Being inside a field and sitting at the table where that field’s rules get written are not the same thing. Bourdieu’s distinction is simple but easy to lose sight of, an actor can be inside a field, affected by its outcomes, even fighting for it, and still have no place in the question of who writes its rules. Last week, through Golda Meir’s hesitation in 1973, I wrote about Israel’s dependency on the US, institutionalized since 1967, as a heteronomous structure, one whose rules are set by the tolerance of an outside actor. The Iran memorandum signed in June 2026 shows the next stage of that same heteronomy. Israel isn’t only inside a field someone else governs anymore. It isn’t at the table where the rules get written either.

The starkest sign of this came in how a war ended up getting learned about. On the night of June 14, Netanyahu was with his security cabinet in a bunker, bracing against a possible Iranian missile strike. Trump called, informing him the war they’d waged together was effectively over, the memorandum about to be signed. The detail matters, because it says something semiotic, the side that started the war together receives its ending as news. The gap between deciding and being informed is a quiet instance of what Bourdieu called symbolic violence. The violence here works not through force but through the normalization of exclusion, Israel’s absence from the memorandum is so unremarkable that no one even feels the need to explain it.

An earlier version of this same scene played out in the 1991 Gulf War. As Einat Wilf recounts in her book, while Iraq launched Scud missiles at Israel, the US asked Israel not to retaliate so as not to fracture the Arab coalition, and Israel complied. Even then, the power guaranteeing Israel’s security was also the power that took away its right to exercise that security. Thirty-five years later the same structure repeats, not only in the decision to hold fire but in the terms on which a war ends. The scope has widened. In 1991, all that was asked of Israel was silence. In 2026, an entire negotiation process runs without Israel’s knowledge, then gets reported to it afterward.

Israel was absent at every stage of the framework agreement signed the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)