This chapter provides a comprehensive description of the regime across dimensions and zones of control based on a short historical overview combined with several indexes reflecting different components of the regime. It shows that in Israel proper the highest levels of democraticness are in political contestation followed by protection, while the levels of coverage are much more limited. The regime in Israel proper is, overall, fairly stable despite some increase in democraticness after state consolidation and some more recent signs of possible decline. In the Occupied Territories, on the other hand, the levels of democraticness are minimal in the dimension of political contestation and coverage and highly limited in the area of protection. The regime in the Occupied Territories is not as stable as the regime in Israel proper due to changes in the zones of control. The zones of control shifted after the 1990s – a shift that can be seen as the major transformation of the Israeli regime up to date.

This chapter outlines a possible explanation for the overall stability of the Israeli regime based on the concept of state capacity, namely, the ability of the state to use coercive and administrative capabilities to “get things done.” It therefore emphasizes the role of the state itself in explaining the regime. The first section provides a short conceptual clarification of the concept of state capacity and its relationship with regime stability. This is followed by a presentation of the historical origins of Israeli state capacity and some measures of its capacity. The main part of this chapter discusses the ways in which state capacity sustains the regime’s stability in light of three challenges: the internal aspect of the conflict, the challenge to state authority from political tensions among its Jewish citizens, and the ways in which the zones of control have shifted according to the limited ability of state capacity to ensure direct control of the entire Occupied Territories.

A tourist arriving in 2018 to Jerusalem – the declared but internationally unrecognized capital of Israel – might visit the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. Here, the tourist might encounter Member of Knesset (MK), Hanin Zouabi, an Arab-Palestinian citizen of Israel who has represented the Arab party Balad for almost a decade. As a member of this party – many of whose members openly declare their sympathy with those Israeli Jews perceive to be Israel’s most intransigent enemies – Zouabi participated in the 2010 Marmara Flotilla that sought to defy the Israeli blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Accused by Jewish MKs of being a traitor, numerous attempts were made to oust her from the Knesset and prevent her and the Balad party from reelection. These efforts were blocked by the Supreme Court and Zouabi was reelected in both 2013 and 2015. Her political activities are not, however, limited to the conflict, and her feminist agenda challenges the exclusive authority over personal status held by the religious (Jewish and Islamist) courts that undermines gender equality. Despite her strong political commitment, Zouabi did not run in the April 2019 elections, but her Balad party continued to take part in the elections.

Israel is deeply involved in conflict that has both internal and external dimensions. The intensity of the conflict and the appeal of securitization to different spheres – territory, identity, and demography – should further intensify the impact of the conflict. This chapter outlines a perspective on how the conflict shapes the regime. It argues that the conflict has formed the regime differently across varying dimensions and zones of control. The high levels of political contestation are explained by the need to ensure legitimacy and by the PAI’s diminished power of contestation. The lower levels of protection and coverage are also explained by the internal and external aspects of the conflict. The largest shifts in the Israeli regime – the expansion beyond Israel proper after 1967 and the reshaping of the zones of control after the 1990s – can also be explained by security considerations among other explanations.

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.

The Israeli reality provides evidence of conflicting regime classifications ranging from a liberal democracy to various types of non-democracy. Gaps between political contestation, protection, and coverage in Israel proper as well as the regime’s ambiguous borders enable such conflicting interpretations. Nevertheless, these conflicting classifications are not just a consequence of the contradictory elements in the Israeli regime; they are also a consequence of the concept of democracy itself. Notwithstanding its attractiveness, democracy’s very essence precludes its use for analytical purposes in some cases. These inherent limitations undermine the ability to use it for classifying disputed cases such as Israel. By emphasizing this theoretical weakness of the concept of democracy, this book has argued that classifications of regimes cannot be conclusively applied in all cases and that there are cases in which the disaggregated approach of analyzing the democraticness of various dimensions might be more illuminating than merely debating classification.

The conflicting classifications of the Israeli regime can be explained by the concept of democracy as Chapter 2 elaborates. It elucidates how the concept of democracy is used to define the regime as a whole, showing that this use limits any potential analytical leverage. The current usage precludes, in particular, the development of a thorough understanding of the multidimensional nature of democracy and of the ability to explain variant levels of democraticness along different dimensions. It therefore adopts an analytical approach that combines thin and procedural aspects of democraticness with thicker and more extensive properties and suggests examining the regime’s democraticness via these different dimensions rather than debates on regime classification. This approach enables a bypass of conflicting interpretations of the Israeli regime, and this chapter thus begins to lay the foundation for the description of different levels of democraticness. The dimensions used to analyze Israel’s democraticness are not based on an a priori definition of democracy but were chosen to reflect the continuum, from thin to thick conceptualizations of democracy, in order to ensure that the debate over whether the Israeli regime can be classified as democracy is approached from different angles.

Chapter 1 offers a critical overview of how the Israeli regime is classified, addressing two fundamental issues in the debate over its suitable classification: the definition of democracy and the parameters of the unit of analysis. In providing a detailed description of the local dispute among students of Israel, it shows that very few local scholars or studies have provided explicit descriptions of the assumptions and premises on which their arguments are based. Rather than seeking to understand the Israeli regime from a theory-driven, comparative perspective and contextualizing it within the field of regimes and democratization, their primary goal appears to be determining whether Israel is, in fact, a democracy. This chapter also examines how Israel is categorized in cross-national regime indexes, demonstrating that such indexes cannot be exploited to bypass the local dispute. In so doing, it exposes the limits of restricting the focus to the classification of the Israel regime, arguing that this debate can never be conclusively resolved. Finally, it lays the foundation for the alternative approach to describing the Israeli case.