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Reading the Conflict - How Israelis and Palestinian Negotiate: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Oslo Peace Process

Today, I recommend a slim and eminently readable volume that should be required reading for anyone who ever plays any role in Middle East diplomacy, in either the American, Israeli, or Palestinian governments: How Israelis and Palestinians Negotiate: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Oslo Peace Process.

Last week I suggested The Process: 1,100 Days That Changed the Middle East by Uri Savir, chief Israeli negotiator in Oslo. I referenced the fact that the Oslo process is now widely recognized as, at the very least, flawed, and insofar as the goal of those negotiations - a two-state peace - has yet to be realized, the unavoidable conclusion is that, despite all the best intentions in the world: The Oslo process failed.

That does not mean, of course, that all negotiations are bound to failure, nor that the original vision should be abandoned. If Israelis and Palestinians want to live in real peace and security, they will have to find a way to share the land that both peoples hold in their hearts - they'll have to find a way to meet their own needs, while genuinely recognizing the legitimacy of the needs on the other side.

A good place to start, however, would be figuring out what went wrong in Oslo.

Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, authors of The Palestinian People: A History (which I recommended earlier), have unpacked much of what was ill-advised in the actual agreements - front-loading of Israeli benefits vs. back-loading Palestinian benefits, for instance - but part of why the agreements were flawed can be found in the way the sides worked together.

It turns out that culture actually matters when you sit down to make peace.

And thus, with that lengthy preamble, I get around to recommending How Israelis and Palestinians Negotiate, a collection of several excellent essays that do precisely what the title suggests they will - analyze the ways in which the two sides approached and behaved in the process of the Oslo talks.

Edited by Tamara Cofman Wittes (who also contributes to the book) How Israelis and Palestinians Negotiate could, in fact, be easily be digested in the course of a flight from Washington to Tel Aviv, with time left over to peruse the Sky Mall catalogue - and yet its contribution is tremendous. I'll let the authors speak:

"Culture plays a subtler and more multifaceted role than merely provoking misunderstanding," Wittes writes. "Cultural factors influenced the assessments and decisions of individual leaders and negotiators, shaped the domestic institutions and political environment in which policy decisions on negotiation were made and carried out, and shaped each party's perception of their relative balance of power and how best to respond to it."

"The tendency of Israeli negotiators to dictate positions without justifying them," writes Omar M. Dajani, former legal advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team, "reinforced Palestinians' concern that Israelis were less interested in a new relationship of equality than in a modification of existing arrangements.... Palestinian negotiators' passivity reinforced the impression that they were not interested in actually reaching a deal."

Possibly the most salient point is this, made by Wittes: "Each side's national identity is rooted in a sense of minority status, persecution, vulnerability, and unrelieved threat. Each side felt itself to be the disadvantaged and weaker one."

Finally, Aharon Klieman, also a former participant in the diplomatic process, makes plain the enormity of the task: "Israelis and Palestinians need to work hard at learning to understand the other side's language, history, value systems and culture, and... no less crucially, they must still learn to reshape their own respective negotiating cultures."

If we've learned nothing else over the past two decades, however, we've certainly seen that such a prescription is easier to make, than to carry out.

But it is not, nor has it ever been, impossible. Perhaps if all three national diplomatic corps could find the time to read these 148 pages between now and September, the looming diplomatic dust-up could be avoided. Perhaps if we learned to pay attention not only to our own needs, but also to those of our interlocutors, actual progress could be achieved.

Please read How Israelis and Palestinians Negotiate*.

*Credit where it's due! It was APN's spokesman and my friend Ori Nir who first handed me Wittes' book.

Please note: I'm travelling with my family to Israel/Palestine today, and so will not be posting Reading the Conflict again until July 8.

Emily L. Hauser is an American-Israeli freelance writer who has studied and written about the contemporary Middle East since the early 1990s, and is an active member of a Chicago-area Conservative congregation. An archive of previous book recommendations can be found here. She blogs at Emily L. Hauser In My Head and can be followed on Twitter.