Small-State Mediation in International Conflicts

Diplomacy and Negotiation in Israel-Palestine

Jacob Eriksson

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857739117
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mediorientale

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most prolonged, contentious and divisive in the modern era. But, despite the volatile nature of the conflict, which frequently flares up in armed confrontations between the two, there have been advancements towards a settlement through an admittedly protracted peace process. In this book, Jacob Eriksson argues that the impact of small states, such as Sweden or Norway, should not be ignored when it comes to the ongoing efforts to negotiate between Israel and Palestine. Although small states lack coercive power, the talks they have sponsored in this particular instance (such as the Norwegian-mediated Oslo Accords) have transformed both the conflict and the conceptions of a solution to it. Of course, the diplomatic and financial power of larger states such as the USA is undoubtedly central to a negotiated solution. But by looking at conflict resolution from the perspective of the small state, Eriksson offers a unique analysis of power and diplomacy in the context of negotiations and efforts towards peace settlements.

CHAPTER 1

THE ISRAELI–PALESTINIAN CONFLICT: COMPETING NATIONAL NARRATIVES AND THE ETERNAL ‘RASHOMON EFFECT’¹

Arab and Jewish designs for the future of Palestine are diametrically opposed, and they were not at all interested in discussing compromises.

– Count Folke Bernadotte²

The passions aroused by Palestine have done so much to obscure the truth that the facts have become enveloped in a mist of sentiment, legend and propaganda, which acts as a smoke-screen of almost impenetrable density … the most formidable obstacle to an understanding, and therefore to a solution, of the Palestine problem lies not so much in its inherent complexity as in the solid jungle of legend and propaganda which has grown up around it.

– George Antonius³

Do you know what astonished me most in the world? The inability of force to create anything. In the long run the sword is always beaten by the spirit.

– Napoleon Bonaparte⁴

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is not just a conflict about land, nor is it a conflict purely about religion. While these are important parts of the dispute, this is a wider conflict about people, memory, politics, and self-determination. Israeli novelist Amos Oz expresses the problem quite well:

It is not a struggle between good and evil, rather it is a tragedy in the ancient and most precise sense of the word: a clash between right and right, a clash between one very powerful, deep, and convincing claim, and another very different but no less convincing, no less powerful, no less humane claim.⁵

Such an understanding, however, is not widely shared among either side in the conflict. Lowenthal's assessment is perhaps more accurate:

We confront one another armoured in identities whose likenesses we ignore or disown and whose differences we distort or invent to emphasise our own superior worth. Lauding our own legacies and excluding or discrediting those of others, we commit ourselves to endemic rivalry and conflict.⁶

This chapter outlines these two competing claims and identities, analysing how the parties frame and understand themselves, the ‘other’, and their conflict, focusing on a number of key themes such as victimhood, martyrology, and the construction of nationalism.

On 8 December 1987, four Palestinians were killed in a car crash with an Israeli vehicle at the Erez crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip. In the eyes of many Palestinians, the incident was an act of deliberate vengeance for the murder of an Israeli in Gaza a few days before. Rioting ensued in the Jabaliya refugee camp, Palestinians clashed with the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), and the violence spread to other parts of the Gaza Strip and on to the West Bank. This was the trigger of the first Palestinian intifada, or ‘uprising’. The fact that most other observers, international and Israeli, believed that the collision was merely an unfortunate accident was quickly rendered academic. The intifada swiftly gathered incredible momentum, feeding off the bitterness and resentment that had been building up among Palestinians for decades, and the results changed Palestinian society, their image among the international community, and their relationship with their Israeli occupiers forever.

The eruption of the second intifada also remains mired in a fog of competing perceptions. When Likud leader Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount, or Haram al-Sharif, on 28 September 2000, accompanied by hundreds of Israeli bodyguards and police officers, it was primarily a campaign tactic for the upcoming Israeli elections. He sought to exhibit symbolic Israeli sovereignty over the Jewish holy sites in the Old City of Jerusalem, and his personal commitment to their retention in any future peace agreement. It was a political demonstration against Prime Minister Ehud Barak and his offer at Camp David a few months earlier to divide Jerusalem with the Palestinians. Barak has explained that Sharon ‘wanted to show the extremists in Israel that he is faithful to the Temple Mount, as opposed to Barak who is willing to discuss [and] negotiate, and they of course exaggerated what we would be willing to negotiate’.⁷

Such a large Jewish presence at the third holiest site in Islam was perceived by the Palestinians as a deliberate provocation. The following day, Palestinian riots in and around the Old City led to violent clashes with Israeli police, leaving seven Palestinians dead, some 300 wounded, and 70 Israeli policemen injured. Over the next week, violence escalated drastically and spread throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The official position of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs is that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority (PA) had given up on the peace process and made a strategic choice to return to violence. Israeli intelligence sources claim to have proof of a calculated beginning to the riots traced back to PA ministers and Arafat himself.⁸ Palestinians viewed the al-Aqsa intifada, as it came to be known, as the natural product of a combination of factors: years of frustration with a peace process that was not delivering an end to the occupation; Sharon's inflammatory visit; and the repressive Israeli military reaction to Palestinian protests the following day.⁹

Coined by the film directed by Akira Kurosawa, the term ‘Rashomon’ commonly refers to the impact of subjectivity on memory. The plot revolves around four characters who provide wildly differing versions of the same events. Though not espoused as the definitive truth, the account of the woodcutter – an eyewitness not directly involved in the events – is implied to be the most accurate. As Rashomon illustrates, authoritative history is never straightforward, since the absolute truth behind events is hard to ascertain amid competing accounts. One can argue that objective, precise, and truthful history should be the ultimate goal of the historian, accurately describing exactly what happened and why. Whether or not this is possible is another matter.

In his work on lieux de mémoire (‘sites of memory’), Nora makes a clear distinction between memory and history:

Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past. Memory, insofar as it is affective and magical, only accommodates those facts that suit it; it nourishes recollections that may be out of focus or telescopic, global or detached, particular or symbolic – responsive to each avenue of conveyance or phenomenal screen, to every censorship or projection. History, because it is an intellectual and secular production, calls for analysis and criticism.¹⁰

Halbwachs too draws a clear line between memory and history. Collective memory, he argues, is a social construction determining ‘how members of society remember and interpret events, how the meaning of the past is constructed, and how it is modified over time’.¹¹ Individuals become socialised into a collective memory through collective social frameworks that are ‘the instruments used by the collective memory to reconstruct an image of the past which is in accord, in each epoch, with the predominant thoughts of the society’.¹² In his seminal work On Collective Memory, Halbwachs posits that historians, using ‘historical memory’, tend to deviate from the accepted values of collective memory.¹³ Nora further elaborates upon this distinction:

Memory is blind to all but the group it binds – which is to say, as Maurice Halbwachs has said, that there are as many memories as there are groups, that memory is by nature multiple and yet specific; collective, plural, and yet individual. History, on the other hand, belongs to everyone and to no one, whence its claim to universal authority … History's procurement, in the last century, of scientific methodology has only intensified the effort to establish critically a ‘true’ memory.¹⁴

Lowenthal similarly differentiates between the two, though using the concept of ‘heritage’ rather than memory: ‘To serve as a collective symbol heritage must be widely accepted by insiders, yet inaccessible to outsiders. Its data are social, not scientific. Socially binding traditions must be accepted on faith, not by reasoning. Heritage thus defies empirical analysis; it features fantasy, invention, mystery, error.’¹⁵

Khalili argues that these distinctions are problematic and hyperbolic. To approach memory and history as ‘popular’ and ‘intellectual’ respectively ‘ignores the mutual imbrication of these two categories of narratives and dehistoricises and sanctifies an object called memory’.¹⁶ Zerubavel also observes this difficulty while adopting a more nuanced approach, acknowledging both the conflict and interdependence which exists between the two terms.¹⁷ Litvak similarly criticises the ‘rather crude positivist approach’ of Halbwachs and Nora, pointing out that they disregard the impact of the society's collective memory on the historian. Historians are, after all, often actively engaged in shaping collective memory and national identity.¹⁸

Indeed, these two mutually dependent concepts, identity and collective memory, conjoin the past and the present and are readily adaptable to serve particular interests. Halbwachs contends that ‘it is in society that people normally acquire … recall, recognise and localise their memories’, and that societal groups provide the means to reconstruct memory and adapt individuals to a way of thinking. In other words, identity is dependent upon the constant construction and reconstruction of one's memory in concert with the collective memory. Each group is free to evoke and ‘choose from the past the period into which we wish to immerse ourselves … If certain memories are inconvenient or burden us, we can always oppose them the sense of reality inseparable from our present life.’¹⁹

Gillis too reminds us that ‘memories and identities are not fixed things, but representations or constructions of reality, subjective rather than objective phenomena … we are constantly revising our memories to suit our current identities’.²⁰ Useful memories are confirmed by the collective and others can be neglected as deemed appropriate. Lowenthal observes that ‘for all but amnesiacs, heritage distils the past into icons of identity, bonding us with precursors and progenitors, with our own earlier selves, and with our promised successors’.²¹

Zertal holds a similar view, describing collective memory as ‘a social reality, a political, cultural product that takes shape within the system of social, political variables, and interests of a given community’.²² Mead, a contemporary of Halbwachs', similarly put forth the notion of a ‘symbolically reconstructed past’, which entails ‘redefining the meaning of past events in such a way that they have meaning in and utility for the present’.²³ Lassner and Troen express the nationalist application of this principle eloquently when they suggest that ‘it is as though modern nation builders throw stones into the troubled waters of history and create with each toss perfectly concentric circles’.²⁴ On the basis of his earlier dichotomy, Lowenthal states that ‘history co-opted by heritage exaggerates or denies accepted fact to assert a primacy, an ancestry, a continuity. It underwrites a founding myth meant to exclude others.’²⁵

Collective memory and identity are the handmaidens of modern nationalism, codified and expressed in national narratives. Kacowicz refers to narrative as ‘a fundamental way of organising human experience and explaining human behaviour, and as a tool for constructing models of reality’. They ‘embody explanations, though they also mobilise the mythology of their times, mixing literary tropes, notions of morality, and causal reasoning in efforts both to justify and to explain events’, thereby rationalising or legitimising the present.²⁶

Both Israelis and Palestinians have over time developed an identity and a narrative that justifies and legitimises their respective claims to the land known as Palestine, while rejecting those of the other as artificial and illegitimate. Questions of territory, sovereignty, and security cannot be separated from religion, ideology, or culture, rendering the conflict immensely difficult to resolve. When national identities and claims of self-determination collide, they often result in an intractable identity-based conflict, where ‘one group's sense of identity seems to deny the reality or legitimacy of the other group's identity’.²⁷ As Kelman explains, ‘each perceives the very existence of the other – the other's status as a nation – to be a threat to its own existence and status as a nation … They can acquire national identity and rights only at the expense of our identity and rights.’²⁸ Thus, any acknowledgement of the other weakens one's own claim.²⁹

Such a situation where the existence of one denies the existence of the other is known as a zero-sum conflict, where there is victory or defeat, but no middle ground. It is difficult to overstate the significance of the zero-sum perception and its role in the perpetuation of conflict. ‘Fulfillment of the other...