ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS:
REGIME, CULTURE, AND OBJECTIVE THREAT
If we were to focus solely on Bosnia and Palestine, we might argue that Serbian and Israeli policies differed as a result of fundamental differences in regime type. Israel was a democracy in the late 1980s, whereas Serbia in 1992 had a quasi-authoritarian, populist regime. Wouldn't Israeli democracy explain its more subtle methods of control? Wouldn't Serbian authoritarianism explain its resort to an unabashedly brutal regime of domination?
There are difficulties with this argument, however. First, the designation of Israel as a democracy is problematic, since its military was absolute ruler over some 1.8 million Palestinians.[10] Although the occupation was officially transitional, it had endured for over three decades, and a generation of Palestinians had grown up under Israeli occupation. Within Israel proper, moreover, some 3.5 million Jews enjoyed a broader range of political rights and social respect than the country's 800,000 Palestinian citizens. Like the grossly imperfect democracy of postcommunist Serbia, in other words, Israel combined both authoritarian and democratic features.
Second, variations within the Serbian and Israeli cases suggest that the nature of each country's regime cannot, on its own, explain patterns of state violence. How can Israel's regime type explain its different styles of violence in Palestine and Lebanon? How can Serbian authoritarianism explain the Sandžak/Bosnia variation? Why, moreover, did Serbian authoritarianism not translate into greater tyranny at home? Why were Muslims safer in Serbia than in Bosnia?
The drawbacks of regime-based arguments emerge more generally from the tarnished record of democracies and semi-democracies worldwide. France, for example, waged vicious wars, replete with forced displacement, torture, and indiscriminate terror, against rebellious colonized peoples in Algeria and Vietnam. The world's largest democracy is India, but its war with Kashmiri separatists is an entirely brutal affair. Turkey is democratic in many ways, but has forcibly depopulated large swathes of its Kurdish-majority southeast. Regime type, in and of itself, is too blunt an explanatory tool to account for an individual state's varying repertoires of violence.
What, then, of the notion that Jewish and Serbian nationalisms were profoundly different in content? If Zionism, for example, was fundamentally kinder than Serbian nationalism, wouldn't that explain Israeli restraint? Regardless of this claim's validity, arguments of this sort encounter the same difficulties as regime-based explanations. How can the supposed moderate nature of Zionist ideology explain both the Lebanese and Palestinian experiences? How can Serbian radicalism explain both Sandžak moderation and Bosnian extremism? Nationalism may explain why states use discrimination and violence in the first place, but it cannot explain divergent repertoires of coercion by the same state in the same general time period.
A third explanation—objective threat—is also unpersuasive.[11] As noted above, Israelis might have viewed Palestine as a far greater threat than Lebanon, but it was in Lebanon, and not in Palestine, that Israeli artillery had free rein. In Serbia, similarly, Kosovo's 1.8 million ethnic Albanians presented the most powerful threat of all to Serbian national interests, but it was Bosnian Muslims, who in fact presented the least acute threat to Serbian national security, who were first targeted. If national security was the guiding logic, then Kosovo should have been ethnically cleansed long before Bosnia. The Sandžak poses a similar puzzle. Serbian officials saw a Muslim presence in the Sandžak as a strategic nightmare, and if objective levels of threat were determinate, they would have ethnically cleansed the area along with Bosnia. Perceptions of national security matter enormously, of course, but interpretations of what constitutes a "threat" are always mediated by other factors.