2 - Circumventing the Challenges in the Classification of Israel (A)

Summary

The conflicting classifications of the Israeli regime can be explained by the concept of democracy as Chapter 2 elaborates. It elucidates how the concept of democracy is used to define the regime as a whole, showing that this use limits any potential analytical leverage. The current usage precludes, in particular, the development of a thorough understanding of the multidimensional nature of democracy and of the ability to explain variant levels of democraticness along different dimensions. It therefore adopts an analytical approach that combines thin and procedural aspects of democraticness with thicker and more extensive properties and suggests examining the regime’s democraticness via these different dimensions rather than debates on regime classification. This approach enables a bypass of conflicting interpretations of the Israeli regime, and this chapter thus begins to lay the foundation for the description of different levels of democraticness. The dimensions used to analyze Israel’s democraticness are not based on an a priori definition of democracy but were chosen to reflect the continuum, from thin to thick conceptualizations of democracy, in order to ensure that the debate over whether the Israeli regime can be classified as democracy is approached from different angles.