Inclusion under threat? majority nationalism and the making of political boundaries in Israel

Political inclusion in nationalising states is shaped not only by institutions or minority claims, but also by how dominant majorities define the political community. This article examines how political boundary-drawing operates within a national majority. Using original panel data collected in Israel in 2022–2023, the study shows that inclusionary or exclusionary attitudes of members of the Jewish majority toward the Arab/Palestinian minority were partly contingent upon a person’s assessment of three types of threats: symbolic threat by the minority to the ethno-national character of the state, security threat by external enemies, and regime threat from within the majority to the institutional order. The findings further demonstrate that threat assessment and attitudes toward the minority were linked to participants’ sorting into distinct national belief clusters. Further, national belief clusters moderated shifts in threat assessments and attitudes during two crisis periods: the public turmoil evoked by the government’s judicial reform initiative and the later October 7 Hamas attack and subsequent war in Gaza. Building on Brubaker’s triadic model, which links a nationalising state, a national minority, and that minority’s external homeland, the article proposes an extended quadrilateral framework that construes the majority as an internally differentiated actor distinct from the state.