Hindrances to the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process ✓ Solved

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process stalled almost immediately after the Oslo II Accords were signed. According to many scholars, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is hindered by both political and religious reasons which have prompted the denial of a Jewish state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Similarly, the ownership of Jerusalem as their capital city is heavily challenged by both Israelis and Palestinians since all the three monotheistic religions consider Jerusalem to be a holy city. Despite the Jews considering Jerusalem as their holy city just like Catholics regard Rome and Muslims consider Mecca and Medina, the Palestinians have repudiated to recognize Israel as the homeland of the Jews.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has no neutral parties as bilateral talks will favor Israel while multilateral talks will favor Palestinians. It is therefore evident that each interstate party will support the decisions that will be most beneficial to their own side. This research is designed to assess whether peace between Israel and Palestine would have been achieved by now if Jerusalem was not contentious in the conflict. To understand why the Arab-Israeli peacemaking process has never accomplished its objectives, it is crucial to analyze the conflict from its origins. The Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking process was initiated following the decision by the UN in 1947 to divide Palestine into a nation dominated by Jews (Musu, 2010).

The Jews were predominantly comprised of immigrants that had fled persecution in Europe in the 19th century and settled into the land they considered their historic territory. However, the Palestinian communities occupying the land constituted the indigenous residents. While there was a conflict between Jewish and Palestinian communities, it is only following the proclamation of Israel as a nation that an interstate war erupted. The one-year war came to an end in 1949 when Israel signed agreements with their neighboring Arab states (Corre, 2007).

Nevertheless, peace between the Israeli and Palestinians was never achieved since a majority of Palestinians were not part of the UN-mediated dialogues as they had either fled or were expelled from the country (Frank, 2005). Therefore, a wall of enmity erupted among the Palestinians that viewed Israelis as intruders that had established a Jewish state and expelled them from their land. Secondly, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not an interstate conflict but rather an inter-group conflict that revolved around a disputed territory located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

As a result, the dispute of the region is associated with the identity, economy, and security of both the Israeli and Palestinian citizens (Martin, 2003). Since Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Israelis have gained dominance over the Palestinians in two major ways. First, the Zionist Jews managed to attain state power in Israel by appealing to the interest of the Jewish people that were consolidated in the region.

Secondly, the Israeli occupation blurred the boundaries between Israel and Palestine. Thus, the inter-group conflicts are evoked by Arab and Jewish maximalist ideologies that spark dissent between the Palestinians and Israelis, making it impossible for the Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking process to address the conflict by accommodating the opposing groups' interests (Martin, 2003). For instance, the Zionist movement interests aim to establish a Jewish homeland for its people while the Palestinian national movement aims to defeat the invading Jewish community that inhabits their lands (Barak, 2005).

According to Michael (2014), it is practically impossible to advance the peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians since both sides do not view peace as the only viable option. Thus, unlike state leaders that put the state interest first, the party or tribal leaders are not ready to make necessary compromises that would proposition an opportunity for peace. (Martin, 2003), acknowledges that the Israeli and Palestinian parties' leaders contribute to the violence through incitement and propaganda, insensitivity to the opposing communities' suffering, and immature political systems which fail to grab opportunities to end the conflict.

Similarly, the failure of the Israeli and Palestine leadership to effect a peaceful resolution is linked to the delicate consensus within their individual groups which has given them limited room for negotiations. Both the Arabs and Israelis maintain their groups' subjective needs which include community identity, security, recognition, dignity, and justice which remain unfulfilled since they are neither acknowledged nor addressed (Michael, 2014).

Consequently, the leaders are constrained in the peacemaking efforts limiting the applicability of interstate conflict resolution strategy within inter-group conflicts. The 1993 Oslo Accord attempted to identify ways to accommodate each groups’ interests to be tabled and addressed. However, it only acknowledged the facets of the Israeli-Palestine conflict and postponed discussing the most crucial issues affecting the two groups’ relationships until the final stages of negotiation (Hilal, 2008).

As a result, all the issues that were indicative that the Israeli and Palestinian conflict was an inter-group battle as opposed to an interstate battle were not resolved. The following issues demonstrate that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can only come to an end when both the Jewish and Palestinian interests and goals are well-defined leading to inter-group and intra-group communications. Furthermore, for there to be a mutual understanding between the Jews and Palestinians, they both expect their security and identity needs to be accomplished (Olesker, 2018).

The issues include the ownership of Jerusalem, the Palestinian refugees, the Jewish settlements and the territories, and the Palestinian state and its borders (Beste, 2015). Since issues of identity and security were not tabled earlier on in the negotiation by the inter-groups’ leadership, both groups failed to attain mutual trust. The internal division within both the Jews and Palestinians inter-groups undermined the Oslo Accord and resulted in the amplification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Musu, 2010).

Factions within the Jewish inter-group defied the legality of the Palestinian leadership, launched open attacks on Palestinian citizens to undermine the peace process, and in an extremist display assassinated the Palestinian prime minister. Equally, the Palestinians responded by launching attacks at Jewish soldiers leading to the undermining and rejection of the Oslo Accords (Martin, 2003).

Conflict resolution strategies were launched nearly two decades before formal negotiations began to bring mutual interaction and recognition between Jews and Palestinian groups. Despite their implementation, the informal workshops failed to alter the attitudes or persuade various high-ranking members from both inter-groups that held leadership positions (Hilal, 2008).

Without approval from leadership at the top, the Oslo Accords did not gain support at the grass-root levels since the public from both inter-group sides continued to observe each other as adversaries, which fueled the conflict further (David & Madeline, 2009). Similarly, projects directed at the public were launched in an attempt to transform the attitudes of both Jewish and Palestinian citizens (Beste, 2015).

However, reconciliation was not achieved as rivals of the conflict resolution efforts used inter-group ideology to reaffirm rivaling Palestinian or Jewish beliefs and ideas regarding statehood. The transformative change was difficult to obtain through the Oslo Accords as leaders from the Jewish and Palestinian sides viewed it as a tool for coexistence with the rivaling group without making an effort on developing long-term commitments at the political levels.

One of the major obstacles that the Israeli-Palestinian relationship has failed to overcome concerns the control of resources which has made Palestine dependent on Israel (Barak, 2005). All the land and water resources are under Jewish control. Similarly, Jewish firms are tasked with offering basic services. As a result, the Palestinian economy is dependent on Israel heightening the inter-group conflict (Frank, 2005).

Israel leadership has failed to realize that without resource reallocation between Jews and Palestinians, their rigid tactic of peacemaking fails to grip the nature of the conflict. For instance, Israel's prime minister attempted to end the conflict in 2000 by signing a proposal that would meet the Palestinians' objectives. Nonetheless, his approach overlooked the negative changing forces fueling the conflict by proposing immediate and perpetual solutions that failed to specify what would happen later (Corre, 2007).

This paper justifies the claim that peace between Israel and Palestine would not have been achieved by now even if Jerusalem was not contentious in the conflict. It offers a variety of political, ideological, and religious reasons with supporting evidence to support the working hypothesis. All the reasons highlighted the claim that there are numerous underlying factors behind the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict whereas Jerusalem features a minor role in spreading the conflict.

The major reasons that have propagated the conflict since the division of Palestine in 1947, the launch of conflict resolution strategies in the 1980s, and the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 include flawed conflict resolution processes that failed to address identity, economy, and security characteristics that resonated with both the Israeli and Palestinian citizens, failure to appropriately characterize the conflict as inter-group, incompetency by both Palestinian and Jewish leadership to compromise throughout the negotiation process and internal conflicts within the rivaling inter-groups resulting in attempts to sabotage the reconciliation process.

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