Is Civic Space Shrinking Over Israel and Palestine?

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has metastasized into an intractable contest no longer among states but within them. The real battles now are among various social, economic, and political actors in the region and globally over the shape of—or alternatives to—a single state controlling all of Israel/Palestine.

Any path toward a more manageable and just future for Israelis and Palestinians can no longer rest solely on diplomacy among political leaders. The conversation must include and draw on the energies and ideas of civil society groups, social movements, and activists who represent a range of interests and perspectives. These groups must also engage with each other, as in any would-be democracy, rather than retreat into polarized camps.

Perhaps because of such polarization, one of the least understood but increasingly contentious terrains of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is civic space—the marketplace of ideas where competing constituencies can organize, advocate, and affect the decisions about redress for their past grievances, their present status, and their prospects for better futures.

With the stakes so high, it is unfortunate that civic space is also where some constituencies are labeled and treated as pariahs. To be “civic,” a group must commit to operating peacefully within accepted rules; however, this standard is difficult to apply in contexts where the basic rules of politics are contested and violent force is frequently deployed. It is especially important in such contexts to avoid rhetorical sleights in which peaceful groups are lumped together with violent ones, fundamental critique of policy is equated with physical attacks on civilians, and specific groups are treated as pariahs to marginalize their ideas. In the context of finding a just and durable solution between Israelis and Palestinians, the fight to influence who gets to participate in this debate and what the terms are is increasingly transnational.

New Actors in Old Bottles?

What generations of diplomats came to know as the Arab-Israeli conflict between the Jewish state of Israel and neighboring Arab states has evolved in recent years. The conflict is now less amenable to traditional diplomatic processes. While diplomacy has replaced the threat of war between Israel and most Arab states, diplomacy has died inside the territory controlled by Israel. Whatever diplomatic efforts do take place focus on maintaining short-term calm, such as indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas in Gaza and attempts to maintain Israeli-Palestinian security coordination in the West Bank.

In place of what had been called the “peace process,” this new phase of the struggle pits fragmented constituencies of the territory controlled by a single state, Israel, against one another, and Israel has the power to set the terms for the political arrangements and accommodations that one group must make to the other. That territory—comprising not only what is sometimes referred to as “Israel proper” but also Gaza and the West Bank—includes a wide variety of public and civil society actors. The Oslo process, a diplomatic effort that sought to channel long-standing issues between Israel and Palestinians into political negotiations between the state of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the internationally recognized representative of the Palestinian people, has simply failed. 

Efforts among political leaders may resume at some point, but whatever process does eventually arise will likely look quite different from previous processes. New actors will have to be welcomed to the table and new ideas placed on the agenda. In the meantime, efforts must continue to make life tolerable for all people of Israel/Palestine and avoid entrenching unjust and oppressive conditions more deeply. 

In Israel/Palestine, the emerging forms of struggle to shape who is at the table and what is on the agenda have included political contestation, mobilization, transnational coalitions, and the use of “lawfare” in the form of litigation in domestic and international fora. Additionally, the people of Israel/Palestine are not working alone. In the United States in particular, public controversies about Israel/Palestine have arisen on college campuses and in the halls of Congress, as well as in parts of the bureaucracy, such as the Department of Education.

In response, law and state authorities in the region, the United States, and Europe are being deployed to shape the contours of policy debates including who gets to participate and what ideas are permitted. Some Israeli citizens, Palestinian noncitizen residents of Israel/Palestine, and U.S. citizens are engaged in efforts to use legal tools to police, exclude, or marginalize participants whose views and activities are variously labeled as discriminatory or even associated with terrorism. And where the law offers no tools, there are efforts at legislative and regulatory change so that some can be forged.

In the United States and abroad, government and private actors are working together—sometimes in tandem but many times in concert—to set the terms for permissible debate and discussion in workplaces, classrooms, boardrooms, and the public square, hindering the development of sound U.S. foreign policy on Israel/Palestine.

Initial Questions

• How do attempts to police, control, and regulate civil society in Israel/Palestine impact the nature of the occupation and prospects for a negotiated durable solution?
• How effective are efforts in the United States to discourage and delegitimize specific forms of advocacy?
• Are there linkages among these efforts in Israel/Palestine and the United States?
• Do these efforts tilt policy discussions or affect policy outcomes?
• What legislative or policy measures can be taken to disincentivize repression by both Israeli and Palestinian authorities?
• What strategies can civil society actors and policymakers in the United States employ to reverse the closing of debate at home?

These questions are not new. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has more often been debated within camps than across them, and the discussions that try to span wide gaps have often been harsh. For a brief period centered around the Oslo Accords, national leaders—under the auspices of the United States—offered what seemed to many to be a constructive alternative to intractable conflict. But that time is a distant memory, and the effect now of marginalizing key voices is to hinder Palestinian agency in support of a rights-respecting political solution.

Developing Recommendations

Framing the problem this way and emphasizing restrictions on Palestinians may seem to be a partisan act, as if only one set of actors has rights that need to be protected. But the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s project on shrinking civic space adopts this approach because of the opposite claim: all actors have rights, and any outcome that sidesteps these rights or allows specific actors to set the terms of permissible debate will do little to resolve or even manage the conflict. We do not focus on Palestinian rights because Palestinian actors have one set of answers that are correct and Israeli actors have answers that are incorrect. (Indeed, Palestinians and Israelis hardly agree among themselves.) We do so because the power imbalance between the two sides—an imbalance that many experienced diplomats feel made a negotiated solution impossible—means that focusing on Palestinian voices is necessary and critical to establishing the bedrock of democratic futures for both Palestinians and Israelis. The point is not to restrain one set of actors but allow those who wish to organize and advocate through peaceful channels to do so and construct peaceful channels for those who do not have them. 

That more channels exist for advocates on one side is part of the problem that needs to be addressed. Continuing down a path in which civic space is restricted in a partisan manner, not by security concerns, will have pernicious policy effects. It not only risks further entrenching a festering and periodically explosive reality in the region; it also effectively closes off policy options for addressing the conflict and limits the menu of ideas and interlocutors for officials to engage with. And it risks creating an environment in which various ideas circulate only among their supporters, deepening polarization both on a political and intellectual level.

In policy discussions, there is often a preference for big ideas to address the broad conflict (what should a “final status agreement” look like and how is one achieved?) or small ones to manage the current week’s crisis (can the Palestinian Authority (PA) be convinced to resume security cooperation with Israel?). Carnegie’s project on shrinking civic space is based in part on the idea that the focus on big ideas has been used as an excuse for inaction and the focus on small ideas is like hitting the snooze button.

What the project seeks to develop, therefore, is not a comprehensive peace plan but a set of guidelines for policymakers who wish to steer Israelis and Palestinians generally in the direction of more peaceful and just futures. The primary audience is those public and private actors who operate in or regulate civic space. Israeli and Palestinian officials form relevant audiences as well, as the choices they make today will affect which political actors are active in the future and what they are able to do. None of these guidelines will resolve the conflict, but all will leave those involved in a better position when the time for negotiations and diplomacy returns. The project will tentatively explore the following guidelines, which we hope to develop in the course of our work. We not only seek to refine the guidelines but also use them to make concrete policy recommendations. Our group has been constructed to include those with practical experience engaging with the various policy audiences we have identified.

1. Israel and the PLO/PA need to allow Palestinian civil society to emerge and operate freely, and both sets of officials need to be held accountable when they do not.
2. U.S. and European officials should not only preach tolerance but practice it by abandoning burdensome laws, regulations, and policies designed to hamper and prevent support to Palestinian civil society.
3. Human rights defenders need special attention, or rather, the attention they have been receiving in the form of repression needs to be replaced by protection and engagement.
4. We seek to focus on attempts to restrain media and academic discussions by defining criticism of Israel as a form of anti-Semitism, terrorism, or discrimination. Such attempts are notable in the United States but are increasingly transnational in nature. Our aim as analysts is not to denounce such efforts but to understand their origins, effects, and policy implications. We also note complaints about some forms of Palestinian advocacy—especially Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS)—on similar grounds. We do not endorse or oppose specific efforts but seek to understand if they have the effect of decreasing civic space and disqualifying peaceful groups or individuals based only on their policy preferences. In all cases, we take special note of how governmental support for restrictions impacts the public discourse.
5. We seek to understand the operational and practical impact of increasingly robust legislative efforts in the United States, and sometimes in Europe, at the federal and state levels whose explicit purpose is to discourage terrorism or forms of political violence against civilians but that has secondary impacts on civil society organizations not involved in terrorism. Advocating for or opposing specific legal measures is outside our purview, but we note that there is a substantial body of legislation and litigation whose collective impact we can assess.
6. We seek to understand when advocacy activity directly or indirectly connected with governmental actors serves to increase and decrease civic space. Our purpose is emphatically not to suggest limitations on advocacy, which is a legitimate part of any democratic political process. But we may explore if there are ways to understand when such efforts aim not to persuade or oppose ideas but to exclude opposing groups. The hope is that such an understanding might inform how officials respond.