Illustrations by Amalia Rinehart Perhaps the most critical and least acknowledged impediment to the negotiation of a conflict is the manipulation of language. No peace process can come to fruition when representatives from conflicting parties are embroiled in debates on semantics, yet individuals in both government and media inevitably employ strategic language at various stages in the process. Even assuming a common language in diplomatic talk...
WikiCommons With the conclusion of the most recent war between Israel and Hamas, the status quo is reemerging yet again to denote the calm on the contentious border. As many had predicted, the conflict did not, and as of yet has not, moved the peace process forward. Rather, both sides are settling in after the Egypt-brokered ceasefire and seem to be awaiting the next outburst of hostilities as they have countless times before. There is only one...
ade some bold efforts to achieve peace, in such historic agreements including the Oslo Accords and the second Camp David talks. But for all this symmetry, there is one blatantly asymmetrical element to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This element is a dangerous one, and it was illustrated most recently in last week’s Israel-Hamas war: there is a viciousness about certain Palestinian groups and ideologies that threatens to ceaselessly delay the...
iction with the Obama administration and policies that may make Israel more isolated in the international community than ever before. Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu hhave fundamentally different stances on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Much of modern Israeli political discourse regarding the issue focuses on the idea of a two-state solution where a Palestinian state is established in the West Bank and Gaza alongside Israel. Palestinians have call...
...nd much more true with television than with newspapers. Perhaps that’s why, since the early sixties, survey respondents have been more likely to trust the television than the newspaper, should facts presented by the two media conflict. That had been true of radio, too. In a 1941 Roper poll, 38 percent of respondents said that radio provided “more accurate” war news, compared to 21 percent who said the same of newspapers. ABC was a latecomer to th...
l meaning of apartheid and the factual evidence that shows how it does not apply to Israel. Attempts to describe the situation in Israel as “apartheid” adversely oversimplifies and cheapens what is a significantly complicated conflict that demands honest intellectual discourse, not name-calling and rejection. Mr. Abboud argues that when it comes to trying to label Israel, “the root problem with the word ‘apartheid,’ is that it almost always conju...
...currently more than 280,000 Israeli citizens who call the 121 West Bank settlements home. The underlying assumption surrounding the institution of these communities is that the land upon which they have been built belonged to Palestinians pre-1948. However, the fact remains that today the existence of these settlement projects are in violation of Article 49 of the Geneva Convention, which states that “an occupier may not forcibly deport protected...
With every new semester comes the opportunity for a fresh beginning. But as the Palestinian Authority awaits the Security Council vote on its third bid for statehood, any opportunity for novel approaches to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has disappeared from the world stage. The problem: Palestine’s bid for statehood is a blatant attempt to avoid negotiations. Not only does statehood violate earlier agreements, but is also a tremendous steps b...
family and perhaps a positive point in the ability of negotiations to bring about results (albeit greatly belated and not exactly game-changing or inspiring), a lot that can be extracted from this ordeal toward understanding conflict in the Middle East. The most glaring point is that both sides engage in a dual system of morality – one for their friends and one for their foes. Rationalizing their actions, both sides uncritically accept their act...
side. To the east, King Abdullah harbored no enmity towards Israel. The conservative and still very much empowered Bashar al-Assad posed no serious threat, and the recent 2006 Israel-Lebanon war left Hezbollah exhausted from conflict. But most importantly, on Gaza’s southern border Mubarak in Egypt was just as much suspicious of Hamas in Gaza as was Israel. A time-old enemy of Islamist movements, Mubarak long suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood i...
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