On the continuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict has lasted as a fully fledged conflict between two nationalist actors on how to govern Palestine for nearly 100 years. This chapter addresses its continuation as something puzzling, and thus an academic issue in need of being properly described and explained. How and why has the Israeli–Palestinian conflict continued for decades? When tackling this issue, rather than the causes, the dynamics of the conflict are emphasized. After a critical discussion of how to fruitfully apply the conflict paradigm to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, I present a conflict analysis which emphasizes three facets: situation of contradiction, interaction, and actors. A diachronic section discusses critical junctures of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, while the subsequent synchronic section addresses the issue of its enduring nature in reference to the facets of situation of contradiction, interaction and actors. The conclusion critically discusses the problematique of Israel’s attempt to enforce a sort of reservation model in the Palestine territories conquered in 1967. Moreover, the conventional wisdom that analyses of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict should be based on the idea of negotiated peace between Israel and the PLO is challenged both from an empirical and normative perspective.