American military presence in Europe

Despite the efforts put into negotiations, they have created a self-perpetuating cycle of disappointment, frustration and empty dialogue. With contradictory Palestinian and Israeli agendas – Palestinians negotiating for an independent state, an end to occupation, etc., and Israel negotiating primarily over security concerns – one must question the reason behind prolonged negotiations. Is US mediation, accused by many of extreme bias towards Israel, to blame? Or are negotiations an Israeli objective to execute a particular political agenda? In spite of the international community's recognition of establishing an independent Palestinian state, the current reality on the ground undermines any creation of one. This reality was allowed only by the strategic prolonging of negotiations. A particular focus on the proceedings following the Oslo Accords explains how Palestinian--Israeli negotiations have been used to pursue a specific objective.     

Change Nobody Believes In: Obama and the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict

Despite the promise of ‘change’ in President Barack Obama's early dealings with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the policy that has since emanated from the White House was in fact commensurate with those of preceding administrations. Rather than heralding a new direction for American engagement with the conflict, the Obama Administration had displayed more patterns of continuity than change in its dealings with both parties. Specifically, by continuing to act as “Israel's attorney” during negotiations, the Obama team had in effect negated the president's early pledges to act as an honest broker in the conflict. In assessing the (in)effectiveness of the Administration's management of the Israeli–Palestinian issue, it seems that on-going mediation efforts to revive the moribund peace process have exhausted their potential. Arbitration may be explored as a more effective method to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian territorial dispute.     

The intifada: Palestinian adaptation to Israeli counterinsurgency tactics

In December 1987 the uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip significantly changed the nature of the Palestinian threat to Israel and pushed the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians into the forefront of the Palestinian‐Israeli conflict. This article examines the effects of the Israeli counterinsurgency tactics on the Palestinian strategy from the period of 1967 through 1987. It proposes that the implementation of Israel's counterinsurgency policy since 1967 was a crucial factor in creating the conditions for revolution and influencing the Palestinians’ adaptation of their tactics, culminating in the intifada.     

De-terrorising the Palestinian national struggle: the roadmap to peace

This article follows the representation of Palestinian nationalism as a history of terrorism. This representation was produced in the Israeli media and academia, and broadcast by the state's political elite in international arenas. In the West, this image was accepted in many circles and affected the chances of the Palestinians having a fair hearing in the peace negotiations which began after the 1967 war. The article follows the construction of the equation of Palestinian nationalism with terrorism, assesses its impact on the peace process, and suggests the deconstruction of this narrative as the best way forward in future negotiations.     

Ballots,Bargains, and Bombs: Terrorist Targeting of Spoiler Opportunities

Benjamin Netanyahu's come-from-behind victory over Shimon Peres in the Israeli national elections of May 1996, following an apparent intensification of Palestinian terrorism over the course of that spring, reminded observers of the political ramifications of terrorism. Since May 1996 was also the month in which Israel reentered Final Status negotiations with a Palestinian delegation in Taba, Egypt, the timing of this surge in violence encourages us to ask if terrorists regularly conceive of elections and rounds of negotiations as “spoiler opportunities,” or opportune times to undermine peaceful political processes. We address this question in the context of Israel's long‐running experience with elections, negotiations, and terrorism. We hypothesize that attacks resulting in fatalities are likely to increase in periods immediately surrounding Israeli general elections and key rounds of negotiations affecting the fate of the Palestinian population. Negative binomial event count analyses of the period 1970–2007 suggest that violent opponents indeed viewed the periods preceding negotiations and the ends of electoral cycles as “spoiler opportunities.”     

Is Unilateralism Always Bad? Negotiation Lessons from Israel's “Unilateral” Gaza Withdrawal

Using the 2005 unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza as a case study, this article exposes an apparent paradox: circumstances may exist in which an outcome that serves the interests of parties to a conflict cannot be achieved through bilateral negotiation but can be achieved by unilateral action. Although the withdrawal was seen at the time as serving the interests of both the Israeli government and the Palestinians, we argue that the same result could not have been achieved through bilateral negotiations. “Behind‐the‐table” internal conflicts on each side would have made it impossible for the leaders to agree on the scope of these negotiations. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's success in implementing his Gaza withdrawal was attributable in significant measure to his ability to maintain ambiguity about his long‐run plans for the West Bank. Only by focusing attention on Gaza was he able to build the necessary coalition to implement the controversial move. The Palestinian leaders, on the other hand, could never have agreed to come to the table to negotiate about Gaza alone — they would have insisted that the scope of any negotiations address a broad range of final status issues. In this article, we identify some of the lessons that the Gaza example teaches regarding the utility and limits of unilateralism as well as the benefits and potential costs of employing ambiguity as a strategy to help accomplish a controversial move. Finally, we also explore the aftermath of the withdrawal and its many missed opportunities for improving the outcome. We suggest that, even when acting unilaterally, leaders should carefully consider the probable impact of their actions on the internal conflicts of their adversaries.     

Old (Molotov) cocktails in new bottles? “Price-tag” and settler violence in Israel and the West Bank

In the early morning of July 31, 2015, masked attackers threw firebombs into two Palestinian homes in the West Bank village of Duma, south of Nablus, killing three Palestinian civilians. Contrary to claims by Israeli and Palestinian politicians, this attack was neither an isolated anomaly nor just another incident of settler violence. Instead, it was the latest attack in an important but largely unknown phenomenon called “price-tag,” in which a loosely connected group of young Israelis called “hilltop youth” burn Palestinian mosques and destroy property in hundreds of attacks accompanied by threatening graffiti that references Israeli settlers, outposts, and anti-Arab slogans. Using an original dataset of price-tag incidents and interviews with key actors, we demonstrate that the perpetrators, targets, and strategies of price-tag are different than previous patterns of settler violence. Whereas previous settlers saw the Israeli state as legitimate and largely decided to cooperate with it, the hilltop youth have decided to confront it by using price-tag attacks to deter settlement withdrawals and chain-gang the state into a conflict with the Palestinians. This analysis of the strategic logic of price-tag reveals its potential to shift the political landscape within and between Israelis and Palestinians.     

Blueprint for Arab–Israeli Peace? President Carter and the Brookings Report

After the 1973 Arab–Israeli war, the American Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, conducted a series of negotiations between Israel and its Arab adversaries, culminating in three disengagement agreements. As successful as these were, by late 1975 Kissinger’s step-by-step approach had stagnated. New approaches seemed essential to push the peace process forward. Throughout 1975, a Brookings Institution study group wrote a report on how the United States could better approach Arab–Israeli peacemaking. It recommended a comprehensive approach, aimed at solving all outstanding questions, by including all the parties within the same framework. The recommendations advocated including the Soviet Union in the peace process and that the Palestinians should represent themselves. The report was highly influential on President Jimmy Carter’s subsequent approach towards the Arab–Israeli conflict—and many of the report’s authors staffed his Administration. Carter’s perceived adaptation of the report aggrieved the Israelis, whilst for others the Brookings report served as a normative benchmark for the Carter presidency.     

Security and discourse: the Israeli–Palestinian water conflict

When conflictive viewpoints are discursively strengthened, they develop into a ‘conflict discourse’ with a specific discursive structure which perpetuates conflict, like the discursive securitisation of an issue for varying audiences. When they are weakened, however, societal discourse can potentially change so that agreement becomes possible again, thus achieving discursive conflict transformation. This article analyses the Israeli and the Palestinian water discourse. On both sides, the dominant discourse structures underscore the conflictive issues regarding the distribution of water between Israelis and Palestinians, thus making communication, let alone negotiation, downright impossible. While Palestinians regard the natural water resources as sufficient in principle and the existing scarcity as entirely politically induced, Israelis perceive the natural water resources as absolutely scarce while receiving major de-securitisation impulses from the possibility of desalination. In the respective (minor) counter-discourses, however, possible starting points for dialogue and conflict resolution are visible.     

Ingredients of a Successful Track Two Negotiation

During three days in 2003, an Israeli–Palestinian group met in London to negotiate the draft of the “Geneva Initiative,” which offered a potential final status agreement between Israel and Palestine. In this article, I analyze the video recording of these unofficial negotiations and examine how the framing and conduct of the talks enabled significant progress toward reaching an agreement. I describe six main framing techniques used by the mediators: calling the meetings an “exercise,” which reduced restraints on the participants and enhanced their flexibility, avoiding deep historical issues to focus solely on future‐oriented pragmatic solutions, allowing the participants to discuss any topic they chose while deliberately avoiding crucial narrative issues, convincing the participants that this track two negotiation was crucial for the future of official Israeli–Palestinian relations, accentuating the parties' understandings and agreements with each other, and building a sense of superordinate group identity among the participants, to encourage cooperation. These components were the key “ingredients” for the first — and still the only — (unofficial) detailed proposal for an Israeli–Palestinian peace agreement. They provide lessons that could improve the success of other track two negotiations.     

Why Do Peace Negotiations Succeed or Fail? Legal Commitment,Transparency, and Inclusion during Peace Negotiations in Colombia (2012–2016) and Turkey (2012–2015)

This article examines the ways in which the negotiation framework—i.e., the legal guarantees, information management mechanism, and degree of inclusivity in peace negotiations—shapes the likelihood of concluding a peace agreement. Codifying the peace negotiations in law, publicizing information about the content of negotiations, and including mediators and civil society actors in peace talks is likely to increase a government's short‐term costs. However, doing so alleviates the adversaries' information asymmetry and commitment problems, sets guidelines to insure the process against exogenous shocks, and increases the number of actors taking part in conflict management. Comparing the recent peace negotiations to end intrastate wars in Colombia and Turkey, this article argues that a legalized, public, and inclusive framework made a peace agreement possible in Colombia, while the lack of such a framework caused Turkey's peace talks to fail.     

The Radical Crescent: The United States,the Palestine Liberation Organisation,and the Lebanese Civil War, 1973–1978

This analysis examines the efforts by the Palestine Liberation Organisation [PLO] to formalise relations with the United States before and after the October 1973 Arab–Israeli War. It details the public and private attempts by PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat to present the organisation as a legitimate partner for negotiations with Israel. However, the American secretary of state and national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, hindered the PLO’s diplomatic initiatives during the Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford administrations. Kissinger viewed the PLO as an impediment to his efforts to resolve the Arab–Israeli conflict through separate peace agreements, rather than a comprehensive solution. Despite Washington’s objections to the PLO, the organisation had regional and international legitimacy, its stature aided by its political and ideological allies. Yet these ties also contributed to the PLO’s involvement in the Lebanese civil war. Kissinger encouraged Syria’s June 1976 invasion of Lebanon to weaken, if not destroy, the PLO as an independent actor. Although the PLO survived Syria’s intervention, Kissinger’s actions and agreements limited the diplomatic initiatives of the Jimmy Carter Administration.     

The symbiosis between Palestinian ‘Fayyadism’ and Israeli ‘economic peace’: the political economy of capitalist peace in the context of colonisation

Abstract

Recent years have seen both the Palestinian Authority and Israeli government conveying the supremacy of economic approaches over politics to achieve peace and stability. More specifically, the encounter and symbiosis between Palestinian 'Fayyadism' as a professional application of neo-liberal approaches to state-building and economic development, and the Israeli strategy of 'economic peace' towards the Palestinians have shaped much of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict dynamic, with a particularly discernible materialisation in the West Bank. This article critically analyses this dynamic in light of the recently revived theory of 'capitalist peace', which, despite valid criticism, entails considerable similarities with the basic assumptions of 'Fayyadism' and 'economic peace'. While two key dimensions express this symbiosis—security co-ordination and economic normalisation—the article focuses mainly on the economic part, particularly the case of joint industrial zones, which exemplify the most extreme example of this symbiosis.     

“These People Have an Irrevocable Right to Self-Government”: United States Policy and the Palestinian Question, 1977–1979

Upon entering office, Carter Administration officials placed a heavy emphasis on integrating human rights into United States foreign policy. They also sought to contain festering Arab–Israeli tensions in the Middle East. The intersection of these two issues was the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This article examines the Administration's attempts to solve that conflict and to bring peace to the region. It argues that policymakers developed a sincere dedication to safeguarding Palestinian rights, but that their understanding of those rights was limited in scope and defined through the lens of United States security and strategic interests. In spite of a good-faith effort to satisfy Palestinian desires while maintaining a constructive relationship with Israel, the Administration ultimately failed to alter the status quo because of regional developments. As Washington's strategic thinking changed, so did the urgency of Palestinian rights.     

Back-Channel Negotiation: International Bargaining in the Shadows

Back‐channel negotiations (BCNs) are officially sanctioned negotiations conducted in secret between the parties to a dispute. These extraordinary negotiations operate in parallel with, or replace, acknowledged front channels of negotiation. Back channels are like the black markets of negotiation; they are separate tables where bargaining takes place in the shadows. When front‐channel negotiations fail, they are sometimes eclipsed by successful BCNs even though the same principals, conflicts, and sociopolitical contexts are involved. This article asks: Why do decision makers deploy back channels? What is the impact of BCN on international peace processes? The Palestinian–Israeli peace process, in which both back and front channels have been used consistently, provides the basis for comparing channels and offering initial answers to these questions. The author concludes that while BCN can facilitate breakthrough agreements, it can also damage a peace process by helping to reinforce some of the uncertainties that gave rise to the use of back channels in the first place.     

History writing and securitization of the other: the construction and reconstruction of Palestinian and Israeli security discourses

In conflict situations the protagonists are driven by rival visions of the past. The protracted conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is a particularly extreme case to illustrate this point. In protracted conflict like the Israeli–Palestinian conflict historians themselves are acting as combatants. In this regard, the article argues that history writing, particularly in the cases of protracted conflicts, constitutes an important part of the construction and reconstruction of security discourses whether by supporting mainstream security discourses or by challenging them. By discussing the role of history writing in the securitization process, this article aims to contribute to the centuries-long debates over the history-writing–politics nexus by taking a security studies perspective.     

Europe under occupation: the European diplomatic community of practice in the Jerusalem area

ABSTRACT

This article shows how the existence of a community of European practitioners in the Jerusalem area gives substance to the European stance on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The often-stated European Union (EU) support for a two-state solution could appear meaningless in the absence of peace negotiations. However, European diplomats (i.e. diplomats of EU member states and EU officials) in the East Jerusalem–Ramallah area are committed to specific practices of political resistance to Israeli occupation and recognition of Palestinian institutions. These practices have led not only to a specific political geography of diplomacy, but also to a community of practice, composed of European diplomats and based on their daily experience of resisting occupation and bestowing recognition. It is this group of officials who represent and actively “do” Europe’s position and under occupation.     

Oslo and Its Aftermath: Lessons Learned from Track Two Diplomacy

Since the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the violence that followed, many scholars have reflected upon the Israeli–Palestinian peace process. Most of this analysis has focused on official negotiations without considering the substantial role that unofficial peace efforts have played in peacebuilding, both prior to and after Oslo. This article, in contrast, seeks to better understand the application of “track two” diplomacy to the Israeli–Palestinian case. It reports on a self‐reflection effort by numerous Israeli–Palestinian peace practitioners to better understand what has worked, what has not, and how new initiatives could be more effectively organized and carried out in the future. The research presented is based on an inventory of seventy‐nine track two projects that occurred between Israelis and Palestinians between 1992 and 2004, personal interviews with many of those who organized and oversaw these projects, and two focus group meetings that brought together a total of forty practitioners. In this article, we seek to better understand two issues: (1) how track two initiatives have changed in scope, organization, and intent; and (2) how track two practitioners have sought to disseminate their work beyond the participants of those initiatives. Our findings present an overall picture of the Israeli–Palestinian second track practice and identify a number of trends and common types of practice. Among the trends we have identified are the following: during the peace process years, more track two initiatives were undertaken with elite/professional participants than with representatives of the grassroots, but in the subsequent decade‐and‐a‐half, Israeli–Palestinian grassroots, track two initiatives gradually replaced senior‐level track two exchanges; most of the grassroots initiatives we studied were relationship focused, whereas those involving elite participants are outcome focused; the track two community subscribes to a set of theoretical propositions about which conditions and contexts facilitate the transmission of track two insights and ideas to the political process, but these propositions have yet to be validated; and track two specialists do little strategic planning about ways to most effectively transfer track two insights and ideas to the political process. Our research also identified four distinct, but not mutually exclusive, approaches to practice: the psychological, the constructivist, the capacity building, and the realistic interest.     

Diplomacy in the media age: Three models of uses and effects

This study offers three conceptual models to promote systematic research into uses of the media as a major instrument of foreign policy and international negotiations: public diplomacy, where state and nonstate actors use the media and other channels of communication to influence public opinion in foreign societies; media diplomacy, where officials use the media to communicate with actors and to promote conflict resolution; and media-broker diplomacy, where journalists temporarily assume the role of diplomats and serve as mediators in international negotiations. The first two models, while previously defined, undergo serious revision in this study. The third model is new. This article demonstrates the analytical usefulness of the models through applications to various examples and case studies of significant contemporary diplomatic processes.     

The nature of Islamic fundamentalism in Israel

This article focuses on the nature of Islamic fundamentalism in Israel. The interplay of Islamic fundamentalism's attitude toward the Israeli‐Palestinian conflict and the extent of the movement's integration into Israeli political life is explored. In addressing these themes, the history of Israeli Islamic fundamentalism is reviewed from the pre‐state period through the present, as are effects of both internal and external factors on the movement's development. In general, the movement has followed a pragmatic line, although its future endeavors and nature will undoubtedly be influenced by the continuing peace process.