Palestine-Israel and the Neoliberal
Ideal: Comments

Dwight Haase

When I was asked to review this piece for AJISS, I was excited to see scholarly
work relating the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to neoliberalism. Reading the
paper only heightened my enthusiasm; by invoking neoliberalism the author
adds new insights into the nature of this conflict and why it persists.

More often than not, we try to understand this conflict in terms of na-
tionalism or religion. Thus framing it as a clash of intractable ideologies,
which allows us to blame it on some uncompromising Islamic extremists
and Zionist settlers, has become convenient – although neither is represen-
tative of the majority of either the Palestinians or the Israelis.

Given this approach, we in the West have a tendency to look upon Is-
raelis and/or Palestinians as the cause of their own problem. We scratch
our heads when they do not come to an agreement, throw up our hands
when the next president’s peace plan fails, and figure that those people are
just that way – always have been and always will be. Not only is this view-
point intellectually weak, but it is politically damaging because it ignores
the true causes of the conflict and justifies indifference to violations of
human rights.

If neoliberalism is a driving force in the conflict today, we can under-
stand that we in the West – the ones who elect the governments that pro-
mote neoliberalism worldwide – all are part of this conflict, part of the
problem, instead of merely neutral bystanders. In fact, nowhere in the world
is this more true than in Israel and Palestine, where the US government has
been spending over $3 billion each year to support Israel, as well as about
$5 billion in the West Bank and Gaza for the last twenty years. If the con-

Dwight Haase is an associate professor of sociology in the University of Toledo’s  Department
of Sociology and Anthropology. He earned his PhD in sociology (University of Wisconsin,
2006) and is interested in globalization, economic sociology, and quantitative methods.

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flict persists after decades of such funding, it is only rational to ask if maybe
we are not solving the problem, but rather perpetuating the problem.

This is not to deny the influence of religion or nationalism. But those
motives play out within a broader global context of neoliberalism in which
people’s daily lives may feel increasingly precarious. That some people ex-
press their frustrations and anxieties through religious or nationalist narra-
tives is hardly surprising. 

If it is true that neoliberalism is the broader political landscape upon
which religious and nationalist forces play out, then this raises new ques-
tions about how these phenomena relate to each other. The common ap-
proach might be to think of neoliberalism, nationalism, and religion as
separate ideologies. But if this were the case, they would be mostly incon-
gruous, and there does not appear to be much to be said about how they re-
late to each other. But as David Harvey notes in A Brief History of
Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), we need to think
of neoliberalism not only as an ideology, but also as an agenda. As such, its
proponents can employ rhetoric and promote policies that garner the sup-
port of certain religious groups and nationalists while still promoting an
overall neoliberal agenda. 

In this sense, there is no incongruence among these phenomena, but
rather symbiosis – a symbiosis that we are watching right now in the US
with a president who is aggressively pushing neoliberal policies while at
the same time rallying anti-immigrant sentiment and positioning himself
as the unlikely champion of evangelical values. 

At this point, it might feel like I am digressing into domestic politics
while I should be talking about Palestine and Israel. But this brings me
back to my earlier point: We really cannot talk about the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict without including American politics. And awareness of that fact
might beget some sense of responsibility among Americans, as well as
some reflection on how we might change our own polity before we con-
tinue asking Palestinians and Israelis to change theirs.

Haase: Palestine-Israel and the Neoliberal Ideal: Comments 29

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