Politics and Society in Israel by Ernest Krausz

Author:Ernest Krausz [Krausz, Ernest]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781351498401
Google: Ym9QDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-09-29T04:07:48+00:00

POLICY CONTENT APPROACH

The character of political opposition in Israel also explains how political power is legitimized in the society when the criteria of legitimacy are determined by the consent of public legislation. The articulation of critical standards by which to judge the adequacy of policies customarily emanates from political oppositions. Political oppositions are only sometimes born in disputes over public policies, but they are always expected to speak to these issues.57

There are certainly good arguments to be made that political oppositions should evaluate the propriety of proposed public policy, but that they often do this as an aspect of their activity which political scientists generally overlook. Many policy disputes, in fact, constitute challenges to the rightness of policy, and it is this kind of challenge which is indicative of the way in which political power is legitimized. The precise nature of the connection between political oppositions and judgments of political legitimacy may become clearer if we remember that political oppositions cannot avoid taking a stand on a claim or even an intimation that a policy is illegitimate. Two practical, if not logical, consequences follow from the involvement of oppositions with the issues of political legitimacy. The debate over the legitimacy of any policy becomes a dialectic that can locate the various oppositions. And on the assumption that all policies that are ultimately successful passed because they were in part considered legitimate, there is a positive correlation between legitimacy and policy effectiveness. Insofar as political oppositions in a democracy exert some measure of control over policies of state, an opposition becomes legitimate by virtue of its association with policies which are considered legitimate. Therefore, if our goal is to isolate the agent legitimizing political power in Israel, it is instructive to describe the forms of political oppositions there, and then to evaluate their relative effectiveness in influencing the formation of public policy.

In Israel, it is not only the political parties outside of the government which dissent from the government’s policies and challenge their validity. It is possible to locate as much dissent and as much opposition within the governing parties as without, and within Mapai as much as within any other political party.58 The extent to which policies are acceptable and legitimate in Israel turns out to be a function of their acceptability in Mapai. The political community rarely voices a serious protest that does not echo through the chambers of the Mapai party and receive reinforcement there.

The decision to go to war in June 1967 and the protests aroused by the need to make such a decision illustrate the nature of political oppositions in Israel and their manner of judging particular policies. The events preceding that prolonged and agonized decision rendered visible the positions of various political oppositions which felt compelled by the circumstances to advocate specific ‘war’ policies. Thus, political party activities related to that decision can serve as a means to locate the political oppositions in Israel, to measure their relative effectiveness, and in so doing to ascertain their legitimacy relative to one another.

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