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Introduction
In recent years much attention has been given in International Relations (IR) research to how international actors deal with the challenge of threats to their identity. One concept that addresses this issue is ontological security, a term that refers to a state's need to have a consistent and assured perception of itself.Footnote 1 However, while this concept has proven very useful in explaining how actors respond when their identity is threatened, it fails to address an essential element of international relations; in many cases, actors must deal with simultaneous challenges to a number of different identities they hold. Things become even more complex when there is conflict between the measures that must be taken to resolve the various threats, aggravating the threat to each of the challenged identities. This type of situation, which I call ontological dissonance, deserves further elaboration and is the main focus of this article.
I suggest that ontological dissonance is not simply a discord resulting from a collective actor's perception that it is unable to maintain its identities, nor is it merely the perception that there is a clash between an actor's identities. Rather, it is a combination of these things: the clash stems from the perception that the measures required to placate the ontological insecurity of each of the threatened identities are themselves in conflict. The accumulation of these threats and the difficulties in resolving them challenge the state's consistent view of itself, which may in turn further complicate the dilemma and hamper the state's ability to find a resolution. In such situations, as I will later elaborate on, avoidance can become an attractive option for collective actors in dealing with the difficulties arising from this dilemma.
I will demonstrate these theoretical assertions through the case of Israel's unilateral steps of, first, establishing the separation barrier,Footnote 2 which was approved in December 2003;Footnote 3 and, second, disengaging from the Gaza strip and from parts of the West Bank, a plan that was approved in October 2004. More specifically, I argue that the terror attacks of the Second Intifada and Israel's initial response to them reawakened a sense of threat to the Israeli Jewish identity,Footnote 4 to the Israeli democratic identity, and to Israel's identity as a state that actively seeks security. Furthermore, the attacks and Israel's response aggravated existing and perceived potential future clashes among the measures to address each of these challenges. I posit that an ontological dissonance arose out of this clash, which policymakers have tried to placate through the use of unilateral steps. These steps can be understood as measures that allow Jewish Israelis to ‘avoid the Palestinian problem’ and thus to deal with the ontological insecurities and the ontological dissonance Israel faced.
The importance of acknowledging ontological dissonance and of discussing the response of avoidance can be seen on a number of fronts. First, this dissonance, although similar to concepts like identity conflict and identity dissonance,Footnote 5 is a distinct phenomenon, which therefore may lead actors to respond differently. As such it also demonstrates another way that identities affect behaviour, leading actors to divert from the expectations dictated by rational models. Nonetheless, due to the resemblance among ontological dissonance, identity conflict, and identity dissonance, this article's theoretical contribution on how dissonance emerges and how actors resolve it may elucidate these latter two situations as well.
Second, it is quite puzzling that collective actors' use of the measure of avoidance to solve identities dilemmas has not been given much critical attention, given the debate on individuals' use of it,Footnote 6 and given some difficulties that arise through other measures collective actors take to deal with dissonance. With this research, I aim to address this neglected aspect. Furthermore, I suggest that avoidance is a mechanism that perpetuates and sustains conflicts, as it may undermine an actor's sensitivity to new information and its ability to respond to it.
Third, by analysing how an ontological dissonance develops, this article contributes to our understanding of how ontological insecurity is experienced (and socially constructed). As I show, while ontological insecurity has its own dynamics beyond the full control of any enunciator, enunciators nonetheless play a crucial role in shaping and intensifying this process.
Studying the Israeli case has further significant ramifications. First, the Israeli case – in particular the Oslo Accords – has been the focus of previous studies that have, in fact, tried to explain the behaviour of states through the theoretical framework of identity conflict.Footnote 7 Revisiting these existing studies using the framework suggested in this article can help explain some of the consequences of the failure of the Oslo Accords. Second, as some scholars note, the Israeli disengagement is a formative event in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in recent years,Footnote 8 which makes this case important for research. Lastly, I argue that although Israel's unilateral steps have some unique characteristics, this case allows us to draw some conclusions about other actors' responses to ontological dissonances.
This article has four main parts. The first is a theoretical discussion of identities and threats to identities. Following this discussion, I develop and show the advantages of the concept of ontological dissonance. In the second part I discuss the measures taken by actors to placate the insecurity and dissonance they experience, specifically measures of avoidance. In the third and fourth parts, I use this theoretical framework to examine Israel's unilateral steps. I show that following the Second Intifada, Israel experienced ontological dissonance, and that the unilateral steps it took reflected measures of avoidance that allowed Israel to deal with this dissonance. I conclude by considering the implications of this study, and also highlight some of the negative consequences of these measures with regard to the Palestinians.
Ontological (in)security and ontological dissonance
Many studies have considered the connections between identity and security. Some claim that identities provide a context through which threats are interpreted,Footnote 9 and therefore that they fundamentally shape feelings of security or insecurity. Identity itself may become the referent object to be secured or threatened.Footnote 10 This process is best described through the concept of ontological security, which concerns an actor's ability to defend its identity, future, and the context in which it operates. Routines and stable social identities are a source of security because they provide order and certainty.Footnote 11 Ontological security thus concerns security of being rather than security of surviving (physical security); and to maintain it, actors must not only be identified by others as having specific identities, but they also need to be able to assure themselves of who they are.Footnote 12 Challenges to either of these may create a dissonance within a state's sense of self, a dissonance that actors try to prevent or soothe in order to maintain ontological security and preserve coherent self-identity.Footnote 13
However, ontological dissonance requires more than a threat to identity to develop. Such a dissonance occurs when the potential solutions to a collective actor's (for example, a state's) various threatened identities – that is, the various ontological insecurities it faces – are in opposition, compelling the actor to choose among contradictory measures.
Further discussion of this concept requires differentiating it from three related concepts that have already been incorporated into the study of IR: cognitive dissonance, identity dissonance, and identity conflict. Cognitive dissonance describes a situation in which an actor perceives that two of its beliefs do not seem to ‘fit’ together.Footnote 14 In these situations – more generally termed ‘belief dilemmas’ – actors may add consonant cognitions, remove dissonant cognitions,Footnote 15 or take some of the following measures: denying the conflict, changing their behaviour, or changing their attitudes/beliefs.Footnote 16 This theory is also applicable to threats to individuals' identities.Footnote 17
The effects of a threat to ontological security on an (individual) actor may be similar to the effects of cognitive dissonance (or other ‘belief dilemmas’).Footnote 18 Feelings that accompany dissonance – discomfort, and the desire to repair the situation and organise life in an orderly and predictable fashionFootnote 19 – can be also experienced by actors exposed to ontological threats. Some scholars have attempted to extend insights from the theory of cognitive dissonance to the international level. Robert Jervis pointed out how misperceptions may be driven by dissonances experienced by policymakers.Footnote 20 This theory was also used by Finnemore and Sikkink to explain norm-confirming behaviour. They suggest that state leaders follow international norms in order to enhance national esteem – and, as a result, their own self-esteem.Footnote 21
However, the concept of cognitive dissonance does not fully capture the dissonance experienced by a group.Footnote 22 In contrast to cognitive dissonance, which is studied in the scholarly literature mostly at the individual level of analysis, I use the term ontological dissonance to denote a dissonance that a collective actor experiences.Footnote 23 As I further elaborate on below, since it is the dissonance of a collective actor, it emerges and is experienced differently, and therefore may be responded to in different ways. Indeed, in recent years some scholars have shifted emphasis from the decision-makers to the state and state identity/identities,Footnote 24 arguing that states may also experience dissonance. This literature overlaps with the concept of ontological dissonance. Scholars refer to situations of ‘identity conflict’ – where there is a clash between the identities held by the collective actorFootnote 25 – and situations of ‘identity dissonance’ – where the clash is generally between one of the identities and the actor's behaviour.Footnote 26 Although this study builds upon these works, it also differs from them in a number of ways.
First, the specific characteristics of the dilemmas are different. In contrast to identity conflict, ontological dissonance is not solely evoked by the challenge of a clash between identities, but rather by a clash between the measures taken to address the threats to the different identities.Footnote 27 While this to some extent converges with identity dissonance, it differs from it in that the concept of identity dissonance usually explores a clash between an identity and the practices that are expected to result from it. While ontological dissonance indeed focuses on a clash between behaviour and identity, it concerns a clash between a practice that aims to secure an identity an actor holds and another identity the same actor holds that is challenged by this practice.
Second, this article differs from studies of identity conflict and identity dissonance in its focus on how the dissonance is addressed. Rather than highlighting measures such as modifying behaviour, attitudes, or identities, I contend that an important and under-researched response states have in these situations is to take measures similar to psychological avoidance.
A third difference is that using the concept of ontological dissonance helps to demonstrate the fact that the dissonance is a collective process. I suggest that this view, which concerns both how the dissonance erupts and how it is addressed, is not always explicitly acknowledged in existing literature.
I suggest that ontological dissonance erupts in two stages. First, a collective actor experiences threats simultaneously to a number of identities it holds. Each of these threats may be initiated by external forces or events (that is, by how the actor is acknowledged and perceived by other actors),Footnote 28 or following an internal process (in which domestic changes challenge how the actor perceives itself).Footnote 29 However, in either case, a discursive process is necessary for the collective actor to acknowledge that its identities are challenged, and a ‘dominant voice’ is developed, helping to create the state's narrative.Footnote 30 In this respect, threats to identity are socially constructed, dependent on a discourse of threatFootnote 31 and on processes such as securitisation in which the identity or identities are presented as threatened.Footnote 32
In the second stage of the eruption of ontological dissonance, the collective actor needs to acknowledge, first, the measures that might resolve each of the threats, and second, that these measures are in fact contradictory. As the Copenhagen School suggests, it is not only the threats themselves that are socially constructed, but the ways that these threats could be resolved.Footnote 33 This acknowledgement takes place through the actor's ‘dominant voice’, which clarifies and sharpens tension that already exists between or among these identities.Footnote 34
Enunciators in this process retain agency in the sense that they have some degree of freedom in narrating an ontological dissonance. Usually enunciators who narrate the existence of threat or ontological dissonance are political figures, but they may also be any other individuals (for example, prominent journalists) who have authority in presenting threats.Footnote 35 However, enunciators are also constrained by existing social structures – by collective memories, discourses, narratives, and practices – which determine what can be interpreted as an identity threat, what the legitimate actions to solve it are,Footnote 36 and when a clash among these measures may break out. If the discourse suggested by the enunciator diverts from the narrative of the collective actor, the suggested interpretation will not be accepted. As Cerulo argues, in order to evoke fear in a particular subject, ‘the potential disaster must first be centered in a community's perceptual porthole’.Footnote 37
In more practical terms, the question is neither whether the threats are real nor whether there is a real clash among the measures to solve each threat. Rather, the question is how these things are reflected within a society's dominant narrative. Discourse analysis, thus, allows us to study whether the actor perceives that its identities are threatened.Footnote 38 Further, it allows us to trace how the actor perceives that these threats should be addressed, and whether or not the actor perceives that these measures are contradictory.
Reducing dissonance
Identity shifts and behavioural change
Situations of ontological dissonance are very stressful, as they create strong emotional reactions. Scholars have concentrated on the specific emotional reactions to ontological insecurity, such as shameFootnote 39 and humiliation.Footnote 40 In addition, it has been suggested that an actor with ontological insecurity will feel it must resolve the threats so that it will return to a state of certainty and order.Footnote 41 Mitzen, for example, argues that ontological security provides certainty and serves ‘the important emotional function of “inoculating” individuals against the paralytic, deep fear of chaos'. Hence, it is suggested that ontological insecurity produces anxiety.Footnote 42 Actors experiencing ontological dissonance have to also prioritise one identity over the other. Actors are thus forced to reflect on who they are and decide who they want to be – two highly emotional dilemmas that demand action. The clash in these cases results from a dissonance experienced by a collective actor (state) reacting emotionally to the pressures of choosing among different values that define the collective self (‘who are we’). Actors who experience an ontological dissonance, therefore, will feel they need to do something to remove the dissonance. The question however still remains: How do states specifically deal with such discomfort?
Drawing on the psychological literature, IR scholars have identified measures actors may take to reduce dissonances. One possibility is for an actor to reconstruct its identity. As Bially Mattern suggests, an actor may ‘feel the dissonance wrought within his subjectivity so acutely that he needs to openly narrate dissent from the offensive identity’.Footnote 43 Another possible response to dissonance is for an actor to change its behaviour. Sucharov, for example, argues that actors may face a dissonance when their behaviour contradicts their (role) identity. She compares two possibilities in her examination of actors' response to the dissonance – behavioural change and the shift of identity – and she concludes that the former is more likely to take place than the latter.Footnote 44
I argue that the attachment of actors to their identity makes it difficult to implement a behavioural or an identity change (and even a dispositional change) for several reasons. First, identity change requires a long process of institutionalising a new narrative, and may not be able to address an urgent policy problem. Second, identities create mechanisms that strengthen them, and due to this ‘self-perpetuating quality’, resist change.Footnote 45 Therefore, identity and behavioural changes are potential sources of ontological insecurity: they may add another dimension of insecurity by forming a gap between the identity and the expected resulting practices. Third, a growing literature in psychology aims to empirically test how individuals use defensive mechanisms in general and avoidance measures in particular to deal with dissonance.Footnote 46 Drawing on this literature extends our understanding of how collective actors deal with threatening situations in which change cannot be easily accomplished.Footnote 47 Furthermore, some scholars have started to explore how state actors – and not just individuals – use defensive measures like denial.Footnote 48 I therefore suggest that we need to consider an additional measure to identity and behavioural change that state's take to reduce dissonance – the measure of avoidance.
Avoidance
Avoidance, as the psychological literature emphasises, includes using mechanisms of selective exposure to information – that is, individuals look for consonant information in order to evade dissonant information.Footnote 49 As Giddens explains, avoidance helps actors to exclude or reinterpret potentially disturbing knowledgeFootnote 50 and thus to neutralise the situation. Basically, as Northrup argues, events that threaten to invalidate the core sense of identity – such as the physical, psychological, and social self – may lead to ‘defensive responses aimed at avoiding psychic and/or physical annihilation’. In such situations, the individual will likely reject new information or redefine the situation in order to protect its identity.Footnote 51
In the international arena, states also may employ, more or less actively, specific avoidance measures to deal with uncomfortable information that threatens their identities: they can take actions that self-restrict access to information,Footnote 52 attempting to change the reality to fit their cognitions. By distancing themselves from the source of identity threat, states limit the collective actor's exposure to actions, events, and utterances that challenge it. Another active avoidance measure is to create ambiguities, looking for information that will increase the level of uncertainty.Footnote 53 Like individuals, states can take actions that create ambiguity and limit the experience of threat. Less active measures of avoidance could be to ignore (uncomfortable) existing information and refrain from seeking new information that would decrease uncertainty.Footnote 54 Lastly, in addition to direct avoidance measures, actors can selectively look for and use supportive and consistent information to deal with the dissonances.Footnote 55 This allows actors to separate the threatened self from the source of the threat and secure the boundaries of the self.Footnote 56
However, when avoidance is the strategy of a collective actor, discourse becomes an important element within it, a fact that carries practical implications for how we study this process. Unlike an individual, internal process of avoidance, which requires no clear utterances,Footnote 57 collective actors require a discourse that publicly acknowledges that the threat (for example, the ontological dissonance) is being managed, and that specific actions are being taken, even if they are only symbolic.
I argue that avoidance allows an actor facing an ontological dissonance to revalidate its identity rather than to change it or to significantly change its behaviour. In this respect, an actor is able to pursue a policy that provides ‘a mental compromise’ and demonstrates for it and for others that it remains true to its perception of itself.Footnote 58 Although such a policy shift will not eliminate the dissonance, it will make it more tolerable. In other words, what differentiates avoidance from other measures is that actors trying to avoid are aware that their choice of action will not fully resolve the dissonance or the core elements that produce the dissonance. Rather, it will only decrease the threat posed to the actor and ease the accompanying discomfort.Footnote 59
Israel's unilateral steps
The main empirical assertion of this article is that the unilateral steps taken by Israel were not only responses to perceived and constructed threats to its identities, they were also measures of avoidance. Specifically, the unilateral steps allowed Israel to actively prevent access to information that threatened its identities and to create ambiguity concerning the challenges to them. In addition, these measures improved the access to consistent information that validated the threatened identities. Using these strategies, Israel was able to manage its ontological dissonance.
Alternative explanations
Although Israel's unilateral steps have attracted the attention of some IR scholars, explaining them has not been the main aim of most studies.Footnote 60 Some scholars emphasise their strategic implications and the level of their public support, especially in the context of the 2001–2002 wave of Palestinian terror attacks,Footnote 61 while others highlight the implications of the separation barrier in perpetuating the Israeli occupation of territories.Footnote 62
Nevertheless, although it is quite certain that without the motivation of physical security the barrier would not have been established, this motive cannot exclusively explain Israel's steps.Footnote 63 First, as some scholars have acknowledged, the separation barrier itself cannot provide absolute security – it depends on complementary measuresFootnote 64 and it may lead terrorists to use other means. Other indications that this barrier is not only about physical security are its long-drawn-out construction, the extensive debates over its establishment and route, and the fact that the barrier itself has gaps (as parts of it are still not built). Furthermore, it has been suggested that the defence of the Israeli side of the barrier is complicated by its length and its location in some places in topographically inferior terrain. Finally, some say that the establishment of the separation barrier will erode Israel's deterrent posture, and therefore that its contribution to Israel's (physical) security is limited – and may in fact be negative.Footnote 65 Therefore, as Slater argues, in spite of the facts that security played a role in the Israeli decision and that the number of terrorist incidents has been substantially reduced,Footnote 66 other considerations in its erection were also important.Footnote 67 In fact, the effectiveness of Israeli special forces (military, General Security Service [Shin Bet]) in preventing planned attacks has been claimed to have dramatically increased since 2003;Footnote 68 in other words, the decrease in the number of attacks is not necessarily due to the separation barrier.
Like the physical security explanation, other accounts of the separation barrier can be seen as complementary to the main argument of this article. One view is that the unilateral steps were implemented because of the strengthening of Israel's political centre.Footnote 69 International conditions also affected the unilateral steps: the common views shared by the Sharon Government and Bush Administration, specifically in the context of the war in Iraq, provided Israel with tacit American support of its policy toward the Palestinians.Footnote 70 However, these factors cannot fully explain Israel's motivation for taking these measures in the first place, and can be better seen as enabling factors.
The unilateral steps have also been seen as an attempt by Israel to create on-the-ground facts to improve Israel's negotiation position regarding the future status of the occupied territories.Footnote 71 But although this significant observation partly converges with the identity explanation put forward in this article – according to which the need to hold the territories is seen as part of the Jewish-Israeli character of the state – it cannot account for the timing of the unilateral steps. In spite of public support since the 1990s, unilateralism did not become operative until after 2002.Footnote 72 Furthermore, even after the eruption of the Second Intifada – and despite public support for unilateral separationFootnote 73 – prominent Israeli officials continued to oppose unilateral steps. For example, in the early 2000s, Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz and his deputy Moshe Ya'alon saw the fence as a sign of defeatism.Footnote 74 This view further challenges the physical security rationale, and also points to the limitations of other explanations to fully account for the unilateral steps.
Another explanation is that Sharon went through a meaningful learning process and acknowledged Israel's need to take these steps for its security.Footnote 75 In April 2001, he explained to Haaretz, ‘I don't see any option of separation, I don't believe in “we-here; them-there”’, and for years he categorically rejected any unilateral disengagement; however, in December 2003 he announced these steps.Footnote 76 While Sharon's acceptance of the idea of unilateral steps was crucial, the question of why he changed his mind at that time remains.
The Second Intifada's challenge to Israeli identities
In order to establish the empirical argument, we first need recognise the threats that the terror attacks of the Second Intifada posed to Israel's identities as a Jewish state, as a security provider, and as a democracy. These threats were emphasised by the processes of securitisation undertaken by prominent Israeli leaders.
As Liebman and Susser argue, although a large majority of Israel's Jews are neither secular nor rigorously religious, ‘Jewishness is fundamental to their identity perceptions and the idea of disengaging Israel from the Jewish peoplehood and its history is, for them, unthinkable’.Footnote 77 With regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Northrup argues, ‘Each side to the conflict in effect says, “in order to maintain our identity we must live on and possess the piece of land which represents our selves, our religion, our meaning.” Loss of that land, or the threat of its loss […] implies the loss of the self’.Footnote 78
In other words, Jewish religious practices have become constitutive of the Israeli ethos, but in a traditionalist (historical nationalist) rather than a religious way.Footnote 79 This identity derives from religious sources, making use of religious symbols, practices, and language, but it is fundamentally not religious.Footnote 80 In fact, being Jewish may concern the link of an individual to the Jewish people, not just to the religion. Nevertheless, after the 1967 War the Israeli-Jewish identity seems to have become more ‘Judaic’ and less civic, and the ‘land of Israel’ became a more prominent part of the Jewish (national) identity.Footnote 81
With the attacks of the Second Intifada the Jewishness of the state was to some extent perceived to be threatened. I argue that the terror attacks helped to strengthen the Israeli-Jewish identity,Footnote 82 but they also provided a context in which the ‘demographic threat’ – the fear that the high Palestinian fertility rate would erode the Israeli majorityFootnote 83 – could be more easily constructed and presented as a concrete and urgent danger.Footnote 84 The fact that the demographic threat is to some extent socially constructed is clearly demonstrated in how this threat was presented in Israeli discourse, as not only is the data regarding the ‘threat’ highly debated, but it has been interpreted in a number of different ways.Footnote 85 For example, in Sharon's speech immediately following his government's approval of the disengagement plan, he claimed, ‘It is a resolution that ensures the future of Israel. It is a resolution that is good for […] the demography of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel’.Footnote 86 Sharon's status as well as his military background provided him with a massive public support,Footnote 87 which made him a successful narrator. This discourse appealed to a large audience.
The threat to Jewish identity should also be understood in the context of the lack of clearly defined Israeli borders. Borders, as Newman reminds us, determine a group's belonging, affiliation, and membership.Footnote 88 The fact that the Jewish state is not clearly defined creates not only a physical but an ontological security problem. This vagueness has existed for many years,Footnote 89 but the terror attacks sharpened these perceived problems. Thus, many in Israel felt that the indistinct Israeli-Palestinian border allowed the attacks to occur and, more fundamentally, undermined the ability to determine what territory should be defended in the first place.
It has been suggested that Israel has a second identity based on its democratic regime, although there is debate over its specific characteristics.Footnote 90 Similarly, Barnett notes four traditional potential problems with Israeli democratic identity: relations with the Arab minority, the hold over the territories captured in 1967, Judaism and liberalism, and the tension between nationalist ethos and individualistic liberalism.Footnote 91 Smooha suggests that viewing Israel as an ethnic democracy may be helpful in overcoming these controversies. According to this view, the Israeli democracy constitutes identity in that both the democratic procedures and the Jewishness of the state are institutionalised and cannot be isolated from each other.Footnote 92
For many Jewish-Israelis (but not all), the terror attacks sharpened the problems associated with the occupation of the territories. These attacks not only raised the Palestinian issue, they initiated a debate regarding the appropriate measures Israel should take to deal with them. In this context, Ami Ayalon, former head of the Shin Bet, declared, ‘We are taking sure steady steps to a place where the State of Israel will no longer be a democracy’.Footnote 93 Even PM Sharon started to talk about the ‘corrupting effects of the occupation’.Footnote 94
The third Israeli identity is that of ‘security provider’. Sucharov argues that Israel is a ‘defensive warrior’, an actor who has a self-perceived need ‘to take active measures to secure its existence’.Footnote 95 The idea of self-reliance – of actively influencing fate – is fundamental to the Israeli security approach, which is reinforced by the trauma of the Holocaust and the hostile political environment Israel perceives itself to be in. Arab threats are thus understood as existential, demanding active measures to prevent another Holocaust.Footnote 96
During the Second Intifada Israel adopted a doctrine that, according to Israeli officials, called for the use of force – to ‘sear into Palestinian consciousness’ the fact that they would not attain their goals through aggression and terrorism.Footnote 97 This (accumulated) general deterrence strategy vis-à-vis the Palestinians has had only limited success, and did not resolve the physical and ontological threats felt by Israel. Thus, terror attacks, almost by definition, have a greater impact than merely creating a physical threat – they challenge actors' ontological security by undermining their routines. And furthermore, because deterrence is constitutive to Israeli identity,Footnote 98 Israel's failure to actively provide security and to practice deterrence became more than a physical problem – it became an ontological one. The terror attacks and the inability to deter or eliminate them led to emotional reactions of frustration, fear, and anger.Footnote 99
The rising of the ontological dissonance
To briefly recap, enunciators used the terror attacks, along with some of their direct effects, to present and emphasise the existence of threats to various Israeli identities – pointing out different sources of ontological insecurity. Although there had been threats to each of these identities and tensions among them for years, these were sharpened by terror attacks. Within this context, not only was each identity perceived to be challenged, but enunciators persuasively suggested that resolving any one of these threats to identity would increase the threats to one of Israel's other identities.Footnote 100
Some of these tensions have been already acknowledged by scholars. Sucharov refers to the Israeli ‘triangle dilemma’, according to which Israel can be any two of the following – a democracy, an occupier of the territories, or a Jewish state – but not all three at the same time. Thus, if on the one hand Israel annexed the territories without providing citizenship to the Palestinians, it would cease to be a democracy; on the other hand, ‘If it did grant the Palestinians Israeli citizenship, the country would, within a few generations, no longer be demographically Jewish’.Footnote 101 As Tessler notes, this leaves those who have a Zionist vision of the state with ‘an impossible choice’.Footnote 102
Indeed, for more than four decades there have been clashes not only among these three Israeli identities, but even between pairs of them. For example, there are different sources of conflict between the Israeli-Jewish identity and the democratic identity. Nonetheless, although these tensions have become more salient from time to time, they have been relatively latent and Jewish-Israelis could ignore them.Footnote 103 The First Intifada changed the situation, and some suggest that the dissonance arising from this event affected the Israeli-Palestinians peace process and the attainment of the Oslo Accords.Footnote 104
If this were the case, one might wonder why the consequences of the dissonance following the First Intifada were what could be seen as a cooperative solution, while the Second Intifada resulted in unilateral steps. Although the study of the Oslo Process is beyond the scope of this article, the dissonance that followed the Second Intifada seems to have been more severe, not only because the magnitude of the violence was much higher – and thus posed a greater threat to the Israeli security provider identity – but because many Jewish-Israelis interpreted the Intifada and the failure of Oslo Process as indications that the conflict was unsolvable.Footnote 105 Furthermore, to some extent this dissonance was fuelled by reactions to identity threats raised by the Oslo Accords, and by the ‘self-perpetuating quality’ of the threatened identities. For example, as Barnett argues, the Oslo Accords ‘forced Israelis to confront their own past and history, which had the effect of further eroding various foundational myths and claims; such development led to a backlash against the accords and growing nationalist sentiment’.Footnote 106 Put simply, a cooperative solution to the dissonance not only seemed politically impossible, but was perceived to further challenge the Jewish-Israeli identity. Furthermore, the clashes between the measures that were perceived as necessary following the threat to the security provider identity made the dissonance much more complex than that which followed the First Intifada. In this respect, on the one hand military actions to counter the terror attacks as noted earlier seemed problematic and ineffective, and on the other hand substantial territorial concessions were considered dangerous since they would erode Israel's firm stand and deterrence in light of the terror attacks.Footnote 107 Therefore, more suitable measures were those of avoidance, exemplified in the unilateral steps.
The Second Intifada emphasised the tensions among Israeli identities by forcing Israelis to reflect on the situation.Footnote 108 Kurtz summarises this point very clearly, arguing that as the confrontation with the Palestinians continued, Israel's understanding of the challenges the occupation created were sharpened, thus threatening the ‘future of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state’. In addition, the acknowledgment of the limitation of using force to militarily defeat the Palestinian uprising was accompanied by increased sensitivity in Israel to its contribution to the cycle of violence.Footnote 109 As Grinberg notes there was a public debate and a wave of criticism concerning Israeli measures, which went beyond the mere question of their effectiveness.Footnote 110 For example, an interview in Yediot Aharonot – then the most popular newspaper in Israel – with four senior ex-chiefs of the General Security Services, was given the title ‘We are Seriously Concerned about the Fate of the State of Israel’.Footnote 111 This demonstrates not only the challenges to the security provider identity, but the clashes among the Israeli identities and the clashes among solutions to them as well.
In other words, because the problems and threats created by the terror attacks were not militarily resolved, they could gain enough momentum to challenge the Israeli identities. Therefore, a larger number of narrators could emphasise these existing tensions and frame them in the context of threats to the state identity. The context created by these increasing tensions and by the terror threats was that of insecurity and a feeling of ‘falling apart’.Footnote 112 These concerns were also acknowledged by Sharon. According to Dov Weisglass, who served as Sharon's bureau chief, in the fall of 2003, Sharon felt that there was ‘international and domestic erosion, and everything in the country was collapsing’.Footnote 113
Israel's response to the ontological dissonance
I argue that Israel's unilateral steps were seen as a way to deal with the threats to each of the challenged identities, as I elaborate upon in this section, without intensifying the clash among them. These unilateral steps could do this because in addition to addressing physical security concerns, they were measures of avoidance that distanced the Israelis from each of these ontological insecurities and from the dissonance resulting from the contradictory measures needed to be taken in order to deal with each of them. Furthermore, they allowed Jewish-Israelis to disregard inconsistent information, which also enabled them to (re)validate each of the threatened identities.
The threat to identities
As Waxman suggests, separation came to be understood as ‘necessary in order to strengthen and secure Israel's Jewish identity by leaving as many Palestinians as possible outside Israel's borders’.Footnote 114 Waxman adds that the ‘construction of a fortified barrier between Israel and the West Bank was thus a physical manifestation of the psychological need of Israeli Jews for separation’.Footnote 115 Likewise, in his first speech after he became the acting Prime Minister, Olmert declared that ‘there is no doubt that the most important and dramatic step we face is […] to ensure the Jewish majority in the country’. In this respect, the lack of a Jewish majority was constructed as a threat and disengagement as the solution: ‘In order to ensure the existence of a Jewish national homeland, we will not be able to continue ruling over the territories in which the majority of the Palestinian population lives’.Footnote 116
To put it differently, ‘Israelis, literally and metaphorically, wanted to wall themselves off from their Palestinian neighbors’,Footnote 117 but in addition they want better tools with which to define Israeliness.Footnote 118 Most Israelis, as Benvenisti observes, believed that the ‘demographic problem’ would be reduced by the disengagement plan.Footnote 119 As Ben Meir and Shaked, for example, explain, the relatively strong support of Israel's Jewish majority in 2006 and 2007, compared to the previous years, is
probably due to the heightened salience of the demographic factor as a result of the Gaza disengagement in August 2005 and Ehud Olmert's convergence plan in early 2006, a plan which involved unilateral disengagement from large parts of the West Bank. The rationale behind both plans was the vital need for Israel to preserve and maintain a strong and solid Jewish majority in order to guarantee its character as a Jewish […] [state].Footnote 120
It is also not surprising to find that in a large number of utterances, senior officials such as PM Sharon and PM Olmert stated that these unilateral steps were essential for the preservation of Israel as a democratic state.Footnote 121 For example, Sharon declared in the Knesset, ‘We have no desire to permanently rule over millions of Palestinians, who double their numbers every generation. Israel, which wishes to be an exemplary democracy, will not be able to bear such a reality over time. The Disengagement Plan presents the possibility of opening a gate to a different reality’.Footnote 122 Likewise, Ayalon and other former seniors in the security establishment explained that the solution to the threat to Israel's democracy was a withdrawal (from Gaza).Footnote 123
The establishment of the separation barrier and the disengagement plan can be also understood as a process of eliminating the threat to Israel's security provider identity. This plan could make Israel again an active initiator. As Sharon declared in an address in Caesaria Conference,
I took the responsibility of initiating changes in every field where they were necessary, in order to lead Israeli society to a better situation for the future. We are in the midst of doing so […] The greatest change we are implementing is the Disengagement Plan. We had to take the initiative.Footnote 124
The rationale behind this argument is that these unilateral steps increase security and deal with the threat to identity, but they do not undermine Israeli physical security or the deterrent posture. Sharon explained, ‘Disengagement can assist us in curbing terror, and will certainly allow us to fight terror in a better and more effective way’.Footnote 125 Furthermore, Sharon has implied that the withdrawal would enhance Israel's deterrent posture by increasing the legitimisation of using extensive force if needed.Footnote 126
In this situation, unilateral strategy became the preferred and necessary option to the majority of Israelis. The narrators who called for these unilateral steps explained and justified them in terms of the need to secure Israel as both a democratic and a Jewish state.Footnote 127 In addition, the withdrawal and the establishment of the barrier – perceived by most Israelis as a non-violent act – eased other tensions. In this way, Israel was taking the initiative but in a non-aggressive manner that was perceived to accord with the democratic values of the state.
Measures of avoidance
I argue that the unilateral steps allowed Israel to deal with the challenges to each identity without aggravating the threats to them because they were measures of avoidance: first, they were active attempts to avoid threatening information through the strategy of distancing; and second, they served in the attempt to maintain ambiguity.
The unilateral steps, and especially the erection of the wall, created a physical block that not only seemed to increase physical security, but allowed the reduction of threat to each of the challenged identities. These steps, by separating the threatened self from the source of threat, were an attempt to change reality so that it would fit the actor's identities. The ‘Palestinians’ are perceived to be the source of the challenge to the Israeli identities: therefore, increasing Israel's distance from them minimises the threatening information that could be produced. At the same time, distancing helps to ensure that Israel is only exposed to information that is consistent with and validates each of its threatened identities. As one of Sharon's advisers suggested, the barrier was both ‘a physical and a mental wall’.Footnote 128
Just knowing that there would be a barrier between the Jewish-Israelis and the Palestinians was enough for most Israelis; questions about its route became less important.Footnote 129 As Arieali and Sfarad argue, ‘the Israeli public demanded a fence now! The public was unaware and even uninterested in the consequences of its route’.Footnote 130 Newman explains, ‘traditionally borders constitute barriers […] As such, the other side of the border becomes partially invisible and unknown’.Footnote 131 This public mood was well described by some Israeli journalists. For example, Shavit argued, ‘We will withdraw from [the Palestinians], we will get them out of our sight, and we will solve the conflict with a wall’.Footnote 132 Similarly, Issacharoff, referring to the poor Israeli media coverage of the clashes in Gaza between Hamas and Fatah forces in an article entitled ‘Doesn't Want To Know’, suggested that in part it stems from the ‘Israeli dream of making the Palestinian problem go away and disengaging from Gaza. It's the continuation of Israel's policy of the past few years for the territories’ residents: disengagement, separation fence, convergence’.Footnote 133
From this perspective, the unilateral steps allowed Israel to deal with uncomfortable information in order to prevent inconsistency to the self. This discursive process is clearly demonstrated in Israel's ‘search for quiet’. In other words, the separation plan did not aim to deal with the core elements of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its implications. Its goal rather was to provide the Israelis with a way they could live ontologically and physically in quiet. In the context of Israel's interactions with the Palestinians, quiet became a synonym for the absence of terror attacks. As Haaretz journalist Zvi Bar'el asserted, the perplexed man on the street is not interested in the complicated questions concerning an agreement with Hamas: ‘He wants things to be quiet’. The unilateral steps then should be understood as attempts to provide ‘quiet’.Footnote 134In this respect, the separation barrier was a response that allowed Israelis to avoid ‘feeling’ the conflict and the discomfort that accompanied the threat to its identities and the clash among them. The barrier stands not only as a physical barrier, but as a representational and symbolic manifestation.Footnote 135
Avoidance also involves the ability to maintain a level of ambiguity. The unilateral steps, and especially the separation barrier, were aimed to create a vagueness that allowed Israelis to deal with uncomfortable information. Ambiguity blurs an actor's actions, and thus allows interpretations that can be regarded as more consistent with its identities, which in turn minimises ontological insecurities and therefore the ontological dissonance. The ambiguity surrounding Israel's unilateral steps is manifested in a number of ways.
First, the reversibility of these steps is unclear. On the one hand, enunciators have claimed that they are temporary;Footnote 136 on the other hand, in the eyes of Jewish-Israelis, ‘fixing’ the blurred boundaries of the Israeli state, would contribute to a more stable (Jewish) identity. Prime Minster Olmert argued, for example, that Israel must determine its ‘permanent borders […] We must create a clear boundary as soon as possible’.Footnote 137 Furthermore, Ben Meir and Shaked report that ‘as of 2006, many Israelis have internalized the view that the “fence” is more than just a security barrier and has attained features of an eventual and permanent border’.Footnote 138
Second, it is unclear whether the separation barrier is a defensive security measure (as it is a static obstacle), an active measure (as it required action to erect it and requires the army to operate it), or something that goes beyond mere security concerns.
Third, and following the previous point, the meaning of the unilateral steps is unclear. Are they a way to provide a temporary solution to the (physical) threats Israel is facing, or are they an attempt to unilaterally solve the conflict? For example, Yoel Esteron in a column in Haaretz suggested, ‘Life without a fence was terrible, but at least it created a sense of urgency; that we have to do something to stop the killing; to solve the conflict; to make peace. The fence creates an illusion that we can “manage” the conflict instead of resolving it, another dubious invention of recent years’.Footnote 139
A fourth ambiguity concerns the route of the barrier. Although, as noted above, the original route has been changed for political reasons, the course of the barrier and the fact that it is incomplete contribute to the ambiguity of these steps. As Ehud Barak said in an interview with Haaertz in 2005 when he tried to return to politics, the disengagement plan ‘is a good step in the right direction’. However, according to Barak there was a lot of disinformation. He asserted that Sharon refrained from completing the fence because once he did, ‘there will be a clear line of what is inside and what is outside […] Sharon's obfuscation is [destructive to Israel]. It prevents us from defining things. It prevents us from sincerely asking where we are going’.Footnote 140
The ambiguity surrounding the separation wall is remarkably demonstrated in a television advertisement from 2009 for one of Israel's largest cell phone companies. The advert shows an IDF patrol along the separation barrier. Something hits their jeep and the soldiers jump – only to find it was a soccer ball. This leads to a game that is played over the wall (with no images of what is taking place in the Palestinian side).Footnote 141 Although the advert garnered criticism in Israel, it fits well with Israel's attempts not only to physically separate itself from the Palestinians, but to separate the Israeli self from its ontological threats. In fact, it deals with most of the elements constituting the ontological dissonance: Jewish Israeli soldiers – ‘the security providers' – who are not occupiers, but rather playing soccer with the (other) unseen side. According to this advert, there is no problem, and the mood of ‘avoidance’ is reflected in the response of the cell phone company addressing the criticism: ‘We do not deal with politics’.Footnote 142
Conclusions
The aim of this study was to show that the unilateral steps taken by Israel can be understood not only as attempts to resolve physical security threats, but as a means of placating the ontological dissonance it faced following the Second Intifada – that is, they were a strategy to deal with a threat to Israel's identities, as well as a clash among the measures to solve the threats to each of these identities. Although some have asserted that actors resolve dissonances between identity and behaviour by changing either their behaviour or their identities, I contend that in such situations of ontological dissonance, avoidance is another attractive option. I suggest that the separation barrier and other Israeli unilateral steps represent such a response. By taking active measures to change reality in a way that would decrease uncomfortable information and by creating ambiguity, Israel aimed to deal with the threats to each identity without challenging the other identities. To this end, the unilateral steps blocked uncomfortable information that would challenge Israeli identities and increased uncertainties regarding Israeli practices so that they could be interpreted as being consistent with the Israeli identities.
An important implication of this research concerns unilateral actions that collective actors take. While I do not argue that dissonance is the only explanation for such practices, it helps to explain some of them. Furthermore, the unilateral steps overlap with avoidance in the sense that they allow actors, at least temporarily, to refrain from engaging with other actors. This fact leads to two theoretical points for further research.
The first is to examine the conditions under which actors, when dealing with dissonances, are more likely to choose avoidance practices over engaging solutions to it. The second concerns studying the conditions under which actors tend to act unilaterally, and more specifically how these conditions affect different modes of unilateralism. I suggest that one useful direction of such research is to connect them and explore whether conditions that advance avoidance also promote unilateralism.
A more specific implication of this research is the applicability of the suggested framework to other cases. For example, to some extent it could be used to analyse a similar Turkish triangle dilemma that follows from a dissonance among its national identity, its democratic identity, and its identity as a security provider in the context of the conflict with the Kurds. The Southeast Anatolia Development Project (GAP), which relies on the contested assumption that the Kurdish problem is an economic rather than ethno-national problem, could also be understood as a kind of measure of avoidance.Footnote 143
Developments in Turkey's accession process to the EU can also illustrate the use of measures of avoidance, both by member states of the EU and by Turkey. On the one hand, Turkey's accession is seen to threaten the Christian identity of many EU member states; on the other hand, objections to Turkey's accession are seen to threaten the liberal identity of the EU. For Turkey, the slim prospects of it joining the EU threaten its Western identity; however, acceptance if it did come might threaten, at least partly, its Islamic identity.Footnote 144 Hence, it is convenient for both sides to let accession talks drag on. Even when, for example, Germany and France suggested that although Turkey could not become a member state, it should be offered what was termed as ‘privileged partnership’, there was no serious discussion of what this means and how this is different from the status Turkey enjoys today with regard to the EU.Footnote 145
Lastly, another implication of this research concerns Israel's relations with the Palestinians. While disengagement and the separation barrier helped to enhance Israel's ontological security (and to some extent its physical security as well), these steps carry a significant threat for the Palestinians. For example, the wall and the barrier create enclaves at some points, complicate daily life, and constrain the ability of the Palestinian central authority to operate and to enforce law. In addition, the unilateral steps increased housing distress in some areas, increased poverty by limiting the freedom of movement, and created difficulties in accessing work and material resources.Footnote 146 In this respect, the establishment of the barrier and the separation from the Palestinians is also connected to the Israeli role of ‘enemy’ vis-à-vis the Palestinians.Footnote 147 Far from solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the unilateral steps preserve the enmity and to some extent perpetuate the Israeli occupation in the West Bank. In this way, these acts confirm for the Israelis that there is no partner on the other sideFootnote 148 and for the Palestinians that Israel is not willing to address their needs.Footnote 149
This raises moral issues; but it also raises practical questions about the wisdom of these steps. Although the barrier may have provided some remedy to the physical and ontological security of the Israelis in the short term, in the long term it may result in a backlash.Footnote 150 As Halide already observed in 1995, ‘The widespread acknowledgement of Israel's security needs has contrasted sharply with the marginalization of the Palestinians’ similar fears and concerns’.Footnote 151 The separation barrier provides another demonstration of this assertion.
