On September 13 1993, on the lawn of the White House, Yitzhak Rabin, Prime Minister of Israel and Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) shook hands, symbolically sealing the Oslo I agreement between Israel and the PLO (Booth and Wheeler, 2008, p. 245). The Oslo I agreement was perceived at the time as having ‘inaugurated a new era of hope in the search for peace and justice in Palestine-Israel`. Yet despite over two decades of a ‘donor-sponsored` peace process, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains ‘one of the world’s most
protracted` (Turner and Hussein, 2015, p. 415). A crucial question for Israelis and Palestinians on all three levels of lleadership within conflict societies, from top-level political and military leaders to the grass-roots population (Lederach 1997) and for academics, practitioners, and students within the field of IR and Conflict Resolution is: where do we go from here?
Current Stagnation
The stagnation of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has resulted from both Israeli and Palestinian political elites moving away from the Oslo Peace Paradigm (bilateral negotiations to produce a two-state solution) and pursuing approaches which do not support a renewing of negotiations. Israel has been increasingly moving towards a rejection of the establishing of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders, including the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East
Jerusalem as the end-goal of any Israeli Palestinian negotiations. This should not be read as a rejection of a twostate solution by Israel in terms of the separation of Israel from Palestine but rather a rejection of the idea of a Palestine as a state). The Palestinian Authority (PA) in comparison has moved away from bilateral negotiations with Israel towards “internationalising” the peace process by looking to bolster support for a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders (Bland, 2014, pp. 183-184; Scheindlin and Waxman, 2016, pp. 83-84). The 1967 border here
refers to the 1948 armistice lines (known as the Green Line) established between Israel, Egypt, and Jordan when the Gaza Strip was part of Egypt, and the West Bank was part of Jordan. This has become, in effect, the internationally recognised border between Israel and the Palestinian territories (West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem) (ElAtrash, 2016, pp. 370-371).
