Research perspectives on the Arab-Israeli conflict: introduction to a symposium

Abstract

Arab-Israeli relations have not figured prominently in The Journal of Conflict Resolution. Only a few contributions have focused directly on the conflict, including one review article (Ben-Dak, 1970) and scattered empirical studies (Blechman, 1966; Harary, 1961; Graber, 1969). A few articles elucidating research methodologies have demonstrated some interesting applications to the Middle East (e.g. Brecher, Steinberg, and Stein, 1969), but the dearth of articles in JCR reflects the general intellectual drought affecting the growth of a polemology in the Arab-Israeli context-it mirrors the almost complete lack of empirical investigations relating conflict diagnosis and management to different levels and different areas of life in Israel and the Arab world (for comparison see Boulding, 1968). The present collection is a modest attempt to rectify this situation. It was conceived when the editors were directing mutually responsive projects at the University of Michigan's Center for Research on Conflict Resolution and at Michigan State University in 1968-69. For several reasons the climate in 1970-71 had become moderately encouraging to the dissemination of research different from the customary disappointments (see Ben-Dak, 1970). First, materials produced more recently in the Arab world indicate a relatively fresh and growing systematization with respect to study of the confrontation. Collections of data from Israeli, Arab, and Western sources and summaries of trends have become an important item in Middle East research products in the Arabic language. These started most ambitiously with the Palestinian Movement Yearbooks and recently added the Journal of Palestine Studies (in English). Such endeavors (e.g. at the Institute for Palestine Studies and Kuwait University) are far from impartial and certainly serve a political purpose. However they approximate in direction, though not yet in quality, the veteran Middle East Record (produced by the Shiloah Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies) and the New East chronologies (in Hebrew at Jerusalem). This represents an important change from our viewpoint, because it paves the way for the use of a more rigorous data base and for agreement about the definition of series of events. These two factors heighten the probability for similar interpretations of