Let Israel negotiate with Palestinians to end impasse

Jul 28, 2014

MEDIA reports of the fighting in the Gaza strip are quite unsettling. The catastrophe should remind the world of the need for using diplomacy and soft power

By Samuel Baligidde

MEDIA reports of the fighting in the Gaza strip are quite unsettling. The catastrophe should remind the world of the need for using diplomacy and soft power, among other means, to end conflicts.

The Palestinian and Israeli leaders should negotiate to end the current impasse. Distributive or predatorial zero-sum strategies by either side will not solve the problem.

Starting out with a position that is higher than what the Palestinians can realistically estimate, they can achieve by launching rockets to wrestle concession from the Israelis has never satisfactorily worked.

By the same token, Israeli ‘Salami tactics’ of prolonging the solution to the contested status of Gaza; or giving a small concession to the Palestinians when it can no longer be avoided in order to placate them for a little while longer whenever the two antagonists go to the negotiation table after fighting unbalanced wars in which Israel wins the battles and Hamas the propaganda war is a recipe for prolonging the suffering of the innocent people; women, children and other vulnerable people who are taking the full brunt of the fighting. 

Yet a sustainable negotiated solution is possible because each side has time and again stated their ‘reservation point’ or bottom line beyond which they will not cooperate.

Fortunately, the reservation points can help negotiators contrive a possible scope of agreement! Somewhere along the continuum, the reservation points of the Palestinians and the Israelis overlap into what professional negotiators would call the zone of possible agreement (ZOPA).

Calculating the ZOPA statistic is a daunting task given the possible gaps between information and disinformation, uncertainties about the true values and interests of the Antagonists and the need for reliable estimations but is a critical step in forging peace. There is a possibility that the Antagonists may come to a mutually acceptable arrangement whereby they may all peacefully coexist. 

Without going into the academic gymnastics of debating the nuances of ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ wars let me reiterate what UN Secretary-General Ban-ki Moon said; the killing of innocent people on both sides must stop. To call the deaths of children ‘collateral damage’ is reprehensible.

The notion that the strong must prevail or to put it in the language of classical realism that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must is unethical. 

In a speech at Cairo University in June 2009, President Obama, and in a separate meeting with Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu clearly stated that the US would again be an active participant in peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

Working towards peace in the Middle-East had, since the time of Professor Henry Kissinger, when he was Secretary of State, been a priority of the US but had languished under the George Bush [Jr] Administration whose endeavours did not go beyond the outline of the so called ‘Road Map’ done at the summit of Annapolis, Maryland in 2007.

The Obama speech raised some optimism when it signaled US willingness to be actively engaged once again. 

The current slaughter in Gaza demonstrates that previous attempts at peace have ended and new initiatives as well as strategies are necessary: starting with talks about talks; agreeing to a venue; determining the constitution of the delegations and their leaders; selecting mutually acceptable mediators; setting the agenda; separating interests from positions; policy formulation, analysis and evaluation; among others.

The success of the negotiations will depend on how the preliminaries are managed. 

The writer teaches principles and techniques of diplomatic negotiations and mediation at the East African School of Diplomacy, Governance and International Studies of Uganda Martyrs University-Nkozi

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