Charles Elkins ch414763 Conflict Transformation and Human Rights in Israel-Palestine Conflict Transformation and Human Rights in Israel-Palestine (original) (raw)
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Journal of Dispute Resolution, 2005
If the outline of a deal that would better serve the interests of most Israelis and Palestinians is so obvious, 3 why has it proven so difficult to make progress towards peace? The most common explanation relates to failures of leadership. Many blame the breakdown at Camp David on Yasser Arafat, 4 although Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Clinton are sometimes said to be responsible as well. 5 In the years since, some commentators have suggested that the Bush II administration bears blame for the lack of progress towards resolution because it failed to design a strategy to enable the parties to accept the terms of a deal that would appear to serve the interests of both sides. 6 While we agree that political leadership is a necessary condition for progress towards peace, we believe there is a deeper reason for the apparent paradox: there are profound internal conflicts among Israeli Jews, on the one hand, and among Palestinians, on the other, that stand as barriers to progress at the negotiation table. Among Palestinians, this conflict relates to the refugee problem and the meaning and scope of any Palestinian "right of return" that would essentially be extinguished by the deal. Among Israeli Jews, the conflict concerns the future of the settlements. A contiguous Palestinian state would encompass many existing Jewish settlements, and as a practical matter displace thousands of Jewish settlers. It would also mark the end of the "settlement project." For some religiously observant Israelis this project was meant to guarantee the fulfillment of a messianic desire to include within the Jewish state the cradle of "Eretz Yisrael" 7-biblically ___________________________ 3. Two different "third track" unofficial collaborative efforts by Israelis and Palestinians have demonstrated that the terms of a beneficial deal remain well known. Over 100,000 Palestinians and 150,000 Israelis have signed the Ayalon-Nuseibeh initiative, which spells out the essential principles that would provide a foundation for a deal. Ami Ayalon is a retired Admiral who headed the Israeli Navy and served as head of Israel's internal security agency. Sari Nuseibeh, a leading Palestinian public intellectual, is President of Al-Quds University in Jerusalem. In a process facilitated by a Swiss professor, leading Israelis and Palestinians negotiated the Geneva Accords, an agreement that works out in considerable detail all of the final status issues. The Ayalon-Nuseibeh initiative is available at
Neither One nor Two: Reflections about a Shared Future in Israel-Palestine
Chapter in Ehrenberg and Peled (eds) "Israel and Palestine - Alternative Perspectives on Statehood" (Rowan, 2016). The two states solution became the shared imagery of Jews and Palestinians immediately after the mutual recognition in September 1993, and the symbolic shaking hands between Rabin and Arafat in the White House. In order to imagine the establishment of two states living in peace as a "solution" to the 100 years conflict two basic elements were indispensable: mutual recognition of the national movements and recognized borders. Although imagination is an essential element of any significant political change, it is not enough. It necessitates realization, namely, transformation of images into facts in the ground, and the facts on the ground contradicted the imagined two states solution. Since my previous article (IPU, the '1-2-7 States' Vision of the Future, JPS 2010) two bi-national groups of experts have worked to suggest concrete answers to an array of crucial questions and problems emerging from the ideas of parallel sovereignty and a union. One Land two States (Mossberg and LeVine, 2014); and Two Sates in one space" (Goldenblatt and Boutteau, 2014). The most surprising support to the combination of two states and one came, unexpectedly, from the President of Israel Reuven Rivlin. This paper aims to present the idea of the Israeli-Palestinian Union and develop the analysis of crucial obstacles which are, in my opinion, insufficiently treated until now. The first part of the paper presents a critical analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian relations; the second part briefly presents my initial ideas for an Israeli-Palestinian Union, and analyzes the fundamental issues: demography, citizenship, institution building, the economy and security; the third part discusses the pre-conditions necessary to start thinking out of the box, mainly how to start dismantling the "permanent-interim" situation, and the type of International intervention needed to end Israeli expansionist policies.
Israel and Palestine: The Demise of the Two-State Solution
New England Journal of Public Policy, 2017
A two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with a Palestinian state along the lines of the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, the "mandated" settlement for decades, is no longer either a viable outcome or one that can be implemented. In the past fifty years, the "facts on the ground" have changed, but, perhaps more important, so too have "facts in the mind." The geopolitical landscape in the Middle East bears little resemblance to "facts" back to 1967. The context of negotiations has changed at least four times: first, after Gaza's spin-off in 2006; second, after the Gaza war in 2014; third, because of Israel's increasing religiosity; and fourth, because of the detritus of the Syrian Civil War, ISIS, and Islamic militancy roiling the post-Arab Spring Middle East. ___________________________________________________________________________ On December 23, 2016, weeks before President Barack Obama stepped into history, the United States abstained on UN Security Council Resolution 2334. The resolution called on Israel to stop all settlement activity on the grounds that it is an impediment to a two-state solution. 1 The settlements are illegal under international law, but the resolution was the first of its kind, because heretofore all resolutions along these lines were vetoed by US presidents. In practical terms the resolution means little, since the international community has failed to sanction Israel and the countries in the European Union that might have been expected to take some action are too preoccupied with their internal problems. For Obama, withholding the veto signified less the use of power than a departing gesture of impotence, the culmination of eight years of contrarian and cantankerous relations with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who consistently stymied his attempts to forge initiatives. At the end of Obama's presidency, some would say the prospects for a two-state solution were much diminished. This article argues that they were already dead in the water. Donald Trump's inauguration, his promise to relocate the US embassy to Jerusalem, and his nomination of David Friedman, a right-wing American Jew who has vociferously supported the annexation of the West Bank, galvanized the Israeli right. More than six thousand settlement units were authorized; calls to annex Ma'ale Adumim reached a new pitch, and the Knesset passed a law (sure to be overturned by Israel's High Court, even according to many of its proponents) that retroactively legalized thousands of settlement units built on privately owned Palestinian land. Such was the excess that even the White House called the move "not helpful." When he met with Netanyahu on February 15, 2017, however, Trump turned to his friend "Bibi" during their press conference and casually abandoned the decades-held position of both Republican and Democratic presidents of two states for two peoples. He was, he said, for "one