The Growing Identification of The Nation and The Decline of The State-The Aftermath of the "Peace-Camp" in Israel

The assassination of Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin on November 4th, 1995, was a traumatic political event in Israel's chronicles. The boiling point of political tensions, ideological divides and sectoral cleavages reached degrees of adversity and antagonism between hawks and doves, which hindered the bridging of differences for the sake of political stability and institutional integrity. Unrest and mutual accusations have since become a constant feature in Israeli politics. Inspired by figurational sociology, which frames both civilizing and decivilizing trends (Eliasian theory), and the empirical study of political and institutional transformations in Israel, the essay aims to look at the structural shift from the Israeli state-centered habitus, based on Mamlachtiyut, namely Israeli republicanism, to an increasingly religious nation-bound version of Israeliness. Whilst pinning the political sociogenetic moment into Rabin's assassination, the analysis enables us to draw on the ideological, till then underground trends, prior to the 1990s, place them along the divide-line of the most significative political assassination in Israel's history and, consequently, put them in relation with socio-political dynamics and processual drag-effects which triggered numerous conflicts around nationalist particularism-democratic universalism, the decline of the 'Peace Camp' in Israeli politics and which have almost dissolved representation of the Israeli left in State institutions.