Gershon Shafir: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the last unresolved legacy of the colonial era
November 16, 2007 8:09 am Israeli-Palestinian conflictMost analyses of the Oslo and post-Oslo process have been conducted from an international relations perspective which highlights the asymmetry of power between the two sides, a view also accepted here. This “realist” methodological perspective also portrays each side as a single actor animated by one will; an approach that any sociological perspective must contest. From the latter vantage point the conflict is best analyzed not as being between ‘Palestinians’ and ‘Israelis’ as such, but between the extremists of both societies who gained disproportionate influence and thereby sideline, sometimes silence and, on occasion absorb, their own larger moderate camps.
In the following I will argue that from a comparative-historical perspective the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the last unresolved legacy of the colonial era. Consequently, the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians is a decolonization process which, however grotesquely, coexists with continued Israeli colonization. The agonies of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking are related to this split political personality disorder. Continued colonization perpetuates the territorial core of the conflict and is stimulating political and, in particular, religious extremism on both sides. Jewish messianic fundamentalism, on its part, legitimates Israeli settlement in the “holy land,” and Palestinian jihadist movements simultaneously engage in acts of indiscriminate terror and shelling to prevent territorial compromise.