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Abstract
Political scientists distinguish between governments and regimes. A government is comprised of incumbents holding positions of authority specified within an institutionalized “regime,” that is, a legal order. Within a well-institutionalized regime, politics consists of legal struggles over what governments and government officials do. But when the issues in contention pertain to what governments are authorized to do, and not about what they should do, competitors may no longer feel bound to follow the rules. Such struggles can threaten the integrity of the regime. This article suggests that the prolonged, if temporarily sidelined, crisis over the overhaul of the Israeli judiciary should be understood less as a threat to democracy than as both a challenge to the Israeli regime's remaining liberal features and as an early skirmish in what will be a long political war over whether and how to emancipate millions of non-citizen Palestinian Arabs living in effectively annexed territories.
Contributor Notes
IAN S. LUSTICK is the Bess W. Heyman Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Political Science of the University of Pennsylvania. He has published books and articles on Israel, Israeli-Palestinian relations, and the Arab-Israeli conflict in general since the late 1960s. He is a founder and past president of the Association for Israel Studies and currently Book Review Editor of the Palestine-Israel Review. His most recent book is Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality (2019, in English from the University of Pennsylvania Press; 2022 in Hebrew from Resling Press). E-mail: ilustick@sas.upenn.edu