility of eternal enemies and “the nations.” Iran’s master commemorative narrative expresses Iranian suspicion of foreign encroachment and interference, and of the internal corruption that they engender, sacralizing resistance to the forces of evil in the figurative language and myths of pre-Islamic tradition and of Shi‘a Islam. Using a constructivist-interpretive methodological approach, this research offers a unique interpretive analysis of the parallels between these narratives, where they intersect, and where they come into conflict. It highlights both the broad appeal and the diverse challenges to the components of these “master” narratives within Israeli and Iranian politics and society. The conclusion of this study explains the ways in which the recognition of religious and cultural conflicts through the optic of master commemorative narratives can complement the perspectives of other theoretical approaches and challenge the conventions of Security Studies. It also suggests some of the potential practical applications of this research in devising more effective international diplomacy.

The dissertation argues that we witness a contingent synergy in contemporary Israel-Palestine between an apparent functional superfluity of Palestinians, and Palestinian labor in particular, with respect to the interests of Israeli capitalists, and their disposability with respect to the identitarian logic of exclusionary ultra-nationalist and settler-colonial politics. Under a matrix of inclusion/exclusion, I propose, Palestinians are today superfluous in a double sense: as the unproductive of the capitalist system, and as the undesired racialized population beyond the pale of law. I show how, with the withering of a majority of Palestinian workers from the labor market with the becoming capital rather than labor-intensive of the Israeli economy, and with the (unequal) opening of the global labor market that allowed for their substitution with migrant workers, Israel gradually but systematically began shedding its responsibility for the administered population, concomitantly with enforcing an ever greater control over their bodies and territory. Thus, premised on a principle of minimal responsibility for and maximal control over its subject population, Israeli subjugation of Palestinians is based today on control beyond discipline, and de-capacitization of economic production beyond direct exploitation. Israeli arrangement, control, and management of space and movement today has as its aim to disengage Palestinians i.e., creating a space with the intention of minimizing unwanted encounters with, and responsibility for the subjugated population, while maintaining the highest possible degree of control over them. Predicated on the obviation of native labor as means for its economic flourishing, Israel’s separation regime has mostly expelled Palestinians from the circuits of production and, ostensibly, also from most Jewish Israelis’ conscious mind. No longer mediated to the same degree by the sort of engagements previously operative—be it in the sense of labor relations or cohabitation of public space—racial violence structurally distinct from, and potentially more intensive than that of “exploitative racism” is daily threatening to materialize. This diagram of militarized capitalism, I suggest, illuminates a crisis of both the State of Israel and of late capitalism, insofar as both increasingly require excessive exercises of violence in order to self-preserve. If capitalism is said to produce its own gravediggers in the guise of the unemployed and the poor, in Israel capitalist elites mitigate the resulting antagonisms by turning increasingly to nurtured ethnonationalist sentiments and a racialized welfare state under a neoliberal mantel, thus alleviating pressures from itself and displacing dissatisfaction onto a criminalized Palestinian “Other.” I propose that bringing about egalitarian forms of collective life in Israel/Palestine hinges not simply on the recognition of vulnerability, precarity and ontological interdependence as the sine qua non of the human condition (and thus as a foundation for ethical prescriptions and norms), but crucially also on engineering the (political) vulnerability of those structures, institutions and actors that are today in large measure invulnerable or immune to the claims and demands of anti-apartheid and anti-capitalist struggles. I suggest that such an effort would require a radical re-orientation of the unchosen adjacency between Palestinians and Israeli-Jews, and might be brought about vis-a-vis coalitional politics drawing on the remaining webs of interdependence across the segregated landscape of Israel-Palestine, working through the fundamental contradiction between Zionist territorial maximalism and the the imperative to reduce if not entirely avoid contact with Palestinians, and on multiple registers—from directly anticolonial struggles to those under a non-hegemonic articulation.

Intractable conflicts are characterized by their duration, level of violence as well as their attractivity of conflict management and resolution efforts. When mediated, they are most often dealt with coercive tactics designed to pressure the parties to reach an agreement. Despite such adverse context, some third-parties choose to remain mildly involved in the process. This has notably been the case for numerous mediations attempts in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The objective of this research is to explore under what conditions can facilitative mediation reach a formal agreement in an intractable conflict? We conduct a structured focused comparison of two mediation episodes, the 1993 Norwegian mediation and 2000 American mediation of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. In order to investigate our research question, we employ and articulate the readiness theory elaborated by Dean Pruitt. The empirical findings support our hypothesis that a high level of readiness is necessary for facilitative mediation to result in an agreement. However, some limitations and alternative explanations challenge the explanatory power of our theoretical framework. Further research is necessary to consolidate and precise Pruitt’s model.

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In the Israel-Palestinian conflict, peace conferences and agreements come and go. Public and political discourse about the conflict waxes and wanes. Meanwhile, new and expanded Israeli settlements in the West Bank continue to grow unabated. The history of settlements in the West Bank began with the conclusion of the 1967 war during which Israel successfully took over the West Bank Palestinian territory. According to international law, building settlements in the West Bank is illegal. Israel contends that such settlements are not illegal because the West Bank is disputed territory, not occupied territory. The possibility of a Palestinian state is likely preempted because Israeli settlements comprise close to 40% of the landmass in the occupied territory. The occupation of the West Bank (and Gaza) and the continuing growth of settlements are a perversion of classic political realism because these actions create an increased threat to the long-term national security of Israel and to the safety of the global Jewish community. / Master of Arts

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