Statliga strategier för minoritetshantering

Sammanfattning

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.