Abstract
On October 14 and 15, 2004, just days before the Israeli government submitted to the Knesset a draft legislation to authorize the evacuation of Jewish settlers from Gaza Strip and some settlements on the West Bank, a two‐day conference titled “Past, Present, and Future of the Jewish West Bank and Gaza Settlements: The Internal Israeli Conflict” was held at Harvard Law School. The conference was sponsored by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, the Saltman Center for Conflict Resolution of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the United States Institute of Peace.
This interdisciplinary conference's six panels, whose proceedings are summarized in the series of articles that follow, explored the religious, ideological, psychological, political, legal, and international dimensions of the conflict. Presenters included former and current Israeli and American government officials, experts on resettlement policies and compensation mechanisms, and scholars from a variety of disciplines. While presentation topics covered a range of issues relating to the settlements, three broad themes arose from the conference.
First, participants agreed that it is important, if not fundamental, to understand the perspectives of the national religious settlers who are the driving force behind the settlement movement. Exploring the settlers’ diverse interests, fears, and identities is necessary in order to see why relocation is so threatening to them. The Israeli government can lessen opposition to withdrawal by showing the settlers empathy and reassurance, but only if government officials first achieve a true understanding of the settlers’ concerns.
Participants also argued that a reframing of the relocation in ideological terms could be another critical component of a solution to this problem. It may be necessary for the leaders of the settlement movement to develop a new narrative or modify the existing one in order to legitimize their relocation. Part of this narrative will involve the concept of “a greater good”— the government must reassure the settlers that their sacrifice is for a higher cause.
Several participants noted that Israel needs to show the settlers “tough love.” When the relocations begin, many expect that there will be violence and that disturbing images will be broadcast throughout Israel and around the world. Internal disruption could put the government led by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his Likud party coalition in jeopardy. The government must not waver in the face of this crisis, conference participants argued. In fact, the threat of violent and disruptive resistance by settlers and their allies can be part of the solution, not just the problem. The government and relocation supporters can use this extremism to justify decisive measures and to redefine the problem for the broader population to convince them that the stability of the country is at stake.
Another major conclusion of conference participants was that, while the Israeli settlement issue has unique features, there is much to be learned from comparative analysis. Other countries have dealt with settlement situations, and their experiences offer invaluable lessons. In particular, participants contrasted Israel's settlements in Gaza and the West Bank with French settlements in Algeria and English settlements in Ireland. Some pointed to the French withdrawal from Algeria, which was politically painful but ultimately successful, as an example of “tough love” that Israel should follow.
Finally, the involvement of third parties to help solve this conflict is indispensable. Participants noted that while much of Israel feels alienated from the European Union and the United Nations, the Israeli government is highly sensitive to the concerns of the United States, as evidenced by Sharon's decision to show the Gaza withdrawal plan to the U.S. government before he had even raised it with his cabinet and the Israeli parliament, the Knesset. International participation could help legitimize withdrawal and reduce Israeli responsibility for Gaza's future. Third parties can apply political pressure to encourage an accountable and responsible Palestinian leadership. They may also be called upon to provide some sort of financial aid.
The participants acknowledged the complexity of the settlement problem and recognized that easy solutions do not exist. Yet, if the Israeli government works toward understanding the settlers’ perspectives, learns from comparative analysis, and involves third parties appropriately, the likelihood of a successful outcome increases greatly.
Israel's Internal, “Behind‐the‐Table” Conflict
The conference whose proceedings are summarized in the articles that follow concerned the past, present, and future of Israel's Gaza and West Bank settlements. Readers might well ask why we chose to focus on the internal conflict among Israeli Jews over the settlements. Where are the Palestinians? Where are the other Arab countries? Where are other third parties? These are legitimate and important questions.
The choice of this particular focus for this conference — which admittedly provides a limited perspective on a profound and seemingly intractable Israeli–Palestinian conflict that has many dimensions — arises out of a paradox. The paradox is that, in the long‐standing ethnic conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, the outline of a deal that could well serve the interests of both sides is reasonably clear. What is that deal? It is a two‐state solution in which a Palestinian state is created that includes Gaza and a contiguous area in the West Bank. There would be provisions to ensure Israeli security. Jerusalem would be a “condominium” of some sort, with one portion being the capital of the new Palestinian state and another portion being the capital of Israel. (My own prediction is that some of the settlements close to the Green Line, which separates the occupied territories from Israel proper, will be annexed to Israel in exchange for other territory and compensation.) Palestinian refugees would either have no “right of return” to Israel or this “right” would be extremely limited and primarily symbolic. I think many believe that such a deal would serve the interests of the Palestinians and Israelis substantially better than the continuation of their deadly conflict. Ironically, the essential terms of this deal are well known — this is close to what President Bill Clinton proposed in December 2000, shortly before the Oslo Peace Process collapsed. Moderates on both sides seem likely to accept this kind of deal. But since the collapse of the Oslo process, more than 1,000 Israelis and 3,000 Palestinians have been killed.
In the years since the Oslo Peace Process ended, the parties themselves have not negotiated at all concerning these “final status issues.” But two different “third track” unofficial collaborative efforts by Israelis and Palestinians have once again demonstrated that the terms of a beneficial deal remain well known. More than 100,000 Palestinians and 150,000 Israelis have signed the Ayalon–Nusseibeh 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 Nusseibeh, a leading Palestinian public intellectual, is president of Al‐Quds University in Jerusalem. In addition, 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.
This conference reflects my belief that an important explanation for this apparent paradox, for the failure of a plan that so many believe could work, is that — among Israeli Jews on the one hand and among Palestinians on the other — there are profound, unresolved, internal conflicts that present major barriers to progress in the underlying conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. These internal, “behind‐the‐table” conflicts affect any negotiations “across the table” between the Israeli government and the Palestinian authority.1
For this reason, nearly two years ago, with the support of the Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School, I initiated a project to focus on the internal conflict among Israeli Jews over the settlements. As part of this project, I have made a number of trips to Israel and spent a good deal of time visiting various settlements and talking to Israelis with profoundly divergent views about the settlements. These visits confirmed for me an insight made by Israeli writer Amos Oz.
In a brilliant essay written more than a decade ago, Oz suggested that the conflict among Israelis over the settlements movement exposed deep divisions within Israel about the character of the state, the meaning of Jewish heritage, the relationship of Jewish values and Western culture — about the very meaning and purpose of life. He wrote that:
[h]undreds of thousands of Israelis are convinced, intellectually and emotionally, that if Israel keeps hold of the occupied territories, it will cease to exist — nothing less than that. Hundreds of thousands of other Israelis are convinced that if Israel pulls out, it will cease to exist — nothing less than that. . . . Both sides are armed with precedents and expert opinions, indications that appear to them infallible. Both sides sense an imminent catastrophe. Both sides share a sense of emergency. (Oz 1983)
This conference could hardly be timelier. Each day the newspaper provides vivid contemporary evidence of the centrality of the conflict among Israelis over the settlement project. The depth of this conflict has been exposed and brought to a head by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan, which he first suggested in a speech in December 2003, to pursue a policy that aims to remove all Jewish settlers from Gaza and from four small settlements in the West Bank. And while PON's settlement project, as well as the planning for this conference, began months before Sharon's speech, as the conference got under way Sharon submitted to the Knesset his detailed legislative plan for the removal.
At the time of the conference, there was great uncertainty whether Sharon's plan would, in fact, be implemented during 2005, as he had declared. His proposal has limited support even within his own Likud party, which decisively rejected the idea in an internal referendum. (As this article goes to press in January 2005, great uncertainty remains. While Sharon's own hold on power remains tenuous, there have been promising subsequent developments. A national unity government that includes the Labor party was formed after the conference, and this new government has withstood one no‐confidence vote. Moreover, among the Israeli public, the death of Yasser Arafat and the election of Mahmoud Abbas as leader of the Palestinian Authority are widely perceived as developments that offer hope.) Whatever the immediate outcome of this specific proposal, however, there is little doubt that the issues that we are exploring in this conference will remain deeply relevant.
I must underscore and make explicit two limiting assumptions underlying this work. At the risk of repetition, I again wish to emphasize that this internal Israeli conflict is only one piece, albeit an important piece, of the larger Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Similarly profound conflicts exist among Palestinians concerning the appropriate scope of the “right of return” of Palestinian refugees and the appropriate role of Islam in a Palestinian state. I hope that someday this too might be the subject of an academic conference.
Second, my colleagues at PON and our cosponsors do not think for a minute that Americans can or should resolve the internal Israeli conflict that was the focus of this conference. Instead, we hope to promote a deeper and more informed dialogue — across academic disciplines, between scholars and those involved in policy, and between Israelis with widely divergent perspectives. Through this conference and the interdisciplinary scholarship that it will generate, we hope to promote new insights into this conflict and others with which it shares similarities. Through this conference and other work, my colleagues and I also hope to encourage political leaders and government officials responsible for making and implementing appropriate resettlement policies to think more clearly about compensation mechanisms and about which means are appropriate to reintegrate fairly and humanely any settlers who may someday be displaced.
In closing, I should add a paragraph about how this summary of the conference proceedings was created. These short pieces are neither verbatim transcripts of the presentations nor full‐blown articles prepared by the presenters after the conference. Instead, students in my Ethnic Conflict Seminar at Harvard Law School attended the conference and took careful notes summarizing each presentation. These in turn were edited and then sent to the presenter for revision and correction. I want to express my gratitude to all of these students for their hard work and to the chairs of each session and the presenters for their prompt attention to the revisions.
NOTES
The creation of this conference summary was a team effort. I extend my thanks to a number of students in the Harvard Law School Ethnic Conflict Seminar that Ehud Eiran and I taught in fall 2004 who acted as rapporteurs for the conference. We thank Lisa Coyle, Tanya Goldman, Isabel Goodman, Shireen Karimi, Laura Krevsky, Sreemati Mitter, Chaim Motzen, Bryan Seeley, and Ada Sheng. Two students in the seminar, Brian Seeley and Edmond Rhys Jones, deserve special thanks for their extremely helpful editorial assistance. We are also grateful to the Negotiation Journal’s editors, Nancy Waters and Mike Wheeler, for their special efforts to see that these proceedings be put into print so promptly. Finally, I would like to offer special thanks to Sandy and Daniel Feldman for their encouragement and financial support for the Settlement Project.
There is a rich academic literature dealing with this interaction, both in the field of labor relations and in international relations. Robert Putnam's notion of “two‐level games” emphasized the idea that the political leaders negotiating across the table at an international level are constrained and influenced by the domestic political negotiations in which they are necessarily involved at the same time at a different level.
