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Democratization in Israel, politicized religion and the failure of the Oslo peace process

While the positive relationship between democracies and peace is by now a commonplace of international relations (IR) literature, the possible dangers of democratization processes for international peace and security have only recently become a focus of IR research. This article argues that some of the mechanisms prevalent in democratizing states' ambivalent conflict behaviour help to explain why the state of Israel initially entered into the peace process with the Palestinians, but soon reverted to former hostile policies. In the initial stages of the peace process in the early 1990s, the Labour-led government based its efforts towards peace on the typical norms of democratic peace and thus explicitly stated the need to improve Israel's defective democratic regime. This involved amending the electoral system by ending the de facto control of the Palestinians in the territories, who did not participate in Israeli democratic politics. However, the prospect of ‘land for peace’ threatened the politicized religious Jewish settler-elite in the territories who feared not only the destruction of the basic tenets of their religious identity, but also the loss of both power and resources in Israeli politics. As a consequence, this threatened elite engaged in fierce religious-nationalist mobilization in order to derail the peace negotiations and at the same time subvert the process of improving Israel's democratic regime.