| Abstract: | The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is intractable, given its long-lasting nature and its resistance to resolution.
This paper unpacks the notion of intractable conflict. Attributing intractability to ancient hatreds, or other
meta-narratives, is not sufficient. Rather, these conflicts are rooted in issues of resource competition, and
in turn the threats to socio-economic and personal security, lack of potential prosperity, and political
restriction that the resulting conflict engenders and feeds from. This paper points to both the Palestinian-
Israeli conflict in general, as well as the specific issue of Jerusalem, to demonstrate that the efforts of the
international community have fundamentally failed to bring about resolution to the conflict. This essay
argues that the efforts of the international community have been excessively state-centric in nature,
focusing on issues of borders and political arrangement. To reach a resolution to this conflict, the efforts
of the international community need to target the people, namely the Palestinians, through efforts to
provide physical safety, economic/political opportunity, and an overall sense of future prosperity. Efforts
must provide a positive impetus not to engage in conflict for the populace in order to disempower the
cyclical nature of intractable conflict. Further research is required to understand the motivation of
empowered actors to continuously engage in conflict, though it is suspected that the drivers are also
resource and socio-economically based. The understanding of intractable conflict presented in this paper
would benefit from additional vetting against other notable areas of intractable conflict around the world. |