The Twenty-First Century ‘No War, No Peace’: From the Second Intifada to the Stalemate of the Protracted Peace Process

Abstract

This chapter examines the period from the Second Intifada (2001) to nowadays, following the failure of the implementation of the Oslo Accords. It suggests that a politics of ‘no war, no peace’ has been established and normalized, while cultural violence has deepened despite the efforts of the longest peace process in contemporary history. It examines the effects at the observable level of the stalemate of the protracted peace process and the institutionalization of dehumanization as a radical political agenda. One of the main effects of the now stalled peace process, it explores how peace has been subcontracted by the very actors of the dying peace process that act as donors and sponsors of an increasing number of civil society organizations (CSOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have been involved in the peacebuilding process by bridging reconciliation in the societal level. The argument developed is that the dual and simultaneous processes of dehumanization and peace-less reconciliation that work in parallel in this conflict suggests that in the almost absence of the peace process there have emerged and intensified several activities that seek to counteract the already verified tendency of dehumanization in the societal level, pointing to alternative routes and their potential for peacemaking.

This chapter examines the last phase of the Israeli-Palestinian protracted peace process, corresponding to the period from the Second Intifada (2001) to nowadays. The turn to the twenty-first century was accompanied by another important change in International Relations, yet less exuberant and disruptive than the end of the Cold War about just a decade before. The extensive international interventionism during the 1990s and the Western attempts to fill in the ideological and political gap that was created by the disintegration of the Soviet Union, led to a growing resistance on the ground. Some of the peacebuilding and statebuilding initiatives of this decade finished with no sign of success while others have just contributed to the deterioration of the situation after trampled power transitions that culminated in anything but liberal democratic states. Furthermore, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the war on terror which ended up in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the technological advancements employed in the arms industry that allowed for a different type of warfare from afar, changed forever the face of international interventionism and marked an important shift in the international peace architecture in the twenty-first century. With regard to Israel and Palestine, following the failure of the implementation of the Oslo Accords, the situation of social detachment between the two peoples became even more evident, with both symbolic and material manifestations of exclusionary politics and radicalization.

The final phase of the historiography of the Israeli-Palestinian protracted peace process corresponds to a period in which its existence was maintained more by discourses and the social imaginary of a perspective for peace, insofar as the actual attempts to promote a negotiated solution have all shown little success. As we shall see, in the turn to the twentieth century, a politics of ‘no war, no peace’ has been established and normalized, while cultural violence has deepened in the aftermath of the Oslo Accords. Section 7.1 examines the effects at the observable level of the stalemate of the protracted peace process and the (re)institutionalization of dehumanization as a radical political agenda. Section 7.2 explores one of the main effects of the now stalled peace process, being how peace has been subcontracted by the very international actors that have acted as mediators in the negotiations between the two parties. They have acted as donors and sponsors of an increasing number of civil society organizations (CSOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have been involved in the peacebuilding process by bridging reconciliation in the societal level. Section 7.3 discusses empirical examples that point to new avenues for conflict transformation from dehumanization to peace-less reconciliation. The argument developed is that the dual and simultaneous processes of dehumanization and peace-less reconciliation that work in parallel in this conflict suggests that in the almost absence of the peace process there have emerged and intensified several activities that seek to counteract the already verified tendency of dehumanization in the societal level, pointing to alternative routes and their potential for peacemaking.

1 Political Radicalization and the Increase of Cultural Violence

Is there a clear bridge linking the interim stage with the final stage to reassure us that the interim stage will not be the final one?

Mahmoud Darwish (1993)¹

This is the original, ancient home of the people of Israel and we will build another Elkana (…). We will extend Jewish sovereignty to all the settlements as part of the land of Israel, as part of the State of Israel

Benjamin Netanyahu (2019) ²

The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s quote from 1993 cited in the epigraph of this section perfectly captures the effects of the protracted nature of the peace process until our days. Whether the reader agrees that this process has started in 1947 or considers that its beginning goes back to the 1990s, it is undeniably protracted after more than 30 years of existence (or, as I have argued, more than 70 years), being easily classified as one of the longest peace processes in contemporary history. It is true that it has not been a continuous process. The phases depicted and analyzed so far in this book showed a series of interrupted and sometimes discontinuous attempts to peacemaking, usually interleaved with wars or other types of armed conflicts. Nevertheless, the vocabulary of a peace process has persisted after the turn to the twenty-first century, thus making it even more relevant to the construction and transformation of perceptions, practices, identities and interests within both societies, regardless of whether such process exists in reality or is just a discursive creation.

The most important change in the peace process in its last and contemporary phase is that it became practically frozen, despite definitely not inexistent, since it remained part of the political vocabulary and the historic imaginary of the two peoples. What effectively happened in practice was that the concerns expressed by Mahmoud Darwish in 1993 actually came true. With few adaptations that could not but have happened with the passing of time, the transitional interim period for the Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank occupied territories and Gaza have turned so far into the final one. In this context, radicalization within both sides took over, leading to the explicit construction of exclusionary politics, discourses and infrastructures (such as the check points and the so-called Separation Wall) in the Israeli side, condensed in the words of the former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2019, quoted in the beginning of this section.

It is true that most of the decisions negotiated in the Interim Agreement were not even applied. The self-rule experience of the Palestinians was only conceded in 22 percent of the territory and the measures destined to promote joint development and mutual cooperation turned to be in fact mechanisms for facilitating Israeli control over the Palestinian political will (Dana 2021: 30). Also, most of the adaptations of the former situation that occurred with the passing of time worked against the Palestinians, such as the building of the ‘Separation Wall’, accompanied by a policy of restriction of movement through its checkpoints; the construction of new settlements in the West Bank and the extension of older ones; the very long Gaza Strip blockade; and several others that will be further addressed in this section. The situation of political immobility that was created by the failure of the Oslo Agreements became, and still is, somewhat Kafkaesque. After the Palestinian victory that was the recognition of their self-determination claims,³ and the actual institutionalization of those claims into (what was supposed to be) a temporary proto-state structure—the Palestinian Authority (PA)—it was common sense that the solution to the Question of Palestine was close, and that the construction of an independent Palestinian state was just a matter of time. Nevertheless, after the almost ten years that encompassed the Oslo period, from 1991 to 2000, Palestinian politics has drifted during new times of crises that came along the Second Intifada (Khalidi 2006: 141–142) and, later, the death of their historical leader, Yasser Arafat, in 2004.

Before approaching this new period of the now undeniably interconnected Israeli-Palestinian history, it is worth noting that this third phase of the conflict is also marked by new events that somehow disrupted the international environment. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, promoted a renewed interest and a change in Washington’s policies regarding peace and its definitions in the periphery of the world but, most importantly, in the Middle East and North Africa (Pappé 2010: 277). While the 1990s represented a change in interventionism that, as mentioned in the last chapter, included new peacebuilding mechanisms and several other actors like humanitarian and transitional justice agencies, the turn to the twenty-first century did not represent a serious rupture with the former period but was marked by a “renewed interest in the question of state fragility, and the principles of statebuilding have become pervasive not just in responses to conflict but the governance of the global South more generally” (Sabaratnam 2011: 13–14). Furthermore, transnational terrorism became a new kind of threat that although was not bounded to a specific country or territory, it became associated with Islam and the so-called Arab World. All this converged to strengthening of US military, diplomatic, financial and political interference in the territories that were classified by President George W. Bush as part of the ‘axis of evil’, and their surroundings.

In this context, what Edward Said called “the end of the peace process” (Said 2003) was materialized by both the failure of another intense round of negotiations in Camp David in the summer of 2000 and the escalation of hostilities between the parties that marked this last attempt of the Clinton administration, culminating in the Palestinian Second, more violent, Intifada. The very tone of official political declarations from this period had increased after the fatigue and mistrust that the stalemate in the implementation of the Oslo Agreements provoked. In July 25, 2000, the US President Bill Clinton declared on a Statement after the Camp David Peace Talks that “after 14 days of intense negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, I have concluded with regret that they will not be able to reach an agreement at this time”.⁴ After the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, and the subsequent election of Benjamin Netanyahu for the first time, Israeli policies regarding their basic guidelines for negotiations became even more unyielding. According to Ilan Pappé, “as the 1996 Israeli elections have shown, the majority of Jewish voters were willing to enforce the Israeli version of the Oslo accord even more harshly, as advocated by Likud” (Pappé 2010: 273). Four years later, the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s reaction to the stalemate in negotiations in Camp David reinforced this view. In his Statement after the Camp David Talks of July 25, 2000,⁵ he justified the failure of negotiations by declaring that

we were not prepared to relinquish three things: the security of Israel, those things that are holy to Israel, and the unity of our people. If we will be faced with the alternative between compromising one of these and a confrontation, the choice is clear to every Israeli [the italic is mine].

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), on its turn, rejected the proposals made by President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak, that included settling for an accord that would undermine the right of return for refugees expelled by Israel in 1948.

The results of the Second Camp David Summit were portrayed by the Palestinians as another humiliation. The negative representations regarding the failure of the peace process in the Palestinian official and public discourses, alongside the events that were to take place next, had profound consequences in the interactions between the two peoples and, more specifically, in the levels of both cultural and direct violence against the ‘other’. On September 28, 2000, a congressman from the Likud Party (opposition to Ehud Barak’s Labor), and former military and Defense Minister, Ariel Sharon, who would be elected Israeli Prime Minister in the next year, entered—uninvited and accompanied by a heavy military escort—into the Al-Haram Al-Sharif Plaza (Temple Mount) in the Jerusalem Old City. Although this place is considered holy by both Israelis and Palestinians, it has been administered by Islamic authorities since the end of the Six Day War in 1967, since there exist nowadays two important buildings for Islam, the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. This was seen by Palestinians as a deliberate provocation and a power demonstration (in Arafat’s words, it was a “premeditated desecration […] planned in collusion with the Israeli Government”⁶) and led to a wave of rage that was already connected to the latent generalized feelings of injustice, frustration and deceit that became associated with the decay of the Oslo Process.

The popular protests that followed this incident brought together two agendas. The first one was the fury created by Ariel Sharon’s action, which may be considered an explicit affront to the Palestinian people and their claims of self-determination. And the second one was the disappointment with the peace process and, more importantly, the absolute opposition to what was considered a shameful and undignified offer made in the context of the recent Camp David talks. As put by Rashid Khalidi,

The intifada was a direct result of the disillusionment of most of the once-hopeful Palestinian population of the occupied territories with nine years of a “peace process” that had deferred statehood indefinitely while in practice allowing for the consecration of occupation, the expansion of Israeli settlements, and increasingly severe new restrictions on the movement of the Palestinian populations. (Khalidi 2013: 38)

However, it is worth noting that the popular protests that gave birth to the Al-Aqsa Intifada did not initiate as a violent movement. The violence of the Intifada was a product of the disproportionate reaction of the Israeli border police that shot dead 13 unarmed Palestinian citizens that protested in the next day (Usher 2003). According to Ilan Pappé, “after the deaths after Sharon’s visit, the Palestinian resentment took another form: old and new Palestinian militias […] took up suicide bombing as the sole way of ending occupation” (Pappé 2010: 277). The brutal and powerful Israeli reactions, that Yasser Arafat classified as “the wave of savage violence that our Palestinian people have been subjected to”,⁷ led to another escalation of violence that, this time, impacted Israeli individual security and standard of living in an unprecedented way.

Once again, cultural violence gained strength, and this can be seen in the content of the declarations about the ‘other’ made in this period. Those either implied that the other group’s culture was imminently violent or that their people’s nature was simply deceitful. The mutual provocations in the official and public discourses started even before the election of Ariel Sharon, in March 2001. Fatah’s Secretary General Marwan al-Barghuthi declared on October 26 of the previous year, in an interview to Le Monde, that the Palestinians should not restore peace and order as they had done during the years of the Oslo Process, since the consequence had been the deepening of Israeli efforts to irreversibly change the situation on the ground. In his words,

after seven years, we have experience of the Israelis (…): they never let go of anything without being obliged to do so by force. […] The Israelis want everything: Peace, security, stability, the settlements, and a Palestinian state without Jerusalem and without real sovereignty. That is impossible. They must leave the territories, and there will be no more confrontations.

Interestingly, similar representations of the ‘other’ were made on the Israeli side in the same period. On December 26, a Ha’aretz right-wing Zionist commentator, Yoel Marcus, wrote that

the Palestinian leaders […] negotiate while shooting their six-guns, [and even so] are getting things that they never even dreamed of getting. Yet they incite their public to attack us, while they never stop whining and complaining. […] Instead of leading his people down the road to conciliation with Israel, he is leading them down the road to terrorism, murder and anti-Semitic incitement.

In the same text, he also reminded the Palestinians of the imbalance of power between them and the Israelis by warning that “Israel can live with the status quo for many years and with much less trouble than the Palestinians. They need our approval if they want to set up an independent state (…)”.⁸

It is important to note, though, that those two examples also show that the changes⁹ promoted by the brief Oslo Era were in fact consolidated, having modified the vocabulary that had persisted for more than 40 years, from 1947 to the end of the 1980s (the first phase of the peace process analyzed in Chap. 5). Thus, dehumanization in this last phase gained a new, more literal instead of psychological, dimension, as the denial of the other people’s existence as an identity group was no longer the main goal of dominant narratives in the contemporary phase of the conflict. At this point, it is important to refer back to the definition of dehumanization developed in Chap. 3. Complementarily to conceptualizations that aim to explain the conditions that allow for genocide, war, human subjugation and slavery, mostly found in postcolonial literature that considers dehumanization primarily as the act of treating the ‘other’ as an animal, deprived of human status and, therefore, subject to direct violence (Fanon 1963; Dussel 1974: 35–36; Levinas 1998; Maldonado-Torres 2008), dehumanization is defined in this book as a psychological process that is related with the denial of identity and community (Kelman 1973, 2001; Burton 1990) and whose greatest expressions can be traced within manifestations of cultural violence, consequently allowing for the reinforcement of structural and direct violence (Galtung 1990). The consequences of dehumanization as a type of cultural violence, and its pervasive impact in the dimension of structural violence, became more obvious in this phase, whereas in the first decades of the conflict it seemed easier to connect the symbolic violence entrenched in official narratives and discourses to the levels of direct violence on the ground.

An example of this can be found in events that took place in the next year following the beginning of the Second Intifada. In the context of fear and insecurity felt by most Israelis in face of the violent uprisings, the person responsible for the eruption of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, Ariel Sharon, was elected Israeli Prime Minister. Mandated by the majority of the Israeli public opinion and electorate, his policies were even harsher than those of his predecessors. During the five years he remained in office until he became incapacitated by a stroke, Sharon

acted ruthlessly in expanding Jewish settlements, demolishing Palestinian houses, constructing a ‘security barrier’ through the West Bank, undermining the Palestinian Authority, and breaking up the West Bank into a collection of enclaves with no territorial contiguity. In a word, the overarching aim of the government was politicide: to deny the Palestinians any independent political existence in Palestine. (Shlaim 2010: xiii).

In the context of the extreme violence and absolute lack of confidence expressed in the continuous accusations between the two parties in the aftermath of the failure of the Oslo Accords, international efforts to reverse this situation could not reach a favorable outcome. In the meanwhile,

Israeli authorities kept up their domination of every aspect of Palestinian life: border closures, abuse at checkpoints, house demolitions, the assassination of military and political activists, mass arrests and the start of the construction of a wall separating the territories of the West Bank from Israeli territory.¹⁰ (Pappé 2010: 278)

In May 2003, the US administration alongside the European Union, Russia and the United Nations—known as the Middle East Quartet or the Madrid Quartet that was established in the beginning of the Oslo Process—attempted another approach to revive the dying peace process. The Roadmap for Peace established another set of steps, this time “with clear phases, timelines, target dates, and benchmarks” (UN 2003) for building peace in Israel and Palestine that were supposed to culminate in the establishment of the Palestinian state in 2005. The Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas’ Speech at the Palestinian Legislative Council on April 29, 2003,¹¹ connected the escalation of the conflict and the wave of violence of the Second Intifada to the loss of hope and desperation that were a consequence, among others, of the several failures of the peace process. Notwithstanding, he still urged the Palestinian people and leadership to maintain their hopes in the process:

The peace process has gone through essential failings and major deteriorations, to the point that we have now reached the most difficult stage of this bloody and escalating conflict. While we should learn from the lessons of the past, what we are living under does not cause us to lose hope in the benefits of peace, or to turn our backs on Arab and international initiatives that aim to achieve peace.

Once again—just as its predecessors—this negotiated accord maintained several flaws from previous documents connected to the peace process and, for this reason, constituted another failed attempt at promoting a peaceful transformation in the region. For example, it failed to define clear borders for this future state and insisted on the definition of the starting point for the conflict as 1967, thus permanently excluding from the negotiations the situation of the descendants of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians that became refugees during the first Arab-Israeli War in 1948, as a consequence of what the Palestinians call the Nakba (catastrophe).

Although his leadership and political legitimacy was already being questioned both nationally and internationally at that time, the already mentioned death of Yasser Arafat, in 2004, culminated into a huge demobilization of his political movement, Fatah, that faced a great loss of political capital among Palestinians. After more than ten years of the first Oslo Agreement, the idea that a solution for the conflict through peaceful means was possible became more and more discredited in the Palestinian society. In addition to this, the inability of the Fatah leadership to provide public services such as health, security and education for the areas under its jurisdiction, the high levels of unemployment in the Palestinian society and their further deterioration due to the restrictions imposed by the Israeli building of the wall and the accusations of corruption and nepotism of the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority also collaborated to undermine the legitimacy of this movement (Khalidi 2006: 143–150). The main consequence of the power void created by the loss of the symbol of the Palestinian resistance and the very face of the Palestinians internationally, similarly to what had happened in Israeli elections, was the radicalization of Palestinian politics.

In the 2006 elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council, the radical Islamist movement Hamas emerged victorious, reflecting the discontentment of the Palestinian population with their living situation and the ineffectiveness of the peace process efforts. The results of the scrutiny led to a sort of civil war between Fatah and Hamas factions that resulted in the cut of funds by the members of the Quartet, which were the main sponsors of the Palestinian Authority (Le More 2008). This, alongside the Israeli decision to withhold taxes collected on behalf of the PA, resulted in the collapse of the already fragile Palestinian economy. In 2007, the Hamas occupied the Gaza Strip—from which Israel had withdrew unilaterally, following its 2004 Disengagement Plan¹²—that already counted on its own version of the Israeli ‘security fence’¹³ built in the mid-1990s, “which had effectively sealed off the Strip and turned it into a kind of a huge prison camp” (Pappé 2010: 278). The Hamas constituted an autonomous government in the Strip, creating a situation of separation between the two Palestinian leaderships and correspondent territories and peoples. Israel has continued to react violently to this day against the Hamas and the citizens of the Gaza Strip, imposing a blockade of people and goods, as well as engaging in several wars¹⁴ that have turned the situation into the worst ongoing humanitarian crisis of the twenty-first century.

All new developments in the peace process were not able to promote real changes in the now already established and uncontested status quo. US attempts at promoting another round of bilateral talks, launched in the Annapolis Conference on November 27, 2007,¹⁵ are an example of this. In his speech to this conference, the US President George W. Bush declared, in a statement previously agreed upon by the two parties, that the main goal of this new process was to “conclude an agreement before the end of 2008” based on the previous road map initiative. This time, according to the President, both parties had agreed to resolve “all outstanding issues, including the core issues, without exception (…), in furtherance of the goal of two states, Israel and Palestine”. But this endeavor also failed due to the Israeli Operation Cast Lead, launched in 2008 against the Hamas, that promoted the occupation of the Gaza Strip during the negotiations of the peace process. This operation was largely (mis)represented in the Israeli media coverage, that relied mostly on official government sources, depicting the Palestinians as terrorists and the operation as an uncontested necessity in order to provide security to the Israeli territory and its people (Shlaim 2010: 307). This view disregarded the great asymmetry between the parties of the conflict and contributed to the further dehumanization of Palestinians within the Israeli public opinion.¹⁶ The Palestinians refused to resume talks for the next couple of years and the relationship between the two parties further deteriorated with mutual accusations of dishonesty and lack of real intentions to engage with a lasting peace.

The last peacemaking attempt that deserves attention, although not necessarily being part of a peace process, is the Palestinian unilateral approach to the UN. After trying in vain to rescue the peace plans of the Roadmap in 2010, the successor of Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, had started to change his discourse to the impossibility of achieving peace through bilateral negotiations and decided to embark in what became known as the Palestinian UN Bid. In the context of the loss of power and political legitimacy of the Fatah-led PLO and PA, the Palestinian UN Bid was another form of instrumentalization of the peace process for internal political gains, this time performed by the Palestinians (Ricarte 2013: 60–61). Nevertheless, this strategy that aimed at changing perceptions and representations toward gaining international recognition to the leadership and the cause, as well as internal political legitimacy, in fact succeeded in the symbolic realm and it marks the further consolidation of the change in the Palestinian leadership approaches and discourses to building peace.¹⁷ This strategy consisted in denouncing the impasses of the direct negotiations with Israel, the requests to allied countries for unilateral recognition of the Palestinian state in the 1967 borders and, finally, the attempt to gain its recognition in the United Nations, what failed due to the pre-announced veto of the US in the Security Council (for more on this topic, see Ricarte 2013). Nevertheless, this attempt indeed had promoted symbolic gains for the Palestinians but, at the same time, has not been able to guarantee real changes in the imbalance of power between the two parties of the conflict.

In terms of the Israeli society, 2009 was the year in which a pro-settler coalition government headed by the Likud Party came to power. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was elected again as head of this government and, although facing serious charges of corruption and dwelling on his increasing inability to constitute a viable coalition, still remained in power until 2021, becoming the longest serving Israeli Prime Minister. During the 12 uninterrupted years of his government, Bibi, as he is known in the Israeli society, has benefited from his discourse focused on fear and security. In 2015, Netanyahu won the elections—that had appeared to be a lost poll before this statement—with the promise that he would not agree with the establishment of a Palestinian state,¹⁸ breaking with a decade’s long consensus.

From 2009 to 2015, Netanyahu himself spoke in favor of the two-states solution many times, including in front of the US President Barack Obama, although in practice his government had intensified the politics of settlements expansion, collective punishment and discrimination against the Palestinians (Landy 2011: 8–10). According to Sandra Pogodda, the results of most recent Israeli elections vis a-vis the discourse of the elected candidates show that the Israeli strategy of boycotting negotiations is widely accepted in the Israeli society and that security defined as the maintenance or even deepening of the status quo is the formula that meets most of the electorate priorities (Pogodda 2016: 406). This takes us back to the second quotation cited in the epigraph of this chapter. In April 2019, Netanyahu promised he would annex the territories of the West Bank and, right before the September elections, he added to this proposal the occupied territories of the Jordan Valley and the settlements. Facing serious charges of corruption, abuse of power and being considered by the public opinion, after his third mandate, a despotic leader with few inclinations to democracy, Netanyahu was nevertheless not pushed away from power until 2021. The second stalemate in Israeli elections in the same year converged in the Trump administration declaration in November 2019 that the US no longer considered illegal the building of settlements in the occupied territories.¹⁹

Ever since, the peace process has continued to exist in the political and public vocabularies but ceased to effectively reach any type of follow up. Several were the challenges faced by the stillbirth attempts to reactivate the peace process in the last ten years. First, as pointed by Rashid Khalidi,

The enduring, profound, and destructive split in Palestinian ranks between Fateh and Hamas, and therefore between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, dominated by rival “Palestinian Authorities” […] made a unified consensus on Palestinian strategy, and therefore successful negotiations, impossible. (Khalidi 2013: 69–70)

An era of normalization of the conflict has been established, punctuated by frequent episodes of direct violence that have impacted less and less the gross of the Israeli population but that has deepened structural and cultural violence, that I referred in the title of this section as of ‘no war, no peace’. This chapter will not focus on the peace initiatives that followed, since they were unable to perform considerable change, either in reinforcing or transforming dehumanization in discourses and interactions, as most people simply started to disregard those efforts by believing that they were nothing but a farce.²⁰

Next section will deal with the consequences of the stalemate of the Israeli-Palestinian protracted peace process insofar as peacemaking is concerned. As we shall see, while the peace process has become stalled, other initiatives have flourished which aimed at promoting peace in the margins of the formal negotiated agreements between elites. These are a consequence of the paralysis of the peace process but have also been developed within its context, considering these initiatives have been supported by the main sponsors of the peace process, leading to what I call a politics of subcontracting peace.

In conclusion, dehumanization in this last phase under analysis has been marked by a more literal, instead of psychological, dimension, as the denial of the other people’s existence as an identity group has no longer been the main goal of dominant narratives in the contemporary phase of this conflict. Nevertheless, as has been argued, the changes in the symbolic dimension performed by the Oslo Process in the 1990s were not accompanied by real improvements at the practical realm. Instead, the politics of dehumanization can be considered to have even intensified since Israeli policies have institutionalized and legalized the already existing discrimination and denial of self-determination to the Palestinian people. Ultimately, these have promoted a legitimization and justification of violence based on identity considerations, impacting the everyday lives of the Palestinian people under occupation, siege (in the case of the people of Gaza) and living in the State of Israel either as citizens or residents. This has also affected the Israeli and Palestinian public opinions, thus deteriorating even further their relationships. This has been expressed both in the increase of violence against the ‘other’ and the legitimization and reinforcement in local politics of radical leaders, contributing to a definite detachment from the peace process efforts and adding to the cycle of protractedness.

2 Subcontracting Peace: Reconciliation as an Everyday Process in the Twenty-First Century

States, however, cannot do the job alone. We need an active civil society and a dynamic private sector. Both occupy an increasingly large and important share of the space formerly reserved for States alone, and it is plain that the goals outlined here will not be achieved without their full engagement.

UN (2005)

The turn to the twenty-first century is marked by the collapse of the peace process and the increase of violence and social detachment between Israelis and Palestinians. As last chapter has shown, the Oslo Process activated the political/institutional and moral/cultural dimensions of reconciliation by irreversibly recognizing the Palestinian identity and their agency within the peace process, changing forever the lexicon of the conflict, as well as the formula for its resolution and the understanding about the actors who were deemed to be relevant for such solution. Nevertheless, the consequences of the failures regarding the implementation of the Accords and the next stage of negotiations have also promoted the normalization of the conflict and dove the situation deeper into one of the most violent phases of its history (Tonge 2014: 15; Pappé 2010: 275). According to Darweish and Rigby (2015: 53),

it was the anger that the despair brought on by the failure of the [Oslo] peace process that sowed the seeds of the second intifada, a period of violence and horror that in turn created the environment within which the Israeli state could justify its construction of the Separation Wall/Barrier by which it was able to encroach even further onto the diminishing territory of the Palestinians.

There is in fact a widely spread belief on both sides of the conflict that relationships have changed after the Accords. Most people interviewed during the fieldwork performed for this book recollected that before the failure of the Oslo Process, although conflicting relationships had already become a reality at the societal level, at the individual level, interactions between the two peoples were common and frequent.²¹ An example several times mentioned was that it was normal and common to see a Jew buying bread in the Palestinian bakery, as well as the opposite, and that, after Oslo, those kinds of interactions started to become more and more unusual and complicated.²² This and other examples demonstrate that the peace process has played an important role not only in the construction, definition and assertion of each group’s identity but also in the representations made of the ‘other’.

Nevertheless, while the 1990s advanced a more complex framework to deal with reconciliation in protracted conflict situations, what might appear to have been a step back during the almost complete stalemate in the peace process in the last couple of decades can in fact be read as a policy change toward the idea of subcontracting peace.²³ This term is employed here due to the increasing support for new and established CSOs and NGOs from the part of the main actors connected to the peace process (e.g., the UN, the EU and the US), suggesting a shift in the approaches to peacemaking in the twenty-first century as expressed in the quotation cited in the beginning of this section. Incentives for local ownership in building (liberal) peace in this context and others have ranged from financial support to capacity building and personnel. This has not come without consequences. I join the chorus of critical voices, such as Meera Sabaratnam, that problematize the vocabulary and practice of terms like capacity building (Sabaratnam 2017: 1–4), as well as the ones who call attention to the social engineering bias inherent to the conditionalities connected with the ‘opportunities’ offered by external donors (Pogodda and Richmond 2017). However, as the formers and others have shown, those domestic initiatives, instead of simply normalizing conflict, have the potential of promoting a better involvement of the population with the quest for and attempts to build peace, removing the responsibility solely from the political elites and promoting the construction of a dynamic civil society.

Moreover, regardless of whether this ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding (Mac Ginty 2008; Richmond 2009; Richmond and Franks 2009; Öjendal et al. 2017) has been based on the development of new forms of governmentality from above (Pogodda and Richmond 2017); represents a resistance to the liberal peace architecture connected with ownership and emancipation (Mac Ginty 2011; Richmond 2012); or is a symptom of the disengagement of international interventionism which leads to a policy of ‘subcontracting’ the peacemaking business, as suggested in this book; its potential for promoting reconciliation and the emergence of new forms of integrated identity narratives must be explored. It is important to mention that this is not a recent issue. The literature on peace and conflict has long identified the need to overcome the state-centric paradigm of peace initiatives under penalty of undermining the sustainability of any type of negotiated peace. According to John Paul Lederach,

we need to examine how to integrate a reconciliation paradigm at the middle-range and grassroots levels on both sides of the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict. Unless that can be accomplished, the innovation and progress made at the highest level of the peace process will always remain under severe stress and in danger of outright collapse. (Lederach 1997: 34)

The incorporation of both reconciliation and actors such as local civil society and NGOs into international approaches to conflict can be traced in the shifts in policy making regarding peace promotion expressed in UN official documents. In August 2000, the United Nations issued the “Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations”, also known as the Brahimi Report (UN 2000). In this document, the organization addressed the failures of peace operations in the 1990s and suggested improvements in the UN’s mechanisms of peacekeeping and peacebuilding in alignment with the former doctrine established by the Agenda for Peace (UN 1992). Departing from the recognition that an important part of the failures of the organization since the end of the Cold War were due to financial restrictions and staff insufficiencies, the Brahimi Report performed a shift in the policies of the organization so far by giving increased importance to regional and sub-regional organizations in both the establishment of peace and its maintenance.²⁴ Focused on peacekeeping operations, the report also promoted a differentiated reading of conflict transformation by connecting—although still timidly—the efforts toward maintaining negative peace and the activities aimed at conflict prevention, one of the central aspects addressed in the report. Although both the concepts of peacebuilding and reconciliation are repeated several times throughout the document, the definition of reconciliation proposed is still limited to minimal approaches. Reconciliation in the Brahimi Report is understood either as political (national) or as a final stage to peace. On the other hand, the very definition of what is referred as “reconciliation tools” is vague and points to the traditional post-conflict framework of reconciliation manifested in apologies and forgiveness (Philpott 2006; Brewer et al. 2010) or to its political/institutional dimension manifested in reparation programs. Moreover, the report lacks any mention to identity and its role for the perpetuation of the root causes of conflict whatsoever.

Notwithstanding these limitations, there is an explicit reference to the need to promote reconciliation beyond the political level, by proposing the involvement of the society at large in peacebuilding efforts and even suggesting the need to financially support programs that impact directly the everyday lives of ordinary people. As can be read in the Report, “among the changes that the Panel supports are: a doctrinal shift […] that emphasizes a team approach to […] helping communities coming out of a conflict to achieve national reconciliation” which encompasses “flexibility for heads of United Nations peace operations to fund ‘quick impact projects’ that make a real difference in the lives of people in the mission area” (UN 2000). In this sense, the Brahimi Report not only proposed a change in the peace doctrine of the organization, emphasizing hybrid approaches to peacemaking (Mac Ginty 2011), it also pointed to the need to fund projects and organizations that can help mitigate the manifestations of conflict, opening up to a wider definition of peace process. Yet, however innovative, this approach maintains the former paradigm of proposing a remedy to alleviate the symptoms of conflict (“quick impact”), rather than an actual treatment for the long-term disease. The role and importance of civil society and local and international NGOs is also key to the report that points to the need to “bring together many different actors”, and to the challenges inherent to the coordination of their activities and amplification of their individually small impact: “all of them need a mechanism that makes it easier to share information and ideas efficiently, the more so because each is but the small tip of a very large bureaucratic iceberg with its own culture, working methods and objectives” (UN 2000).

These changes in the doctrine, adopted by the organization through the Security Council, have accompanied a tendency that was even intensified after the September 11th, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States. As mentioned before, a consequence of these events, the ‘global war on terror’ deviated attentions from peacebuilding and reinforced a negative image of Arabs in the West, who became increasingly depicted as terrorists, thus promoting radicalization. In this sense, the support for and reinforcement of local civil societies became trendy not only in the context of finding better ways to promote the values of liberal peacemaking but also as a way to pass the responsibility of building (liberal) peace to local actors.

In the specific case of Israel and Palestine, the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People’s (CEIRPP) draft program of work for 2004 mentioned civil society organizations nothing less than 22 times in what was a relatively short document.²⁵ First, in the section about the mandate of the Committee, it can be read that “the General Assembly […] requested the Committee to continue to extend its cooperation and support to Palestinian and other civil society organizations […], and to involve additional civil society organizations in its work” (UN 2004). Without ever explicitly mentioning reconciliation, a concept still regarded as part of a post-conflict settlement by the Organization, the program also advocated for the further involvement of civil society in Israel and Palestine in “international and regional meetings and conferences [organized by the CEIRPP] to promote constructive analysis and debate on the various aspects of the question of Palestine” (UN 2004). The organization of meetings and conferences with the participation of several actors from different levels and nationalities, however, points to the moral/cultural dimension of reconciliation insofar as it deals with dialogue, education and mutual recognition. In respect to the cooperation of CEIRPP with civil society (one specific and distinct topic within the other five activities of the Committee outlined in the program), the document refers to the important effects of activities upheld by the civil society to peacebuilding, such as advocacy work, mobilization of public opinion, providing humanitarian relief and assistance to the Palestinian people and sharing insights into reports and situations on the ground (UN 2004). All these references serve the purpose of illustrating the increasing involvement of CSOs, NGOs and other grassroots movements into peacebuilding efforts that have been actively promoted by the United Nations itself, which this section refers to as subcontracting peace.

Not only the UN but also other major actors connected to the peace process such as the European Union and its member states have embarked on the practice of subcontracting peace. As stated in the website dedicated to the European Neighborhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations, “the European Union is the biggest provider of external assistance to the Palestinians […] [and] by far the largest provider of assistance to Palestine refugees” through the European Neighborhood Instrument (ENI) and regional cooperation funds.²⁶ The European Peacebuilding Initiative, which aims to “facilitate the peace process by supporting a solid foundation at civil society level for a fair and last settlement in the Middle East”, also disburses “€5 million per year to Civil Society Organizations promoting links across the political divide”.²⁷ All these initiatives can be understood as yet another type of peace process, pointing to its changing definition through time, as well as to the need of examining the historiography of protracted peace processes as whole and its impact on the identities in conflict.

In conclusion, the widespread dissemination of peace activities and organizations in Israel and Palestine is symptomatic of two things: (1) that the structural transformations performed by the changes in the lexicon of the conflict during the Oslo Accords has endured and (2) that the failures of the peace process in the higher political level started to be compensated by other types of activities financed, trained, stimulated and even coordinated by the main actors of the peace process, in which the peace enterprise is subcontracted to local and international civil society and grassroots actors. Next section will explore further the impact of those changes to the construction of new avenues for conflict transformation, focusing on their potential for transforming dehumanization through peace-less reconciliation.

3 New Avenues for Conflict Transformation from Dehumanization to Peace-Less Reconciliation

Notwithstanding the current (lack of) developments of the Israeli-Palestinian protracted peace process, this book has shown that a dual process of dehumanization and peace-less reconciliation has been working in parallel in this conflict. This is as a consequence of the intergenerational dispute, but also of the protracted nature of the peace process and the representations made of its failures. The process of dehumanization precedes the beginning of the peace process. However, it was unintendedly reinforced by its dynamics and intensified by the semi-implementation of the negotiated accords resulting from the Oslo period. As discussed before, the latter has allowed for the consolidation of what Lisa Strömbom (2013) calls thin reconciliation, as well as for a glimpse of thick reconciliation. Nevertheless, the step backs on its implementation have led to a renewed conflict of narratives, focusing on the attribution of blames and responsibility for the lack of success of the peace process, which introduced new grievances to the conflict and increased social detachment. As a result, the turn to the twenty-first century, alongside the developments of the liberal peace architecture, has witnessed the appearance and strengthening of several grassroots organizations within the Israeli and Palestinian societies that have transformed the peace enterprise into their very labor.

While this chapter has shown that the normalization of the status quo has benefited the strongest side of the conflict, the generalized appearance of organizations aiming to deal with manifestations of the conflict or to denounce the wrongdoings of political elites in either side of the Separation Wall has been remarkable. In Herbert C. Kelman’s words, written still in the end of the twentieth century, “there are numerous private and governmental efforts in Israel to promote cooperative relations between its Jewish and Palestinian-Arab citizens” (Kelman 1999: 584). The same is true for the Palestinians, who have taken their efforts to the point of assuming state functions, creating the basis for viable communities, defending historic rights and conducting public diplomacy in what has been called a resistance to the domestic “dis-unity”, being regarded as “everyday state formation” actions (Pogodda and Richmond 2017). Their activities have ranged from advocacy in national and international organizations to filling the governance gap within the Occupied Palestinian Territories, by providing services (such as health, education and legal support) and humanitarian relief. Moreover, there exist some organizations and movements that deal specifically with the transformation of relationships and narratives, working in the realm of what this book has called peace-less reconciliation.

During the fieldwork performed for this research, I encountered several outstanding organizations that deal with the identity dimension. Just to cite a few, there are the Combatants for Peace, the Bereaved Parents Circle, the Humanistic Centre in Ghetto Fighters’ House, B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, activists and organizations that promote politically oriented guided tourism for foreigners, transformative theater groups such as the Freedom Theater and the Yes Theater, and research/advocacy centers such as Adalah, Adameer and Al-Haq. All these are examples of organizations that promote peace-less reconciliation in different levels since they work toward thick recognition and the transformation of identities, overcoming the paradigm of the conflict being regarded a source of ontological security (Lupovici 2015). Also, they contribute to counteract the dimensions of dehumanization (Kelman 1973) since they increase Palestinian agency within the conflict by developing advocacy work, lobbying in the political elites’ level, producing reports and fact sheets, promoting courses and educational activities about the conflict, spreading personal testimonies and narratives, and promoting cultural activities that address identity and reconciliation.

However, most of these organizations act in a localized manner, dealing specifically with one or the other national community. Although this is an important effort to transform the understandings about the conflict or to provide support to those who are more affected by its long-lasting injustices, by their nature, they fail to deal with the problem of social detachment that was exacerbated by the stalled protracted peace process. Despite being rarer due to several reasons which include the geographical separation between the two peoples connected with the Israeli policies of movement control, bi-national activities were the ones that called my attention since they seem more prone to deal with the dimensions of peace-less reconciliation, by counteracting the historical processes of mutual dehumanization that have been discussed in the last pages. Building on John Paul Lederach’s (1997: 34) proposal of considering the “importance of developing relationship—of providing a space for the parties to encounter and engage with each other as people and a place where they can express feelings openly while also recognizing their shared future”—this research suggests that new avenues for conflict transformation from dehumanization to peace-less reconciliation can be found in the activities that have been developed by bi-national organizations self-identified as non-violent and pro-coexistence.

Two groups stand out as the very few that are in fact self-described as joint Israeli and Palestinian organizations: the Combatants for Peace and the Bereaved Parents Circle of the Families Forum. The latter is an interesting enduring example of organization which promotes joint narratives and the perception of humanity within both peoples (Braun-Lewenshon and Kitain 2016). The Parents Circle Families Forum²⁸ was created in 1995 and their activities aim at exposing adversarial groups to the narrative of the other side by promoting inter-group encounters within a reconciliation-oriented framework (Furman 2013). This organization brings together Palestinian and Jewish families who have lost immediate family members to the conflict and that decided to promote dialogue, share narratives and grief together instead of searching for revenge. They deal with identity, past, memory, history, narratives and the very positionality of each group, addressing their roles in the conflict as both victims and victimizers.

In his book Bridges Across an Impossible Divide: The Inner Lives of Arab and Jewish Peacemakers, Marc Gopin analyzes this organization and transcribes an interview made on August 24, 2008, with Ibrahim, an Arab translator that is a member of the joint Israeli-Palestinian group the Bereaved Parents Circle. In this interview, Ibrahim reproduces a very common story I heard many times from other people during fieldwork in Israel and Palestine. He says that a trip organized by his university to the Hebrew University, when he was in his early twenties, was

the first time for me as a Palestinian, I am going to meet normal Jewish one, not an Israeli soldier, citizens, normal ones, with two ears and two eyes […]. We sit with the Israelian students, we start to talk not about Jerusalem, not about the big issues of the conflict, we start to talk about the daily life problems for both sides as students. Then at the end of the day they took us to the Truman Centre at the Hebrew University, and I am so surprised. Despite what I have listened to about the Jews, that most of them were our enemies, they like to kill us, I find a professor who runs a center there. The main aim of the center is to care about the Palestinian needs from Gaza Strip and the West Bank under full occupation. So it surprised me. From that time, I used to be in contact with all the Israelian groups who believe in my rights as a Palestinian. (Ibrahim 2008 apud Gopin 2012: 14)

Also by drawing on interviews conducted in 2016 with members of the Bereaved Parents Circle conducted, Olga Burkhardt-Vetter’s analyses suggest that the activities developed by this group promote identity transformations by emphasizing the shared humanity of both sides (Burkhardt-Vetter 2018: 239). These activities aim at remembering the past, sharing narratives and recognizing the identity needs of the ‘other’, addressing the moral/cultural dimensions of peace-less reconciliation identified in this book (see Table 3.1 Dimensions of dehumanization and peace-less reconciliation in Chap. 3).

Similarly, the Combatants for Peace²⁹ is a grassroots movement which bring together former combatants from both sides (former Israeli soldiers serving in the Israel Defense Forces [IDF] and former Palestinian combatants) who have decided to break with the cycle of violence and chose to walk the path of non-violent activism together. Founded in 2005 in the aftermath of the Second Intifada and right before the Palestinian Legislative Elections which resulted in the victory of the radical movement Hamas, their actions range from joint demonstrations; national and international advocacy; education-driven meetings, workshops and seminars; the production of documentaries, newsletters and other advertising materials for English-speaking communities denouncing the situation in the OPt; and artistic interventions such as community and forum theater. Their revenue comes from diverse sources, being their international counterpart, the American Friends of CfP, the most relevant one, which includes several types of donations ranging from individual to institutional. However, they also receive funding from a Christian American charitable organization and several German non-governmental organizations,³⁰ which points to the argument developed in the last section regarding the twenty-first century turn toward subcontracting peace. Their activities aim to transform societies, contributing to challenge the feeling of ontological security (Lupovici 2015; Rumelili 2015) associated with protracted conflict. In the book The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Movement—Combatants for Peace, Donna J. Perry describes first-hand the construction of this movement, arguing that its bi-national character makes it unique in the efforts to peacebuilding. In her words, “peace cannot be made on one side only” (Perry 2011).

This and other examples deal specifically with social detachment, which is identified in this book as one of the most pressing challenges of this conflict impacting any future developments since it reinforces dehumanization processes. In the context of protracted conflicts, it seems essential not only to transform narratives within societies but also to promote a space for joint encounters and sharing experiences related with the common, although differently narrated, past. However, the very welcomed and even strictly necessary people to people³¹ character of this kind of initiatives makes the range of their work a matter of dispute. In order to have a real impact in the transformation of the conflict, more initiatives like this one would have to proliferate.

The brief analysis developed in this section showed how the changes in the international environment and the conflict developments following the collapse of the Oslo Accords have marked another change of the meaning of reconciliation. While the protracted conflict becomes normalized and the protracted peace process loses sense of promoting peace giving way to the perpetuation of the process, other dynamics have emerged that aim at promoting peace. As explained in the beginning of this chapter, these are both a consequence of the protracted nature of the peace process but also an outcome that marks another approach to peacemaking connected to the notion of subcontracting peace. Notwithstanding the limitations and biases of this proposal, it has opened up new avenues to conflict transformation yet to be further explored by policy makers, donors and the very peace process.

4 Conclusion

As explained in the beginning of this chapter, in the turn to the twenty-first century the peace process became frozen but certainly not inexistent. The option of insisting on this term—although to take an ideological stand, many contest it or even choose to refer to it as a ‘peace process’ in quotation marks or the so-called peace process (as explained before)—has to do with the representations made of it in the political discourses and the continuous impacts of those representations on identity narratives about the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ shown in this section. Even though I do agree with those who question either the process or its actual aim toward building peace, as shown throughout this book, its existence—even symbolic—has borne consequences. The beginning of this last phase of the peace process, marked by the demise of the Oslo Process, initiated as a very violent one. The normalization of the conflict turned it into what we can call a ‘no war, no peace’ situation. In the past two decades it has been common to witness Israeli actions aiming to reinforce what already seems to be an irreversible situation on the ground in detriment of the Palestinians. This has been done through new settlement constructions, settlements expansions, war, mass arrests of Palestinians, house demolitions in strategic places such as Jerusalem, and so on, sometimes announcing these measures on the very same day, or the day before preparations for resuming direct bilateral talks would commence.

More so than direct violence, in the case of intergenerational conflicts, the maintenance of this status quo seems to collaborate with the deepening of structural³² and cultural violence, which leads to the aggravation of the self-reinforcing dynamics between violence and conflict. In this sense, conflict transformation in these cases necessarily imply the understanding that cultural violence and, more specifically, dehumanization are not dimensions to be addressed only in post-conflict settings, as the traditional sequential approach to peacebuilding tends to imply. Edward Azar argues that “groups which seek to satisfy their identity and security needs through conflict are in effect seeking change in the structure of their society” (Azar apud Ramsbotham et al. 2011: 101). Accordingly, John Paul Lederach points out that the minimization and ultimately the elimination of violence requires a process of change that focuses on developing structures that meet basic human needs (substantive justice), while maximizing the involvement of people in decisions that affect them (procedural justice). The cultural dimension refers to changes produced by conflict in the broadest patterns of group life, including identity, and the ways that culture affects patterns of response and conflict (Lederach 2003: 26) [the italics are mine].

What this last phase of the protracted peace process has shown was that, either intentionally or not, the normalization of conflict and the lack of results of the peace process have given way to the appearance of several initiatives developed at the level of the civil society which aim to transform the conflict and promote narrative changes. While the stalled peace process has allowed for the deepening of the conflict and the increase of asymmetric relations, the idea that peace was ‘in process’ has been maintained. However, although these activities represent interesting examples of local peacemaking, their impact is still reduced. On the one hand, joint organizations face the challenge of trying to promote interaction in an extremely polarized environment, in which the barriers to the ‘other’ transcend ideology and politics, being actually represented by the existence of the Separation Wall, check points and the blockade in the Gaza Strip. On the other hand, the challenges faced by these organizations regarding the amplification of their voices, the limitations within their political and ideological agendas connected to the imperatives of international funding, and the difficulties in the actual interaction between these activities and the political/institutional level make most of them episodic examples of good practices that fail to impact the society and social identity at large.