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Constraints on Diplomacy: The Rise of Right-Wing Political Cultures in Israel

Abstract

In recent years, extreme right parties have received considerable electoral support and mounting influence in Israeli politics. This thesis will examine the Oslo Accords of 1993 as the catalyst of the new-radical right in Israel, and the state’s neoliberal economy that has shifted towards the manufacturing and export of advanced weapons and security expertise as the global factors that have shaped the rise of new right-wing political cultures in Israel. The study will then analyze the social factors that have appealed to the Israeli public to vote for parties that espouses radical-right views by exploring the influence of roughly one million Russian immigrants to Israel beginning in the 1990s, and the exploitation of existential fears experienced by most Jews. The study will specifically focus on two case studies: the 2014 war on Gaza, also known as Operation Protective Edge, and the reelection of Benjamin Netanyahu as the crystallization of a new-post peace extreme right-wing culture in Israel. The thesis will also illustrate how social movements in Israel, and within the larger Palestinian global solidarity movement, have attempted to resist and expose global and social origins of new militarism in Israel by engaging in nonviolent resistance, boycotting institutions that benefit from the illegal occupation, and demanding justice.

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