Responsive Theory for Israel-Palestine Peacemaking

תקציר

The theory of responsive governance commends a sequencing of interventions, where escalation up a pyramid occurs after failure of collaboration at each lower layer of the pyramid. Costs of intervention at each layer of a peacemaking pyramid mean that war becomes more costly for belligerents as each extra layer of escalation is added on. When collaboration begins to swing into action at the highest levels of the pyramid, belligerents can move back down the pyramid, sometimes toward hybrid institutional architectures of peace with elements learnt from different layers of the sequenced process. The responsive pyramid considered for Israel-Palestine peacemaking starts at the base with Track II dialogue of diverse civil society engagement, followed by dialogue toward settling a two-state peace, then escalation to one-state dialogue, then when that fails, escalation toward new trade, travel and political sanctions until combatants rectify recalcitrant non-compliance with international law on issues as fundamental as illegal occupation of territory, crimes against humanity and nuclear weapons that are uninspected, undisclosed under the nuclear non-proliferation regime. When those sanctions fail to motivate return to one- or two-state negotiations that succeed, international society escalates to new levels of sanctions – bans on arm sales to, arms purchases from, Israel or Palestine (with sanctions on states that breach the ban) and suspension of UN recognition privileges. The idea is to persuade supporters of two- and one-state solutions to commit to giving both approaches better chances to succeed because ultimate escalation to progressively severe sanctions are worse outcomes for all sides. Figure 1 summarizes the strategy.