The Biden Administration's promotion of the two-state solution

For politics or for peace?

‘Child orphaned by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’

Source: Shutterstock

[Text as published in the Jewish Independent, Western Sky Communications Ltd., Feb.12, 2021]

Did Israel’s unilateral exit from Gaza bring peace? History informs us that solutions driven by powerful third parties or unilaterally imposed by one party ultimately fail to create lasting peace. These solutions are usually intended to satisfy some political interest of the promoting party. Political answers rarely eradicate the deep drivers of inter-group conflicts. As well, the leap to a simplistic or stock remedy is not the way to bring about positive and lasting change. Solutions that seem obvious too often sustain conflicts and at times make them worse.

The complex dimensions that fuel the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the consequences of solutions can only ever be genuinely appreciated by the parties involved. Establishing social cohesion requires all those involved in a conflict to be engaged in crafting the way out and forward.

For those involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Biden administration’s promotion of the two-state solution de facto limits their comprehension of each other, their relationship and their ownership of the circumstances. The best involvement for the administration is to employ its significant leverage to bring the parties back to the beginning. Meaningful conflict resolution work truly begins through having the parties first determine how they will speak to each other. If folks can’t first agree on what proper civil discourse is, then how will understanding and empathy ever flow? Once listening and talking with each other, the parties can collaboratively undertake a process of jointly exploring the conflict. Only after there is shared knowledge can the conversation shift to finding resolutions.

There are examples of such successful paths towards peace. One is the relative success of the end of apartheid in South Africa, where exterior pressures did not shape the outcome so much as motivate the parties onto a journey in which they together crafted their future.

Beyond political structures, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is also carried in fears embedded in the cultural narratives held and passed down by the parties. Social divisions, as well, have entrenched an absence of human attachments that are foundational to community cohesion.

There are many embedded layers in the conflict that must be dealt with in a multi-factor strategy. Therefore, the current inclination by the Biden administration to again look at the conflict purely as an “interest-based” problem to be solved, is also not a new beginning. As with Egypt, a problem-solving approach created an armistice with Israel that does not look so much like peace.

Resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict requires room for solving problems, but also time for insights, for the work of amending old conflict narratives, for the reframing of collective and individual perceptions and reactions, and for the transformation of relationships. Each of these areas is an approach within current conflict resolution theory and methodology. Let’s get more sophisticated and use all the tools we have.

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