3 - Circumventing the Challenges in the Classification of Israel (B)

Summary

Chapter 3 addresses the challenge of defining the borders of the unit of analysis. After a short historical overview of Israel’s borders, it discusses the justifications provided in previous analyses of Israel for the boundaries chosen to define the unit of analysis and their weaknesses. Additionally, it demonstrates that the problem of choosing these borders is not fully addressed even by the cross-national indexes, which detracts from their applicability in regime classification efforts. A conceptual elaboration on state and regime shows that the units of Israel proper or Israel/Palestine cannot be used to define the borders of the regime. Instead, a spatial analysis, which divides the Israeli regime into different zones of control at different time periods is required. The major shift that occurred in the regime of the Occupied Territories was the move from direct control over the entire territories between 1967 and 1994 to direct control of only Area C thereafter. The Israeli regime does not, therefore, include the Gaza Strip or Areas A/B. The main shift in the Israeli regime was a consequence of the First Intifada and the establishment of the Oslo process in the 1990s.