Some aspects of the relationship between the military and polity in Israel 1947 - 1977

The protracted war and the centrality of security in Israel raises the Lasswellian question, can parliamentary democracy and political pluralism prevail under such conditions, without turning Israel into a Garrison State? The prevailing understanding of political-military relations in Israel is that the IDF is an instrumentalist army, that it serves as the executive tool of the legitimate political authorities and is not involved with state politics. Furthermore, it is accepted that the greatest achievement of David Ben Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister and Defence Minister, and the architect of the defence establishment, was the de-politicization of the IDF and its disconnection from party politics. Both assumptions are challenged in this study. New evidence, and an analysis of existing material reveals the existence of a nominal control pattern, which has the formal appearance of an instrumentalist model, whereas the reality is otherwise. The IDF was not subordinate only to a state channel of political control, like other instrumentalist armies. In Israel there existed a unique pattern of political-military relations, a dual-control pattern. The political authorities exerted control through two channels, not only the state but also the party channel, that is of the dominant Labour Party. The state control was in fact weak and there was a lack of effective mediatory mechanisms between the military on the one hand and the Cabinet, Parliament and Defence Ministry on the other. As a result a pattern of civil-military partnership emerged in place of civil control. The boundaries between the military and the Labour Party were permeable. This allowed the rivalry between that party's two "sub-elites" to affect the military which enhanced the partnership between the military and political elites. The emergence of the military as one of the main mobility channels to the national leadership, evidenced by the increased influence of the generals-turned-politicians, has resulted in a developmental construct of Military Democracy

The widening military-political gap in Israel: former chiefs of staff fight for principles of statism

Over the last decade, the gap between the military and political elites in Israel has increased and eventually peaked in 2019, when a group of senior officers who had just retired from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) formed a new party - led by three former chiefs of staff - and called for the replacement of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. This gap has developed because Israel's previous govern­ments have represented a new kind of polarising, right-wing politics beyond what is considered a shared national common sense. The military, on the other hand, is striv­ing to maintain the character it has acquired as a "Nation in Arms" by reflecting the entire society of Israel and acting according to its professional ethos and national statist values. The stated goal of the officers entering politics was to defend those values against perceivably partisan and polarising governmental politics. The com­position of a future government is thus both: A competition over principled values of the state, but also a determination about the steps regarding the military and politi­cal leadership in Israel, as well as the military’s relations with society at large. (author's abstract

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements

The Israeli military and Israel's Palestinian policy : from Oslo to the Al Aqsa Intifada

Yoram Per

Between battles and ballots, Israeli militery in politics/ Peri

viii, 344 hal; 24 c

Antidemocratic populism in power: comparing Erdoğan’s Turkey with Modi’s India and Netanyahu’s Israel

By the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, populists have taken charge in Turkey, India and Israel, all previously heralded as exceptional democracies in difficult regions. This moment offers a unique opportunity to explore populism in power outside Europe and the Americas, in three states shaped by deep social, ethnic and religious divisions. This article locates Turkey, India and Israel within a global wave of electorally successful populist movements. It explores how populism can jeopardize democratic choice in deeply divided societies and whether Erdoğan’s capture of democracy in Turkey offers a blueprint for the political strategies employed by Modi and Netanyahu. In unravelling parallels between the three administrations, our analysis uncovers a common populist playbook of neoliberal economic policies, the leveraging of ethnoreligious tensions as well as attempts to denigrate independent news media, by portraying it as the “enemy of the people”. Although their position on the spectrum between democracy and authoritarianism differs, our analysis reveals striking continuities in the erosion of democracy in Turkey, India and Israel as a result of these policies, thus highlighting the vulnerability of political systems, particularly those of deeply divided societies, to democratic decay