The unity and reconciliation agreement between Fatah and Hamas holds promise for the future. Clearly, we have to take a wait-and-see attitude. But I consider it potentially a turning point in the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians. Many Israelis reacted negatively to the news and quickly assumed that Hamas would dominate. But let’s consider a few issues.

First, a united Palestinian people are going to be more responsive to the peace process. Did anyone ever really think the peace process would be successful with Hamas and Fatah separated and in conflict with one another? Did anyone ever really think a solution to the conflict would include a separate West Bank and Gaza, under separate political entities? The unity of Hamas and Fatah was inevitable. This will be especially true if the two groups unite on some fundamental issues regarding the peace process and international recognition. The United Nations and European Union welcomed the efforts toward reconciliation and the possibility for new dialogue.

Everybody with an opinion on this matter could turn out to be wrong. Two possibilities bound the end of the continuum. The worst-case scenario is Hamas overtaking the PLA and the government and security services. Hamas maintains its rigidity and continues to call for the destruction of Israel. Hezbollah continues to prosper in Lebanon and the Islamic Brotherhood gains a stronger foothold in Egypt and provides support for a Hamas driven Palestinian Authority. This scenario will guarantee war, not peace.

The best case scenario, and the one that I think is most likely, is that Hamas is moderated by the PLA and becomes more normally integrated into a Palestinian governing body that realizes the need for certain practicalities. The new Palestinian unity government gains credibility and brings a fresh voice to the peace process. It will take some time for the Palestinian unity government to prove itself to the Israelis. Netanyahu will not go gently into a relationship with Hamas. The Israelis and PLA currently share certain security responsibilities, and it’s hard to imagine continuing this shared security relationship with Hamas. But a Fatah Hamas reconciliation is necessary to a successful peace process. It solves the problem of Israel needing someone to talk to who represents all of the Palestinians.

Hamas is an Islamic militant group and Fatah is a secularist party. The two groups have always opposed one another with respect to tactics and their relationship to Israel. They have separate security systems and there are plenty of stories of Palestinians who are arrested one day by the PLA and the next day by Hamas. But the unity arrangement will strengthen the Palestinians in their quest for a Palestinian state – not two states (Gaza and the West Bank) but one state. This unity agreement could be a new era for the Palestinians.

According to some analysts, it was Hamas who made most of the concessions that enabled the unity agreement. The “Arab Spring” is one reason for this. Hamas fears that the unrest in places like Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria could spread to Gaza and threaten its rule. The PLA needs increased legitimacy. They are perceived as weak and known to have difficulty carrying out legitimate elections. The reconciliation between Hamas and the PLA will present a unified stance for the Palestinians. There is a clever sleight-of-hand operating here also. The United Nations will undoubtedly vote for a Palestinian state in September and this will confer legitimacy on Hamas. Hamas will go from a militant Islamist party steeped in violence with extreme political attitudes that are unsustainable in any context, to an internationally recognized political operation that represents the Palestinian people. Although there is an irony to this, it does pressure Hamas to yield to international demands.

The United States and Israel should see this reconciliation as an opportunity. Hopefully, talks can continue and Hamas will find itself in a situation where it must cooperate and engage with United States and Israel. This will include stronger pressures on Hamas to maintain cease fires, eliminate rocket attacks into Israel, and control violence. There’s a good chance that any resultant political platform will be more consistent with the PLA than Hamas. The hope is that Hamas will not contaminate the PLA, but the influence will run in the other direction.

Hamas and the Theory of Contamination

The argument that this reconciliation will result in something positive is based on the assumption that the PLA will moderate Hamas rather than Hamas “contaminating” the PLA. The theory of contamination is based on the theory of disgust which is explained more here. Briefly, disgust is an evolutionary emotion probably related to knowing what to eat and avoiding food that is bad or contaminated. We always assume that contamination passes from the dirty to the clean and therefore “contaminates” the clean. If I drop a piece of food on the floor, the dirty floor contaminates the clean food. Nobody assumes that cleanliness passes to the dirty and purifies it; the “clean” food does not pass to the dirty floor and make it cleaner.

And so it is psychologically. Things that are considered dirty, harmful, or just plain “bad” are always assumed to contaminate the “good.” A racist will consider his or her neighborhood “contaminated” if a member of an undesirable minority group moves in. Most people assume that Hamas will “contaminate” the PLA. But in the realm of human interaction, in the socio-symbolic world, it is possible to avoid contamination and have influence move in the other direction. The normal theory of contamination would clearly have Hamas contaminating the PLA and making matters worse between Israelis and Palestinians.

But the extension of theories of contamination and disgust into the social world has its limits. It is not inevitable that desirable social processes be contaminated; in fact, contamination as a psychological construct is culturally created. It was learned, and that means it can be unlearned. Let’s hope the PLA can withstand the normal flow of contamination and have a positive influence on the culture of Hamas.

There is a rumor about that Netanyahu will conduct a major pull out of the West Bank in anticipation of the UN declaration of a Palestinian state. I first encountered the rumor in the publication Isranet which can be found here. More and more Israelis throw up their hands and say, “we can’t fight the whole world.” There is a chilling sense that the world will accept nothing less than the creation of a Palestinian state and that Israel will have to give up much to create any sort of Palestinian state. This is true. A Palestinian state is justifiably called for and an inevitability. But more than the creation of the state Israelis must move the Palestinian identity more to the center. The Palestinians have been the subject of systematic marginalization which has made it impossible for them to coalesce into a viable political entity, and much of this marginalization is associated with settlements. Let’s take a closer look at how this works.

Marginalizing another people is about the relationship between the center and the periphery and how the concept of the periphery, or margin, interacts with the center. The Palestinians live at the periphery of the environment and this informs their dualistic and contradictory identity. Thus, historically Israelis are rational and democratic and the Palestinians violent; Israelis were modern, Palestinians traditional; Israelis future looking, Palestinians backward looking. The Palestinians have been socialized at the margins. They have been told that they are politically, culturally, and economically behind or lagging or outside the mainstream. The language of marginality depends on comparisons of the center to the margins. The difference between the physician and the quack or the polite drinker and the drunk is a matter of centrality and marginality where the image of each contains qualities of the other.

And so it is between the Palestinian and the Israeli, the oriental and the occidental, the primitive and the modern. The efforts of a nation-state to achieve cohesion or a sense of a “center” are an effort to achieve unity as a nation. The current conflict between Israeli-Jews and Palestinians is defined by arguments over control of space. This intractable conflict is fraught with dangers and marginalized identities are characteristic of these intractable conflicts. Read more about intractable conflicts here.

The language of marginality relies on creating power by consigning one group to the marginal and the other to the more powerful center. The Palestinian Arab is not only marginalized through the normal power relationship but this is reflected in settlements where settlers have created a dominant unified center for themselves and work to marginalize the Palestinians.

The local Palestinians are twice alien: once within the state in which they are dominated (Israel and their settlers), and once again by the mother nation (other Palestinian Arabs).

The Palestinians clearly identify with the space they’re claiming for national political identity. According to Anthony Smith it is not necessary that a group even inhabit a space, only that they have the collective identification with the space. Essentially, the Israelis and the Palestinians are competing to construct the identity of the same space. As Smith explains with respect to the establishment of nation states, identities and cultures become politicized in order to create differences that justify claims to the land. The power to rule is based not on tribal or personal loyalties but on a fixed territorial space. Settlers who define the land as “sacred” are politicizing the land in order to create national ideologies that justify a national identity and claim to a territory. The Palestinians must do the same before they can establish a central political identity. The rhetorical battles between the Israelis and the Palestinians group around the question: who arrived first? The ideological clashes that emerge from the politicization of these discourses provide the legitimacy for acts of violence.

It is interesting how national rhetorics mirror one another. One argument used to marginalize the Palestinians is that they historically did not place great importance on the land, that is, their ideas about the land were indistinct. Only after the Israelis arrived, the story goes, did the Palestinian land identity evolve, and it took particular shape after 1948 and 1967 and the idea of a Palestinian state began to arise. Interestingly, the Israelis fashion a favorable history by accusing the Palestinians of constructing history. They go on to claim that it is the Palestinian elite who are most responsible for devising a Palestinian ethnopolitical identity and giving it intellectual justification. It was the Palestinian elite who, for example, sought to shore up the importance of Jerusalem when for Muslims Jerusalem was less important than Mecca and Medina. The Israelis, then, began to delineate whole areas of land between the Egyptian and Lebanese border, and Jordan to the East, and claimed it as “Jewish” on the grounds that the Jews were there in previous centuries and driven away but are the original inhabitants of the region. All other ethnic categories are regarded as intruders. This primordial claim to the land makes it easy to classify others as marginal. To legitimize the right to exist in all of greater Israel settlers needed to establish their descent from ancient Israel and frame the claim as culturally, scientifically, and religiously true.

Settler communication activates a pattern of thinking, a pattern that is social and marks objects such as land and geography as central or marginal thereby giving them symbolic power in society. The Palestinians have been behind in the language of centrality game, although they have made significant progress in recent years. Still, it will be interesting to watch the interplay of identities, and the competition for centrality, that emerges during a new political order that includes a recognized Palestinian political entity. But it is still true that the settlers remain at the “center” of this controversy.

I’ve been maintaining for some time that an actual solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not so difficult. I will save details for another posting, but bet I could predict what a future solution will look like. No, the problem is not the details of the solution but getting there; that is, there is a failure of will to solve the problem. There is what Andrew Smith calls in his new book a lack of a “deliberative impulse.” It is as if the parties simply do not want to solve the problem. There is no urge that compels the parties to cooperate and communicate reciprocally such that needs and desires are met. Violence does not seem to matter because both sides are numbed to violence. Let’s speculate a little about what might be helpful.

First, the two sides must develop more deliberative will. They must be more serious about actually accomplishing something. If we borrow a little from Habermas we can recognize both the informal sphere of will formation and the formal sphere. The formal sphere or context of communication is typically characterized by dispassionate styles of bargaining and negotiation. This is the communication of the elite and leaders who are trying to legitimize state actions. Many Israelis and Palestinians have opinions about formal peace processes and communication, but they feel alienated from it. They do not feel as if it is a form of communication that represents them. On the other hand, the informal sphere is the context of rough-and-tumble interaction and unregulated communication that is most influential for generating opinion.

As buses explode in Jerusalem and rockets hit Gaza the Israelis and Palestinians insist on peace processes most described by the formal sphere of communication. The representatives of the two sides of the conflict should include a wider selection of convictions and concerns. The formal sphere of conflict resolution makes people feel as if they have little chance of being heard and that they cannot succeed communicatively in such a setting.

It is not the case that the formal sphere is rational and deliberative and populated by those capable of the most reasoned argument. On the contrary, the environment that surrounds discussion about the Israeli and Palestinian conflict is rife with dogmatism, naïve idealism, xenophobia, racism, resentment, and an inability to reframe and transcend past injustices. Both societies – Israeli and Palestinian – need to deliberate more amongst themselves at ground level. The formal negotiations and the people who actually signed peace treaties and make legislation are not inclusive enough with respect to the will of the general population.

Leaders, idealists, and those in power often hold strict interpretations and understandings of issues and consider additional deliberation and discussion to be responsible for the distortion of truth. Hence, a Palestinian who believes that Israel is an illegitimate community who came into being by violence and international conspiracy will not discuss the matter of recognizing Israel’s right to exist or its political legitimacy. And an Israeli who is convinced that the Palestinians seek genocide and the elimination of the Israeli state is insensitive to discussion about recognizing Israel. A new emphasis on generating deliberative will might improve public justification and arouse members of each community toward more serious problem solving. This is all in the service of the epistemology of communication because the assembly effect that results from genuine deliberative interaction can create new understandings and perspectives. It’s important to underscore that both conservative and progressive ideas can be entrenched such that they are responsible for deliberative failure.

There are simply too many motivational roadblocks in the current conflict climate that embraces the Israelis and Palestinians. The Palestinians lack motivation to really solve the problem because they believe a better “deal” is possible as they drag out international sympathy. They have successfully convinced the world that they are an oppressed minority and deserving of attention, resources, and special consideration. Even their violence and defiance has been excused. The same holds for the Israelis. They are prosperous, militarily superior, reasonably democratic, and have the unwavering support of the United States. Except for the moral failing, the Israelis could continue to live as they do while considering the Palestinians a minor distraction. These situations are of course unsustainable for the long-term but they are reasons that prevent serious deliberation designed to end the conflict.

So what happens is a retreat from efforts at joint justification. The two sides give up in favor of the sort of communication that is limited to those who are like themselves and designed to reinforce already shared views. This is the sort of political polarization that is increasingly common. Netanyahu speaks only in a way that satisfies his conservative coalition, and the PA remains entrenched in their cultural and political narrative. And as Kipling pointed out, “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”

 If you will allow me to wax a little philosophical and academic, I’d like to compare the current negotiation impasse between Israelis and Palestinians to the existential question posed by Hobbes in the Leviathan. In other words, is this difficult and intractable conflict destined to end up a Hobbesian nightmare of all against all? Is Hobbes correct that human beings can just never abandon their self-interest and their will to power? Is life destined to be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, as Hobbes declares? Is it inevitable that coercive power is the only way to keep individuals in check?

 If so, then negotiations and deliberations are naïve and futile. The only thing we have to look forward to is more of what happened in the settlement of Itamar last week were children were literally slaughtered. This image of children’s with their throats slit forms, for me, a collage that includes images of thousands lynching two soldiers, of the Park Hotel massacre, and rockets firing on innocent citizens from Gaza. All of this goes on against a backdrop of ethnopolitical hate that is either primal and hence untouchable, or socially constructed and potentially manageable. If this conflict is primordial and the inescapable result of ancient hatreds that cannot be placated, that cannot be reframed, that cannot be forgotten, then even Hobbes will turn his head away in shame. But this is how conflicts such as these are communicative and symbolic. They are not outside the influences of human interaction – they are not inevitable. Such conflicts are stimulated by words, meanings, and interpretations. Again, it establishes the lie in the children’s rhyme about how “sticks and stones can break your bones but names will never hurt you.”

 But Dore Gold writing in Isranet explains how the accomplished diplomat Richard Holbrook began to understand that the Bosnian conflict was stoked and inflamed and deliberately stimulated; it was not an ancient hatred that was too deep to be controlled. Incitement by ethnopolitical entrepreneurs who have a stake in the conflict is a bigger problem than the general public thinks. Most of the time when you read that the Palestinians are encouraging their own citizens to fight Israel it is termed “incitement.” But when the Israelis described the situation to their own population is termed “education.” This is a perfect example of the incommensurate worlds that these two conflicting populations live in. One man’s education is another man’s incitement.

 It strains the imagination to try to conjure an image of what sort of beast bubbled up out of the earthly goo to kill a family in their beds and slit the throats of three children one of which was three months old. Such a horror cannot be legitimized, but it comes from somewhere, something explains it. I understand that the IDF is often cast in the same role by the Palestinians and Fayyad and Abbas have equated the Itamar murders with IDF behavior. Yet the IDF never intentionally targets innocents. But this is the definition of the conflict: extreme behavior accompanied by mirror images of one another regardless of facts or defensible arguments. Each side sees the other as violent and itself as a victim, and every behavior and action reinforces the perceptions. It’s an endless cycle that you cannot escape; it’s the definition of interactive hell.

 It remains the case, however, that this conflict is not doomed to failure because it is so deep-seated. Difficult and messy as it is, it is possible for the Israelis and the Palestinians to manage, if not completely control, their problems. It is possible to escape Hobbesian logic.

 One interesting approach to this, and I encourage the reader to find a book titled The Deliberative Impulse  by Andrew Smith, is to not assume that people are competitive and mistrustful. Smith uses some Hobbesian assumptions to assume that people can be cooperative and drawn together or at least engage one another in a civil manner. For Hobbes people were attracted to a powerful leader so they could avoid living in fear and vulnerability. Smith suggests the same thing can lead people to cooperate and to deliberate publicly in order to solve problems. Self-interest can result in cooperation. There is certainly evolutionary theory supports such is contention.

 This sounds a little contradictory but it really is not. Smith refers to it as the “deliberative impulse.” Smith takes the unusual stance – and I will take it up again in a later post – that things like conscience, morality, and commitments to community are equally motivating. Even in fractured societies and fractured conflicts such as that between the Israelis and Palestinians there is a deliberative impulse, motivation to act morally and in accordance with conscience. True, there are many barriers to deliberation which include structural barriers as well as limitations on communication, skills, and resources. But these roadblocks can be overcome by the promotion of certain types of solidarity. I will detail these in the next post.

I would encourage anyone interested in the current state of affairs between Israel and the Palestinian Authority to read a document recently available at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The address is here: http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA

Israel can drive a hard bargain and lard its negotiation stance with stubbornness and inflexibility. On more than one occasion I’ve lost patience with the Israelis and sympathized with the frustrations of the Palestinians. But all that is changed. One of Israel’s fears is that the PA is not really interested in a principled negotiation; that is, the PA continues to gain international sympathy and has so successfully defined itself as the pathetic underdog that it can ask for anything and expect to receive it.

A recent report seems to bear this out. A paper prepared by the Foreign Ministry describes the activities taken by Israel to help the Palestinians, while the Palestinians have been obstructionist and either blocked Israeli initiatives or taken steps to circumvent Oslo stipulations and those of the interim agreement. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples from the report:

1. Even though the sharp conservative Bibi Netanyahu has accepted the reality of the two state solution, his efforts to support the development of a Palestinian state have been thwarted at every turn. For example Israel has continued to work to strengthen the Palestinian economy in a wide range of fields including civil, infrastructural, political, and security. As a result, the Palestinian economy has grown 8% in 2010. There has been a reduction in unemployment and a rise in tourism.

2. Israel has addressed one of the most damning symbolic issues it faces which is the nature of roadblocks and security checkpoints. There are 28 fewer roadblocks now than there were in 2008.

3. Israel has stimulated Palestinian business efforts. They have made more entry permits available for work, expanded industrial zones, approved more bandwidth for Palestinian cellular telephone providers, and begun work on the electric project that will establish for new substations in Jenin, Ramallah, Nablus, and Hebron.

We could add to this list but it seems a little fruitless in the face of Palestinian recalcitrance. The report from the Foreign Ministry points out how the Palestinians are manipulating their sympathetic position in the world political order by pursuing in the international community Palestinian claims to a future state within the 1967 borders. This is a backhanded move designed to undercut the discussions on the permanent status of the proposed two states. But there is more and some of it is particularly disturbing.

1. Palestinians continue to demand condemnation of Israel in international forums. Just when the Palestinians should be formulating a negotiated relationship with Israel, one that will leave both of them strong and viable after a final agreement, the Palestinians are trying to diminish Israel’s legitimacy–a stance that will not serve Palestine well in the future.

2. It also appears as if the Palestinians are calling on known biased organizations toward Israel, such as the Human Rights Council in Geneva, to condemn Israel for war crimes. This again is nothing but provocative and counterproductive. It is a misrepresentation of the facts designed for symbolic damage to Israel and an effort to diminish Israel’s right to self-defense. There are numerous clauses in the temporary agreements that govern the relationship between Israel and Palestine that stipulates that the sides should not incite one another and spread propaganda and misrepresentations. This, of course, is sensible and productive negotiation behavior but is being undermined and manipulated by the Palestinians.

3. And the extent to which the PA continues to glorify terrorists and openly commemorate their extremist behaviors, remains a major impediment to peace. The report indicated that the Palestinian presidential compound in Ramallah has been renamed to glorify the terrorist Yihye Ayash.

These are but a few examples of Israel’s progressive efforts and the PAs regressive ones. Again I do not hold Israel blameless on these matters and many of these actions have complex interpretations. But mature negotiation relies on the establishment of common meaning; a collective sense of what you are bargaining about. In fact, bargaining is not even the right word. Bargaining is strategic action in which each side tries to maximize its gains. That’s what’s going on now, and it leads to exaggerated requests and expectations such as a Palestinian expectation that Israel has no right to exist.

But true deliberative discourse, where both sides are genuinely reflecting upon their preferences and views, is an epistemic process where new ideas can emerge based on the genuine interest of both parties to solve the conflict. I will have more to say about the benefits of deliberative discourse in another post.

A number of issues are beginning to intersect and result in instability for Israel. From an Israeli standpoint, political conditions are fraying at the edges and challenging Israel’s ability to manage all of these difficulties: Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy military, increases its control and influence in Lebanon and maintains an even more prominent position in the government thereby undercutting efforts to consolidate Lebanon’s strands of democracy. Iran of course is always hovering overhead building bombs and threatening Israel’s existence. Hamas continues to make gains in the Gaza Strip. Israel’s relationship with Turkey is more than frayed; it is seriously damaged and in need of repair. Al Jazeera’s revelations about the negotiating process has damaged Fatah’s credibility and directed more positive attention toward Hamas.

 And clearly the situation in Egypt does not bode well for Israel’s future relationship with Egypt. There are many questions to be answered. Remember there was a time when in 1979 we thought a government run by Islamists was laughable and impossible. There was a time when peace activists and human rights workers thought that there could be nothing worse than the Shah of Iran. I am certainly not suggesting that change in Egypt is not morally and politically inevitable, but it remains the case that Egypt’s peace agreement with Israel has been very stabilizing and could be a casualty of revolution in Egypt.

 Let’s look at a few outcome possibilities in Egypt and speculate about their implications for Israel. First, an Egyptian leader to emerge could be Mohamed ElBaradei who has international standing. ElBaradei poses problems for Israel. He is forming a coalition with the Muslim brotherhood and could increase their standing and the strength of their voice. ElBaradei’s anti-Israel tendencies are well enough known. He has called the Gaza Strip a large prison and sided with Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan who has been harshly critical of Israel. ElBaradei may not share Muslim brotherhood ideology but he will use them to bolster his own position and thus set the conditions for more oppositional relationship with Israel and the United States.

 Second, it remains unclear whether or not change in Egypt will result in a liberal democracy. Not only will the Muslim brotherhood be strengthened but Egypt’s history of authoritarianism will not be replaced easily. Egypt’s civil society is undeveloped and weak and it could take a generation to weed out corruption and ineptitude. Hernando de Soto writing in the Wall Street Journal cited the example that to do business in Egypt requires dealing with 56 government agencies, countless inspections, and corruption. Such a civil society and business conditions cannot prosper. None of this bodes well for Israel because it increases instability.

 Third. Israel has been very troubled by the US response to the protests. After siding with some of Israel’s enemies–the Sauds and Hashemites–the US is increasingly seen as an unreliable partner. This means Israel should be even more stubborn about giving up territory that may have defensive implications in exchange for American security guarantees.

 Finally, building democracies is difficult business and it’s easy to bungle it. Look at what happened in 2006 when Condoleezza Rice, and her supposedly stellar international relations credentials, pressured people for elections in Gaza. There was always the naïve belief that groups like Hamas would moderate after they were in power, or that they would participate in a fair democratic process. We still know nothing about the skills and intentions of the protesters. Elections in Gaza resulted in violence and serious trouble for Israel and elections in Egypt, even legitimate elections, could cause Israel trouble.