This paper examines the metaphor of "Mowing the Lawn" or "Mowing the Grass" that emerged in Israeli political culture around the turn of the century after the Israeli political class developed the conviction that "there is no partner for peace" among the Palestinians. Israel espoused a particular modality of violence against Palestinians, which gradually became a military-political strategy defined as regularly targeting Palestinian leadership, facilities, and infrastructure to control their growth like a lawnmower controls grass growth. I examine the historical, political, cultural, and military rationale for the emergence of this metaphor, and the construction of the self and the other that is embedded in it. I explain how the strategy that this metaphor encapsulates reflects Israel's, and, indeed, mainstream Zionism's apprehensive irreconcilability with the idea of Palestinian national existence in Palestine. I illustrate how the emergence of the metaphor is prescribed by this irreconcilability, manifesting within the contemporary context of Israel's confrontation with Palestinians in general, and Palestinians in Gaza in particular - well before 7 October 2023.

This paper revisits scholarship on Israeli democracy, focusing on constitutional and political developments over the past two decades. I argue that Israel has evolved into a distinct regime type best described as 'Democracy of Masters', a system that departs from, yet shares important features with the traditional model of Herrenvolk democracy. I critically examine the applicability of the Herrenvolk model to Israel within its pre-June 1967 borders and explore why scholars have generally avoided this label, instead proposing other critical yet ultimately insufficient frameworks. While Israel is often characterized as both 'Jewish and democratic', this formulation applies meaningfully only to its Jewish citizens, and even that democratic standing has been increasingly challenged. When considering Israel's Palestinian citizens, I contend that the country's political system is better understood as a Democracy of Masters. This regime type is sustained not only through constitutional law but also through institutional practices, political discourse and social hierarchies that legitimize and normalize Jewish supremacy. Focusing on Israel within its pre-1967 borders and excluding territories occupied in 1967-except occupied East Jerusalem due to its annexation-I propose a new conceptualization of Democracy of Masters tailored to Israel's unique political and legal landscape.

This article locates the rising extremism in Israel in the dynamics of the ongoing Zionist settler-colonial project in Palestine. It introduces the concept of process in settler-colonial settings as the interaction between the settler-colonial structure with its inherent violence and the agency of the colonized with its inevitable resistance. It is within that context that extremism is nourished and grown. The article argues that Zionism is entrapped in path of escalating violence, the end of which we have not yet seen, to maintain the goals of Jewish supremacy and subdue the natives’ resistance to taking over their land. Therefore, the article defines the challenge of a peaceful relationship between Israelis and Palestinians as being based on abolishing Jewish supremacy and establishing equal political and national rights for Israelis and Palestinians. The article argues that to achieve full equality, recognition of the right and legitimacy of the Israeli Jewish national group to belong to the land in equality with the Palestinian nation and to establish a common political framework of sharing the land, can be achieved only by imagining a future without Zionism.

This chapter examines how nationalism, religious claims, and settler colonialism enmesh within Zionism and demonstrates how their interaction played a major role for Israeli academia and politics in sidelining or obfuscating settler colonialism as an appropriate frame of analysis for Zionism’s encounter with the Palestinians. The chapter makes three main arguments: first, that while settler colonialism is an obvious framework for analyzing and understanding the unfolding of the Zionist project in Palestine, the framework has been obscured by highlighting the connection between Jewish nationalism and religious claims; second, that the steady rise in religious encroachment into institutions and the public sphere in Israel is rooted in the need for legitimation (grounded in religious claims) in face of rising Palestinian resistance to the expansion of the settler-colonial project from Israel to the West Bank; and third, that while secularization was possible in other settler-colonial contexts such as South Africa, Northern Ireland, and North America, it is impossible to achieve secularization within a Zionist regime. Rather, for secularization and democratization to take place, Israel has to recognize the settler-colonial reality of the Zionist project, a recognition that will make it possible to free Israeli Jewish nationalism from religionism and work toward decolonization.

This chapter examines the impact of the fusion between religious claims and nationalism on state policies – domestically, regionally, and internationally. It offers a comparative perspective on the extent to which religious claims bestow sacredness on the state’s workings of power – or what we define as sacralized politics. The chapter analyzes how, through hegemonic nationalism, states invoke religious claims to legitimize political and national strategic goals in domestic and international politics. To trace the matrix of power that sacralization of politics mobilizes, and when looking comparatively at various case studies, the chapter points to three main (among other) modes of sacralization’s profound impact on politics. The first operates through managing consciousness, including the construction of self-identity in relation to others; the second, through territoriality and the politics of land claims; and the third via political governance, using violence and a necropolitical regime of control. While each mode can operate separately, all operate through mutual reinforcement and each with elements of sacredness, resulting in an emergent power structure that is self-sustaining, religiously infused, and resistant to change.

In this essay we trace the return of history as a process that has become integrated into the transformation of Palestinian political consciousness. We examine how Palestinian history, particularly the history of the dismantlement of Palestine and the ethnic cleansing of the majority of Palestinians from their homeland – known in Palestinian historiography as the Nakba – has gradually started to occupy the centre of the present political and cultural experience and discourse of the Palestinians in Israel. We examine why the Nakba, the defining experience in modern Palestinian history and politics, was, until the mid-1990s, silenced in the “official political sphere” of the Palestinians in Israel. We will also try to explain when and why history returned to take an active and conscious place central in Palestinian political discourse, and more recently, political behaviour and cultural activities. We argue there has been a discernible process of transformation from a silenced collective memory around the Nakba to its gradual return as a salient force in the modern political consciousness of this community. We trace this transformation and examine the various manifestations of this return, which, we argue, reflects a dramatic makeover of their present collective consciousness. We then briefly address the political implications of this transformation.

This chapter reviews the results of the parliamentary elections in the Arab community and explains the drop in voter turnout, which is one of the major characteristics of these elections. It examines other characteristics such as a shift in voting patterns and decrease in voting percentages for Zionist parties. The chapter argues that participation in the elections serves special functions of the Arab population and its leaders, and that these functions should be understood in light of the complex citizenship relations with the state— relations that are being redefined and have a growing element of hostility. The Nationalists (NDA) proposed bridging two central demands: equal citizenship and Arab-Palestinian national identity. The linkage between national identity and equality reflects the seriousness of the quest for equal citizenship that developed within the Arab public and that was actually reinforced under NDA's influence.

This paper argues that thinking about reconciliation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict requires a paradigmatic shift in conflict analysis. The international community has approached the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a national conflict between Zionism, as the national movement of the Jewish people, and the Palestinian National Movement. The partition plans proposed from before 1947 until the recent “two-state solution” formula have all been based on this assumption. I argue that the premise of national conflict is fundamentally flawed, and, therefore, reaching a settlement based on partition – let alone reconciliation – is becoming increasingly unlikely. A new paradigm (in the Kuhnian sense) is needed that applies a settler-colonial framework to the conflict while also taking into consideration the national component. Reconciliation in this conflict is conceived as decolonization within a transitional justice framework. This approach overcomes major pitfalls in the hegemonic discourse on reconciliation in this conflict, including the symmetrical analysis and psychologizing the process.

This paper seeks to re-examine the relationship between Israel and its Palestinian citizens. It offers an alternative reading, that while acknowledging the procedural connection of citizenship, introduces the settler-colonial structure as a central analytical framework for understanding the origins of this complex relationship and its evolution. We trace, with a broad brush, the various phases of the Palestinian citizens' collective political experience from 1948, when they were transformed from being an integral part of the fabric of a nation fighting and losing a double struggle against a settler-colonial project – the Zionist project that sought to establish a ‘Jewish national home’ in their homeland – and a struggle of independence against British colonial rule, to a fully dominated minority in a foreign state established on their homeland and bringing about the expulsion of the majority of their people. We also anchor their experience as an integral part of the people of Palestine in the pre-1948 period when their homeland was an intrinsic part of a larger Arab World, and in their post-1948 experience when they became hermetically isolated from the rest of their people and the whole Arab World.

Income inequality undermines societies: The more inequality, the more health problems, social tensions, and the lower social mobility, trust, life expectancy. Given people's tendency to legitimate existing social arrangements, the stereotype content model (SCM) argues that ambivalence―perceiving many groups as either warm or competent, but not both―may help maintain socio-economic disparities. The association between stereotype ambivalence and income inequality in 37 cross-national samples from Europe, the Americas, Oceania, Asia, and Africa investigates how groups' overall warmth-competence, status-competence, and competition-warmth correlations vary across societies, and whether these variations associate with income inequality (Gini index). More unequal societies report more ambivalent stereotypes, whereas more equal ones dislike competitive groups and do not necessarily respect them as competent. Unequal societies may need ambivalence for system stability: Income inequality compensates groups with partially positive social images.