The Recognition Dilemma: Negotiating Identity in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

During five years of US-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian peace talks (2009-2014), Israeli PM Netanyahu repeatedly demanded that Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state as part of any final status agreement. Simultaneously, a chorus of Israeli political and military elites consistently challenged this negotiating posture as a threat to the state's very identity. What explains these competing positions on recognition's absence and necessity? Considerable attention in IR has recently focused on the lengths states go to correct acts of misrecognition, out of a genuine need for recognition, and the self-certainty recognition provides in a socially uncertain world. This structural and intrinsic model neglects, however, the powerful role agents can play in constructing, or avoiding, recognition conflict. Political considerations can cause recognition, and its absence, to matter more than it otherwise should, just as they can cause others to view recognition campaigns as vulnerable and ontologically harmful pursuits. This article proposes both an instrumental model of recognition and a theory on the recognition dilemma needed to explain these competing attitudes. In doing so, it shifts attention away from social structure, and relations, in order to take domestic processes seriously as a forum for both the construction and contestation of recognition politics.