Dartmouth Events

The Israeli polity has entered an unprecedented crisis following the establishment of a new coalition government after five rounds of elections in three years, and the failure to create a coherent and stable coalition. The new extreme right-wing coalition formed after the fifth-round attempts to enact a legislative reform cancelling the democratic division of powers, subordinating the Supreme Court to the Parliament (Knesset) majority. The unusual speed of the reform without parliamentary deliberations and negotiations provoked deep concerns about the anti-democratic intentions of the new coalition, aiming to prevent future free and democratic elections. The legal reform, interpreted as an “anti-democratic coup”, provoked unprecedented opposition from almost all the institutional elites of Israel, and weekly mass demonstrations.

Is this a political crisis or a regime rupture? The lecture will offer an analysis of the present situation in Israel within a dynamic historical perspective, framing Israel’s democratic deficit given the military rule of Palestinians and the constant settler expansion.

Professor Grinberg is a visiting professor in the Sociology Department at Dartmouth College, he is a political economist and political sociologist. Professor Emeritus Grinberg is the founding Chair of the Sociology and Anthropology Department (2006-2009) at Ben Gurion University, former President of the Israeli Sociology Society (2020-2023) and former Director of the Humphrey Institute for Social Research (1998-2003). Grinberg is author of several books, among them: Split Corporatism in Israel (1991), Introduction to Political Economy (1997), Imagined Peace, Discourse of War (2007), Politics and Violence in Israel/Palestine (2010) and Mo(ve)ments of Resistance (2014). Among his academic articles: “Imagined Democracy in Israel”, “A Historical Slip of the Tongue”, "Israel's Dual Regime Since 1967", "Speechlessness: In Search of Language to Resist the Israeli 'Thing Without a Name'", and "The Israeli-Palestinian Union: the `1-2-7 States` Vision of the Future".