Negotiating Under Fire: Preserving Peace Talks in the Face of Terror Attacks (review)

If only the Oslo Accords had been successful, we would have been inundated by a plethora of studies that would have explained the reasons for their success, providing lessons for other protracted conflicts throughout the world (see under the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland). But instead, the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians that was launched in Oslo in 1993 and reached its bleak conclusion after the eruption of the al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000 utterly failed. Consequently, post-Oslo literature has tried to explain the reasons for its breakdown and the lessons that should be drawn for other peace negotiations worldwide. Negotiating Under Fire adds to this extensive body of literature that has attempted to explain “why Oslo failed” by focusing on one particular aspect, defined by Matthew Levitt as an “acute security crisis” and the way Palestinian and Israeli decision-makers reacted to this challenge in the midst of the peace negotiations.

Levitt argues that “the impact of acute security crises on ongoing negotiations represents one of the most significant facets of modern conflict resolution theory to remain under-researched” (p. 3). He offers, therefore, a theory of crisis management under conditions of ongoing negotiations, so as to preserve and protect peace processes in the face of acute security crises with which they are bound to be challenged given the oftentimes violent resistance from opposition groups to the peace process. An acute security crisis, according to Levitt, involves a high level of intensity, is unanticipated, and constitutes a violent breach of security resulting in casualties. It is followed by the threat of further violent conflict and it represents a wider threat to an expanded array of core interests.

The book focuses on three major “acute security crisis” events during the Oslo years (1993–2000) which threatened to negatively alter the dynamics of the peace negotiations: the February 1994 Hebron massacre committed by Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli settler who killed 29 Palestinian worshipers in the Cave of the Patriarchs and wounded about 200 others; the kidnapping, failed rescue attempt, and consequent murder of the Israeli solider Nachshon Wachsman in November 1994; and the series of Palestinian suicide bombings carried out in Israel in March 1996. All three crises posed a direct challenge to national security and challenged the parties to crack down on extremists within their camp or lose their status as the legitimate representatives of their people in the eyes of their negotiating partners. Each of the case studies is covered in a full length chapter providing a historical narrative of the event itself, leaders’ perceptions of the intensity of the crisis, the impact of the crisis on the negotiation process, and the extent of the Israeli and Palestinian leaders’ ability and willingness to continue the negotiations.

The study analyzes how these three events impacted the authority of the decision-makers in the eyes of their constituencies, their legitimacy to pursue negotiations, and their credibility in the eyes of the other party. This approach attempts to uncover the changes in the negotiation environment and their impact on the ability to continue the negotiations.

In a nutshell, the book attempts to show first, how parties vested in peace negotiation can protect that process from the effects of the acute security crises that are bound to disrupt it; and second, what parties can do to shape their crisis response so that negotiations are best preserved. Levitt argues that this could be done through preemption — insulating the negotiation process from the effects of acute security crises — and through formulating a crisis management response once the crisis is taking place to minimize its impact on ongoing negotiations.

Levitt’s book is an interesting addition to the literature on crisis management in general and to analyses of the failure of the Oslo Accords in particular. It also demonstrates how, by their very nature, peace processes are messy and how challenging it is to overcome protracted conflicts...