Gaza Fighting Continues

On Yahoo! News today, I came across an article discussing the newly stirred violence on the Gaza strip. This seemed to be directly applicable to the Identity-Based Conflicts lecture.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080416/ap_on_re_mi_ea/israel_palestinians;_ylt=AjIujC58ocW9c0euFreN_gZvaA8F

Firstly I think it is important to note that this was the heaviest surge of violence in the area in the past month. Regrettably this attack undid mediation attempts by Egypt, and broke the informal truce that Hamas and Israel seemingly had. This fresh attack, amid the controversy surrounding the meeting between Hamas officials and former President Jimmy Carter, again begs the question; will peace ever be attained in the Middle East?

When analyzing the reasons for why there is such an issue with finding a peaceful solution to this conflict, ethnic identity concerns can be seen to be at the root of the problem. The intermixing of culture and religion in the area is a direct cause of these security problems. The fact that the region is so divided, Palestinian against Israeli, makes it difficult for either side to commit to a treaty. Even if through negotiations a peaceful end could be reached, the fact is that neither Hamas nor the Israeli government would trust each other enough to completely stand down. Then there is the issue that would arise concerning intra-ethnic policing – simply that neither side has the power or influence over their own groups to prevent them from committing violence even after a peace treaty was signed. This appears to be more of an issue on the Palestinian side, but in the end any extremists may not feel as though peace was the correct path to choose. These people would be likely to continue terrorist activities, which would cause the attacked side to take defensive action, leading to more conflict.

When looking at the proposed solutions to identity based conflict that were discussed in lecture it becomes clear that some have the potential to be more successful than others. Clearly a decisive victory by either side would be the most effective way of ending this conflict, but both sides are fairly well matched; terrorism for nuclear weapons, support of the Arab world for that of the United States. Thus they end up balancing each other out. Instead separation strategies probably have the most potential for ending the conflict. Partitioning would create a self-protecting environment for each ethnic group, in which security dilemmas would not be as big of an issue since each group would be living with its own people. The biggest problem with this solution is that Hamas refuses to give up its position on the Gaza strip, and Israel refuses to carry out a peace agreement until the Gaza returns to Abbas’ possession. Until a compromise can be reached between the Palestinian and Israeli stands, separation strategies will not be able to be implemented.
(all information taken from lecture notes)