Middle East Peace Process, The

Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Publication Year: 1998

A comprehensive, interdisciplinary look at the history of and complex issues surrounding the peace process in the Middle East. This volume offers a series of focused analyses of various aspects of the peace process. This interdisciplinary book includes insights developed by scholars in such diverse disciplines as anthropology, economics, history, law, political science, social psychology, and international relations. Although the book is strongest in dealing with Israel’s political behavior, it also focuses specifically on the Palestinians and on Jordan. The contributors combine the perspective of the last few years; the insights of a variety of social science disciplines, making the complexity of the Middle East situation more manageable and penetrable; and offer a commitment to an analysis which is relatively detached from everyday politics and non-normative in tone and in essence.

Published by: State University of New York Press

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The peace process in the Middle East has been pursued, in one fonn or another, for thirty years. Thus, a short time after the 1967 war, intensive negotiations on the language of a Security Council resolution began, leading eventually to the famed Resolution 242. Nevertheless, for most of the last three decades the peace process was frozen, showing only on rare occasions (e.g., at Camp David in 1978) signs of life. ...

PART I: Historical Perspectives

1. The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process in Historical Perspective

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pp. 3-20

There is something surreal about current Arab-Israeli negotiations and our rapid assimilation of ideas and images recently considered fantastical. The overwhelming sense of awe at these direct contacts, perhaps best captured by that first public handshake ...

2. Historiography as an Educational Project: The Historians' Debate in Israel and the Middle East Peace Process

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pp. 21-38

The tentative title for this article was ''The Historical Debate in Israel as a Precondition for the Peace Process." Yet, this title seemed to me inappropriate for two reasons: First, peace should be concluded between enemies not only once their antagonistic psychological postures have changed, but primarily because they have come to realize that continuing the struggle is futile and too costly, and that their interests would be better served by peace. ...

PART II: Peace and Israeli Attitudes

3. The Peace Process and Competing Challenges to the Dominant Zionist Discourse

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pp. 41-60

The formulation of collective identity is an ongoing political and cultural process. It is a continuous struggle over the delineation of the lines of inclusion and exclusion in the given social unit, over the criteria for such delineation, and over the authority to draw and to enforce group boundaries. ''The most fundamental type of categorization that elicits affective or evaluative responses is 'us' vs. 'them'" ...

4. Two People Apart: Israeli Jews' and Arabs , Attitudes Toward the Peace Process

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pp. 61-84

Israeli politicians and analysts often argue that the signing of the Declaration of Principles (DOP) with the Palestinians (in September 1993) marks a strategic shift in the relations in the Mid-East, and thus necessitates a review of the nation's collective perceptions. The main purpose of this research was to find out whether this argument has been accepted at the grassroots level, ...

PART III: Peace and Israeli Institutions

5. Political Institutions and Conflict Resolution: The Israeli Supreme Court and the Peace Process'

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pp. 87-106

Supreme Courts are political institutions that legitimize the modem state. They legalize its power and transform its existence into the language of obligations. Within democratic settings, in various sociopolitical fabrics, Supreme Courts operate under cultural and structural constraints. The theoretical issue surrounding Supreme Court ...

6. The Peace Process and Societal-Military Relations in Israel

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pp. 107-120

Over a quarter of a century has passed since Professor Michael Howard focused academic attention on the interactions between military institutions and the societies from which they are drawn. This "forgotten dimension of strategy," Howard argued, has in the past made decisive contributions to a nation's success--or failure-in war. In the future, ...

PART IV: Peace and the Palestinians

7. The PLO and the Peace Process

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pp. 123-140

The Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) bona fide entry in the peace process formally occurred on September 13, 1993, when Chairman of the Executive Committee of the PLO, Yasser Arafat, stood on the White House lawn alongside Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, to witness the signing of the Declaration of Principles (DOP) and mutual recognition ...

8. Palestinian Christians and the Peace Process: The Dilemma of a Minority

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pp. 141-158

One of the less researched aspects of the Palestinian society and the Middle East society at large is minorities.¹ The discussion of this topic is still considered by many Arabs, both Muslims and Christians, as dividing the Arab nation and undermining its unity and, therefore, a topic that should be avoided.² The Christians form 4 percent of the Palestinian Arab population of Jerusalem and the West Bank (approximately 13,000 in Jerusalem and 30,000 ...

PART V: Jordan and Peace

9. Jordan in the Middle East Peace Process: From War to Peace with Israel

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pp. 161-178

On October 26, 1994, King Hussein of Jordan and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel signed a peace treaty marking an official end to the state of war that had existed between their two countries for more than forty years. This chapter examines the causes of the Jordanian decision to conclude a formal peace treaty with Israel, and offers a preliminary assessment of some of the political and economic consequences of peace for the Hashimite kingdom. ...

10. Israel's "Jordanian Option": A Post-Oslo Reassessment

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pp. 179-196

This chapter takes a closer look at the impact the Israeli-Palestinian dialogue has had since September, 1993 upon one of the more permanent fixtures of pre-Oslo literature on Arab-Israeli peacemaking (what commonly passes under the generic term, "the Jordanian option") ...

PART VI: Peace and Economics

11. Labor in a Peaceful Middle East: Regional Prosperity or Social Dumping?

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pp. 199-222

In the era of peace in the Middle East, boundaries and borders will change their meaning. No longer will they continue to signify the geopolitics of hostility. No longer will they erect impermeable cultural, economic, and social separation. Like borders in other peaceful regions, they will blur nationalist separation with regional integration. In the era of peace in the Middle East, ...

12. The Peace Dividend: The Economy of Israel and the Peace Process

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pp. 223-236

It has been a long standing tenet in international political economy that integrating national economies tends to reduce conflict between states. This tenet was behind the Western economic order established after World War II, whereby the Marshall Plan, GATT, and the European market made former belligerent so interdependent that the cost of military conflicts became prohibitive. ...

Epilogue: The Peace Process and Israel's Political Kulturkampf

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pp. 237-264

The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995, could be described in two different ways. First, the assassination could be looked upon narrowly, primarily as a political act, designed to remove Israel's prime minister from the scene in order to halt the peace process, an act ...

References

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pp. 265-290

About the Contributors

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pp. 291-294

Index

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pp. 295-300

E-ISBN-13: 9781438415765
E-ISBN-10: 1438415761
Print-ISBN-13: 9780791435410
Print-ISBN-10: 0791435415

Page Count: 300
Publication Year: 1998

Series Title: SUNY series in Israeli Studies
Series Editor Byline: Russell Stone