Likud's exclusionary populism and Israeli palestinian citizens

The paper analyzes exclusionary populist’s relationship to minorities through the examination of the Israeli case. Likud, the main party of the governing coalition, has headed governmental coalitions in Israel almost uninterruptedly since 2001. While always a right-wing nationalist party, since the mid-2000s the party underwent a transformation -headed by current Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu – from a neo-conservative party (modeled after Ronald Regan and the Bush’s Republican party) to an exclusionary populist one. The “people” was constructed as an homogeneous unity as opposed to the “others” the people’s enemies. As is pathognomonic for all populist movements, the elites are signaled as the people’s enemy. The exclusionary character of Likud’s populism is expressed in the constitution of non-Jews, and especially the Arab Palestinian minority, also as the people’s enemy. The paper analyzes how exclusion is constituted at three different levels, the symbolic level, the political level, and that of the distribution of resources, focusing on the contradictory trends between the first two levels, in which exclusion is very salient, and the third one, in which exclusion as a group was mixed with policies aimed at individual inclusion and class mobility. Finally, the paper discusses how the study of the Israeli case contributes to our understanding of exclusionary populism’s approach to minorities.