How Does Religion Matter in Foreign Policy Decision Making? The Case of Israeli Foreign Policy vis-a-vis Lebanon, Egypt and the Palestinian Territories Under Menachem Begin

The international system’s consolidation at Westphalia in 1648 promulgated that religion be a privatized affair separate from that of politics, and the academic field of International Relations (IR) has resultantly paid little attention to religion as an influential force in politics. A growing contemporary academic debate, however, fueled by post-Cold War IR studies and empirical events with religious dimensions seeks to place religion within the study of IR with the view to explain and predict how that phenomenon plays out as an influential force in the international system. Taking its point of departure from this debate, the proposed paper examines whether and most importantly how religion played a role in Israeli foreign policy under Menachem Begin’s foreign policy towards the Palestinian Territories, Egypt, and Lebanon, during the years 1977-1982. In answering this question, the paper takes a pluralist approach to foreign policy analysis awarding, though, special attention to the role of leadership agency. The paper firstly draws on a wide range of primary material obtained from the Israeli State Archives, specialists interviews and public discourse, to ascertain how religion operated as a variable in the given decision making context. Secondly, the paper evaluates these findings in light of the institutional, domestic and international contexts, which may have facilitated or hindered religion’s influence. From these findings, the paper (preliminarily) concludes that religion takes on an ahistorical, non-essentialised role that is developed according to the specific context at hand. As such, the relationship between religion and foreign policy is a pragmatic one, but one that should not necessarily be understood in terms of instrumentalism. The paper explains the findings with reference to a classical realist-constructivist theoretical framework.