How International Relations Theory might help us comprehend the Israel / Palestinian Crisis

Alex Burkhardt, Milena Elsinger, and Hubert Zimmermann

The October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel, and the subsequent massive Israeli military response, have once again plunged the Middle East into bloodshed. Over a thousand Israelis were killed in the initial terrorist attack, while, as of July 1, 2024, some 35,000 Palestinians have died due to Israeli military action in the Gaza strip.

Given the recency and extreme sensitivity of these events, is it appropriate, or even possible, to try to comprehend them with the help of international relations theories?

Such theories have existed ever since the foundation of IR (International Relations) as a distinct discipline after the First World War, as IR scholars developed specific lenses to view and explain events in the international system. Our textbook, International Relations: Theories in Action, is written an accessible way to help university students to make sense of complex and contested global issues through different theoretical concepts.

The most notable of these theories is realism. Realism explains events in IR primarily with reference to the role of individual states, and especially their military power, amidst the dog-eat-dog conditions of an anarchic international order.

However, realism has been called into question and rivaled by a range of other approaches which privilege different factors. These include the role of international institutions and non-state actors (institutionalism); internal, domestic political forces which influence the behavior of states (liberalism); the identities and ideologies of political actors and voters (constructivism); and social inequalities of different kinds (such as Marxism, postcolonialism, and feminism).

In light of the appalling violence and loss of life which has characterized events in Israel and Gaza, using such theories in an attempt to understand the current crisis in the Middle East may seem inappropriately emotionally detached. It may also seem like a fruitless exercise, given the incompleteness of the kind of information we would normally need to attempt an informed judgment. Nonetheless, we suggest that attempting scholarly explanations is necessary for understanding such conflicts and, perhaps, helping to resolve them and prevent their reoccurrence.

So, against this background, what might different International Relations theories make of events in the Middle East?

Realism would surely privilege the role of egoistic, self-preservatory state actors, which look to project military power and protect their interests in an amoral international order. According to this reading, a terrorist organization such as Hamas clearly represents a threat to the security of the Israeli state, justifying a military course of action aimed at destroying or significantly weakening Hamas’ power. Such an analysis is enormously complicated in that Hamas is not a state actor, and the Palestinians have no formal state, which is somewhat indicative of realism’s limitations when it comes to the analysis of unconventional, non-state warfare.
Liberal institutionalism accepts realism’s emphasis on the role of states, but also accords significant explanatory power to international institutions. From this perspective, the primary problem in this scenario has been the failure of international institutions, such as the United Nations, to effectively mediate between Israel and Palestinians. Institutionalists would also likely argue that such international institutions are best placed to resolve the conflict and create a lasting basis for peace.
Constructivist theories might focus on the self-perceptions, identities, and ideologies of key actors in this scenario. Israel’s national identity, for example, is as a Jewish homeland, one that was created to offer security to a historically persecuted group which was almost completely eradicated during the Second World War. Political actors or voting publics whose identities are built primarily around a recent history of persecution and near-extermination might reasonably be expected to behave more defensively and aggressively in the face of new threats. But in a mirror image of this sense of threat and persecution, Palestinian political actors and Hamas leaders view the Palestinians as the displaced victims of the creation of Israel in 1948, and of subsequent Israeli violence. According to constructivism, these mutually compounding narratives of persecution and victimhood could be considered the primary barriers to a viable peace, and only through the creation of new political identities, based on new readings of history, can such a peace be achieved.
And critical theories would focus on the various inequalities which serve to repeatedly plunge the Middle East into violence. Postcolonial theorists might argue that Israel represents a kind of neo-colonial project and continued repression of the peoples of the Global South (a claim which stands uneasily alongside the history of Jewish persecution at the hands of Western political actors). Marxists might depict Israel as an outpost of American imperialism in the Middle East, and thus explain the US commitment to Israel as part of a “greater game” of capitalist power politics in the region. Feminist scholars, meanwhile, might deconstruct the gendered nature of violence on both sides, particularly visible in the violence against female bodies during the October 7 massacre, as well as the “masculinist” principles which underpin the continued readiness to resort to force in order to resolve political problems.

Overall, it could well be that all of these theories are unequal to the task of explaining the renewed violence in the Middle East, or of doing justice to the horrifying losses that have occurred on both sides and, sadly, are likely to occur for the foreseeable future. And yet, perhaps the only way to resolve such crises and prevent continued loss of life is to take a step back and analyze the causes and characteristics of such events. International Relations theory can contribute to such an analysis, whichever theoretical lens we choose to don.

This post has also been published on Sage’s Social Science Space.

International Relations is the definitive applied theory textbook that helps university students make sense of global issues through theoretical concepts. Not presupposing any prior knowledge, this introduction equips readers with the critical skills to use theories as adaptable tools to help them understand some of the most complex and contested issues in global politics.

Watch a webinar with the authors.

FIND OUT MORE AND REQUEST YOUR COPY

About the Authors

Featured

Milena Elsinger heads a department in the administration of Philipps University Marburg. She holds an M.A. in international relations from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva) and an M.litt. in Modern History from St Andrews University. She also holds a Ph.D. in political science from Philipps-University Marburg. Her main research focus lies in development theory, development cooperation, human rights and liberal institutionalist theory. Her publications include New players – same game? The influence of emerging donors on the policies of three traditional donors: The cases of the United States, Norway and the United Kingdom and Grundlagen der Internationalen Beziehungen (together with Hubert Zimmermann).

Alex Burkhardt teaches at the Bundessprachenamt in Koblenz, Germany. He received his PhD in Modern History from the University of St. Andrews in 2017 with a thesis on the rise of the Nazis in the Bavarian town of Hof an der Saale. He has published in Central European History, German History, and The Bulletin of the German Historical Institute London, and his monograph Democrats into Nazis was published in 2019. He taught International Relations at the Philipps University Marburg between 2019 and 2021.

Hubert Zimmermann is Professor of International Relations at Philipps University Marburg, Germany. After graduating from the European University Institute in Florence (Italy), he has held, among others, positions at Düsseldorf University (Germany) and Cornell University (USA). His current research focuses on international security, global financial and monetary policy, the European Union (in particular its foreign economic and security policies), foreign military intervention, and transatlantic relations. Among his publications are Money and Security for Cambridge University Press, a book comparing EU and U.S. policies in the integration of China to the WTO for Drachenzähmung, Nomos), a volume on the justification of military intervention from Militärische Missionen, Hamburger Edition, the European Union (Key Controversies in European Integration, 3d.ed for Palgrave), and his latest book International Relations: Theories in Action for Sage and out later this month, as well as numerous articles in scholarly journals.