Structured Bellicosity: Was the Israeli-Arab Conflict Originally Inevitable?

What is it about?

Subsequent to its inception and the conclusion of the 1948 War, Israel stood at a crossroads. It could choose either to embark on belligerency vis-à-vis the surrounding Arab world or pursue peaceful solutions. Israel opted for bellocisty. Why? It is argued that the political structure that gave precedence to the use of force is traceable to the Israeli type of state building with regard to the strategy the state adopted to absorb the mass Mizrachi immigration from Arab countries. The challenge was absorption without jeopardizing the dominance of the veteran Ashkenazim. The chosen track inevitably created the conditions for bellicosity. Exclusionary arrangements in the labor market by forcibly distancing the cheap Palestinian laborforce, the empowerment of the military as a nation builder, and the enabling of a high level of resource mobilization by a centralized state were all mechanisms that made bellicosity possible and even preferable.

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