PROSPECT FOR NEGOTIATIONS

Last night I watched Oslo – the film about the secret (“backchannel”) Israel-PLO negotiations which took place in the early 1990s while an official process was underway in Madrid and which are described in this background note.

For 76 years, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been hemmed in and the violent Hamas incursion last weekend has caused a brutal Israeli retaliation – bringing forward accusations of war crimes from a few people but cheered on by most Western politicians. This protest from a UK Conservative politician is a rare voice of sanity

As far back as 1988 Christopher Hitchens and Edward Said edited this book Blaming the Victims – spurious scholarship and the Palestine Question. Thirty years later we get Gaza – an inquest into its martyrdom by Norman Finkelstein (2018)

There seems little chance of anyone being willing to go back to the negotiating table but the question does need to be raised - What it would take to get people back to that table?

I’ve been going back to some posts I’ve done on the issue of RECONCILIATION in which Adam Kahane was very much my guide. Two of his books can be read here

Solving Tough Problems – an open way of talking, listening and creating new realities Adam Kahane (2006) and

Power and Love – a theory and practice of social change (2010)

For less US-oriented stuff I would recommend -

Negotiating in Times of Conflict ed G Sher and G Kurz 2015

Small State Mediation in International Conflicts – diplomacy and negotiation in Israel-Palestine; J Erikkson (2015)

The classic is, however, Getting to Yes – negotiating agreement without giving in by R Fisher and W Ury (1981)

UPDATE; I’ve been horrified by the pathetic British response to the violence of the last week – with no empathy shown to the suffering and simply siding with a state which has brutally suppressed Palestinian aspirations. I was therefore heartened by this post which closely analysed the speech of a Labour politician which wasn’t able to condemn the Israelis for their war crimes – and grateful that at least one Conservative politician was able to cross that line. And even more grateful that my positive comments on the post received a lot of positive feedback from Brits who clearly find the MSM coverage distasteful