Network Diplomacy and the Future of the Israel–Palestine Conflict

Abstract

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the ongoing one between Israel and Palestine. It began in the 1940s and is considered one of the longest-running modern conflicts in the world. This chapter begins with some background. The main problem behind this conflict is that Palestine seeks full independence from Israel and the removal of all Israeli soldiers from the territory of Palestine. On the other hand, Israeli Jews, nationalists, and right-wing groups strongly oppose that, claiming that the West Bank and Gaza historically belong to the Jewish people. Moreover, they claim that Palestinians are not a nation, and that they did not exist before the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948. Despite the long-standing efforts of the international community to achieve a compromise and resolve this dispute, and despite Israel’s peace with Egypt and Jordan, the conflict has continued to the present day. Next, we discuss how Israelis and Palestinians continue to fail to reach a lasting peace agreement. Diplomatic efforts aimed at resolving the crisis have been ongoing from the start, but these inevitably fail as the peace process itself has taken the form of a recurring cycle of violence, mediation, negotiations, abandonment, and violence once more. Many reasons for this inability of international diplomacy to resolve the crisis have been posited; the truth is likely a combination of them all. However, as traditional diplomatic efforts engaged at the highest levels have failed to deliver a lasting peace, new forms of diplomacy are increasingly being tried such as public and network diplomacy, which are aimed at a global, public audience. New initiatives by both sides of the conflict have brought the debate beyond the traditional boundaries of governments, think tanks, and academia, and into the homes of ordinary people who may not otherwise have an opinion. Perhaps the solution to the crisis will be found either through bypassing the traditional gatekeepers and engaging more broadly and directly with the international community; or in taking the initiative to engage locally in the community, making use of the tools of globalisation to seek change and apply pressure on governments from both ‘above’ and ‘below’. Then we apply to the Israel–Palestine conflict Anne-Marie Slaughter’s ideas regarding how vertical hierarchies become horizontal networks and look at how Kelman advocates “unofficial communication” between officials and academics, as negotiation in and of itself moves processes along. Saunders sheds light on what makes diplomatic negotiations difficult and how the two parties employ what can be seen as a conflict-avoidance analogy. Finally, we show how network diplomacy can act in keeping with the pace of globalisation. We argue that network diplomacy draws from the breadth of academia and think tanks, to be used as tools where traditional state actors have failed. This approach proposes the creation of an Israeli-Palestinian Confederation as a potential solution to the crisis, loosely modelled after the European Union, a “Two States, One Homeland” solution; an idea that is gaining traction in both Israeli and Palestinian political and academic circles. The main purpose of this chapter is to provide possible solutions for this crisis. In order to do that, this scientific work is organised as follows. The first section is devoted to the background of this conflict, paying special attention to the development of Arab nationalism as well as the creation of an Israeli state. The impact that great powers and the international community had on this region and the consequences of their policies are explained in the first part of this paper. Moreover, this part seeks to explain the roots of the problem and their historical development. The second section looks at former and current diplomatic efforts and their effectiveness in solving this dispute. The final section adopts the analytical tools of network diplomacy and brings in a case study to test its effectiveness.