Obstacles and Possibilities for Peace between Israel and Palestine.

• Author: Golan, Galia
• Position: COMMENTARY - Report

Identity Issues

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be characterized in many ways. Clearly it has historic aspects, territorial, and for many, ideological aspects, as well as religious sources. For some, the conflict combines all of these, contributing in one form or another over the years to psychological aspects. Many factors have kept the conflict alive and prevented solution. Yet there are also factors that could bring about resolution relatively satisfactory for both sides. (1) Such a solution, which is indeed possible, is genuine sovereignty for each people, in a two-state solution. This commentary will outline the obstacles to such a solution, as they have appeared over the past decades, but it will also highlight some of the efforts and proposals that have brought the two sides close to success.

For some, this is a conflict between two nations and their national movements over self-determination in the same piece of land. Both have a history in the land and conflicting claims to ownership, possibly exclusive ownership. But even with such claims there is a basic contradiction in the eyes of most on each side: neither side views the other as a people, a nation, and therefore having a legitimate claim to self-determination in the form of statehood. This is a basic clash over the issue of identities. Most Israelis do not consider the Palestinians a nation but rather merely a part of the Arab world, with many Arab states in which they might choose to live. The common legend is that the Arabs living in this area developed a national identity only in response to the arrival of Zionists and Zionist claims to the land in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Similarly, however, most Palestinians do not believe that there is such a thing as a Jewish nation, viewing Israelis as Jewish religionists and, thus, having no claim to statehood. This is a simplification, but for many it is the essence of the conflict--neither side recognizes the basic identity of the other and therefore the right of the other to statehood. Some would simplify this further with the claim that each side, Palestinians or Jews, was the first to abide here centuries ago and therefore has a prior claim to this land as its "homeland."

Psychological Factors

Beyond this very basic obstacle, there is also a strong psychological factor often misunderstood or underestimated by each side. For the Palestinians, this factor is the Naqba, that is, the expulsion of local Palestinians in the course of the wars that followed the United Nations (UN) decision of 1947 to partition the British mandate of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. For Palestinians, the Palestinian refugees from the 1940s, regardless if they fled from the fighting or were forced out, must be allowed to return, including their descendants. Their original villages and homes, their rights, must somehow be restored or, at the very least, acknowledged and accounted for. For decades many refugees were urged to remain in refugee camps, and their plight was politically exploited by some to justify enmity toward and the struggle against Israel.

For Israelis, the Holocaust occupies a central role that often blinds one to any other event or factor. Centuries of discrimination, exclusion and oppression, culminating in the systematic destruction of six million Jews in the Holocaust, has a place in the psyche of most if not all Jews, everywhere. And for Israeli Jews, this not only renders them victims but also legitimizes, indeed evokes, the need for their own sovereign existence in what was their homeland in ancient times. Just as the plight of the Palestinian refugee has been exploited by some for political purposes, so too the Holocaust and past oppression is often manipulated by Israeli governments to justify or motivate opposition to Palestinian demands. Moreover, the Arab rejection of the creation of the state of Israel and the challenges to its existence in the 1940s and 1950s strengthened the Israeli fear that its legitimacy as a state in the region would never be accepted. (2)

Yet the mutual sense of victimhood is real; so is an obsession with and concern over personal safety and national security. Together they serve as serious barriers to understanding or even hearing the voice of the other side. (3)

Still more barriers have been created since the Naqba and the Holocaust, of course. Decades of wars, terror attacks, and military occupation have created more victims, more recriminations, and more obstacles. What political psychologists have called an ethos of conflict has been created, perhaps even nurtured, within both Israeli and Palestinian publics, giving rise to mutual hatred as well as suspicion. (4)

Additional Barriers

Beyond these psychological barriers, there are very real physical and political barriers. Refugees still live in camps in many Arab countries, denied citizenship in all but Jordan; since 1967 families have been divided by the Israeli occupation, lands have been expropriated by Israel in the West Bank, where some 500,000 settlers now live, including East Jerusalem. Indeed, a second and even a third generation of Israelis has been born and raised in settlements on land that is supposed to serve as a part of a Palestinian state in the West Bank. In addition, the failure of attempts to resolve the conflict through negotiations, such as Chairman Yasser Arafat and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's initiatives of mutual recognition and interim steps in the Oslo Accords, has led to disillusionment and extremism, in both societies. The political situation today in Israel has both leading political parties agreed on the need for continued Israeli control over the occupied territories. On the Palestinian side, the challenge of Hamas to Fatah weakens the Palestinian leadership and handicaps Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) decisions. In both societies, alienation from moderate leaders and potential peace makers has become widespread, with more demagogic, violent elements gaining ground. Polls on both sides indicate a decline in what was once majority support for the two-state solution. This is a decline born of frustration and of the belief that there is no partner for peace on the other side.

International Environment

Political realities outside the region have also changed, but not necessarily for the better. Once it was the Cold War that added to the sustainability of the conflict. By providing political and material backing, the two super-powers acted as enablers, even if they did not intervene directly in the conflict at every step of the way or actually welcomed the risks of war between their regional allies. Whatever their motivations, the super powers' competition in the...