Obstacles to peace between Israel and Palestine lack symmetry. Simple trade-offs (“You give me this piece of land and I’ll give you that other piece”. Or, “you refrain from this particular activity and I’ll refrain from that activity.”) will not clear these hurdles. Rather, the principal obstacles appear to be territorial on Israeli side, but attitudinal on the Palestinian.
The Israelis simply must leave the territory that they have occupied since 1967. Maybe not every square inch, but almost all of it. Law, morality, and common sense demand that the Occupation end. Otherwise, Israel will be caught between the Scylla of creeping apartheid and the Charybdis of a disappearing Jewish state.
Perhaps less obviously, the Palestinians must achieve attitudinal change. Israelis are not devils and certainly Jews are not. However, the embrace in the Arab street of defamatory stereotypes, of triumphalism in violence, and of the cult of martyrdom would indicate otherwise. One cannot convince one’s people to make peace with the devil.
These two, asymmetrical hurdles will not be easily cleared. The disappearance of democracy and the rise of fanaticism and corruption in both societies make the obstacles more formidable.
Jim Friedberg, Posten Professor of Law emeritus, has taught International and Comparative Law and related subjects at West Virginia University for over forty years. He has also taught or been a research visitor at universities of Cambridge, Pittsburgh, Seville, and Guanajuato, as well as at Hebrew University and at Cyril and Methodius University Macedonia (as a Fulbright Scholar).
Friedberg received a B.A. in English literature from Temple University in 1972, a J.D. from Harvard in 1975 and a Diplôme in International Human Rights from Strasbourg in 1989. He founded, and for fifteen years directed, the West Virginia University College of Law Immigration Law Clinic.
His most recent publications have been: “States and Laws, Jews and Palestinians: Yadgar’s Traditionist Alternative, A Reflection on Yadgar, Israel’s Jewish Identity Crisis,” Intercultural Human Rights Law Review, 2021; “Brexit, the Misrepresentation of Democracy, and the Rock of Gibralter,” University of Bologna Law Review, 2020; and “Yitz and Ishmael: A Drama in One Very Long Act, an Annotated Dialogue,” Minnesota Journal of International Law, 2019.
Friedberg has just created a blog Israel Palestine Peace: Share the Pie at israelpalestinepeace.org.
This term he is a Plumer Fellow at St. Anne’s College of the University of Oxford.
