Statliga strategier för minoritetshantering
Israel
According to old european tradition the ideal national state has a unified people, but in reality practically all states has one of several minorities that to a smaller or greater degree differs from the majority. One such minority that have been present in many countries and managed to avoid becoming completly assimilated are the jewish people. Their dream of a state of their own eventually lead to the founding of the state of Israel where they themselves are now in majority. The purpose of this report is to study how the jews historic experiances has affected the political parties in Israel, how they choose to meet the ?challenge? of their own minorities och whatever they treat different minorites differently. For this purpose I use Hylland Eriksen considers the three, in modern times, most common strategies for states to use towards their minorities: Assimilation, Dominance and Multiculturalism. These are then applied to the platforms of the biggest Israeli political parties in combination with an examination of Israeli history, it?s peoplegroups as well as relevant associated phenomena in order to get some clarity in these questions. The results show that you can see the historic influences in the parties choices of strategies and that one can make out two patterns from what strategies they opt for. One pattern after size, where the biggest ones mostly use assimilation while the mediumsized ones opts for dominance and the smallest suggests multiculturalism. This can be traced to the demography and the importance the jewish israelites place on Israel as a jewish state. The second pattern after political direction since the three strategies follows a similiar scale of soft/hard methods as the political left/right scale. As for different minority groups differance appears to be made between jews, palestinians and other minorities. The group jews is seen as pretty much unified with some lesser deviations. The issue of palestinians get large room in the debates but is not considered a real minority. Other minorities is seldom mentioned buy names and are refered to as as group.