Before the Peace Process: Historical Roots of a Dysfunctional Relationship

Abstract

This chapter offers a contextual analysis of the historical roots of what came to be a dysfunctional relationship between the Israeli and Palestinian national identities. It focuses on the first attempts developed toward peacemaking following the establishment of the Zionist Movement in Palestine in light of dehumanization and peace-less reconciliation. This chapter argues that the first attempts to accommodate opposing interests of both Palestinian and Zionist elites during the British Mandate, what can be considered the embryo of the peace process, have introduced a self-perpetuating dynamic of defining the ‘self’ as opposed to the ‘other’ that has marked greatly the process of both Israeli and Palestinian identity building. This chapter concludes that the first approaches to deal with what was still a young dispute between political elites were not only defining features for the subsequent periods, but also had deep implications in the very course of events.

The historical roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict date back to much earlier than the decision to partition the land between two peoples, which led to the creation of the Israeli State in 1948 and the beginning of the official dispute between Arabs and Jews. This moment was—and is—of central importance for the current format of the conflict and the following attempts to solve it. However, the narratives that have created the rationale for the discourses, policies and practices of conflict that prevail until today were actually formed in the first half of the twentieth century. These have arisen in the context of the establishment of the Zionist Movement and the subsequent attempts made by the British Mandate to conciliate the intentions of the latter and the claims of the autochthonous population of Palestine—the Palestinians—after the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire. Although it is impossible to talk about a peace process—at least the way the scholarship and policy makers traditionally define it—before at least the end of the Second World War, through a teleological approach it is possible to frame the first attempts to deal with what was still a young dispute between political elites as the embryonic phase of what would later become a protracted peace process.

Aiming to take full account of what some have referred to as a conflict of narratives (Shlaim 2010: ix) and the very specific identity dynamics that have arisen from it, this chapter develops a contextual analysis of the historical roots of what came to be a dysfunctional relationship between the Israeli and Palestinian national identities. It focuses on first attempts developed toward peacemaking following the establishment of the Zionist Movement in Palestine in light of dehumanization and peace-less reconciliation. Section 4.1 traces early signs of negative interdependence between the national identities in the making, focusing on discourses and official documents related to the newborn conflict before the Second World War and the decolonization processes in the Middle East. Section 4.2 explores the meaning of reconciliation that had emerged during the period of the British Mandate. By bringing together the analysis developed in the previous parts of this chapter, Sect. 4.3 identifies the need for legitimacy and recognition in the context of the interactions between local and international powers as the main drivers of the dawn of dehumanizing processes in this conflict. This chapter argues that the first attempts to accommodate opposing interests of both Palestinian and Zionist elites during the British Mandate, what can be considered the embryo of the peace process, have introduced a self-perpetuating dynamic of defining the ‘self’ as opposed to the ‘other’ that has marked greatly the process of both Israeli and Palestinian identity building. This chapter concludes that the first approaches to deal with what was still a young dispute between political elites were not only defining features for the subsequent periods, but also had deep implications in the very course of events.

1 Early Signs of Negative Interdependence in the Construction of National Identities

A land without a people for a people without a land

Israel Zangwill, 1901 ¹

Dehumanization of both Jews and Palestinians is a process that started many years before the establishment of the United Nations and the peace process between the two parties of the conflict. For instance, Jewish persecution across Europe dates back to the Middle Ages, while anti-Semitism during the Second World War turned the Jewish question into one of the most emblematic cases of dehumanization of a people in History. The interconnectedness of preliminary stages of what is now the Israeli and the Palestinian identities can be associated with those events that created the rationale and the motivation for a massive Jewish immigration to Palestine. However, the origins of the negative interdependence between these two identities can actually be found in the birth of the Zionist Movement, at the end of the nineteenth century (Rouhana and Bar-Tal 1998: 762; Halpern 1969; Hertzberg 1973).

Commonly associated with the slogan quoted at the beginning of this section, “a land without people for a people without land”,² the Zionist Movement was developed from its inception as a nationalist ideology that aimed at the colonization of Zion, the land of Israel—or, in other words, Palestine. As shown by Ilan Pappé in his book A History of Modern Palestine, this movement was not homogeneous at first, neither regarding the origin of its members nor their plans for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people (Pappé 2010: 35–40). Nevertheless, its aim of uniting the Jewish people under national claims, translated in terms of the establishment of a modern national state, and the idea that there could not be other alternatives for this community to live without the fear of persecution and isolation were a constant in the diversity of manifestos and discourses of Zionists in the turn to the twentieth century.³

Early signs of a narrative that dehumanizes the ‘other’ by implicitly or explicitly denying identity and community to the autochthonous populations of Palestine can be seen in the first documents associated with the Zionist Movement. The Manifesto of the Bilu Group (1882)⁴ makes the claim for “a home in our country” that is considered Jewish by divine and historical right since “it was given to us by the mercy of God; it is ours as registered in the archives of history”. Theodor Herzl’s pamphlet “The Jewish State” (1896),⁵ on its turn, proposes “the restoration of the Jewish state” [the italic is mine], thus invoking the moral/cultural dimension of dehumanization outlined in Table 3.1 of Chap. 3. Although at this point the Zionist Movement strategy was that of diplomatic channels and negotiations with the Sultanate of the Ottoman Empire that ruled the region until the First World War, as well as a financial enterprise expressed in the systematic purchase of private land, there is a clear claim for the colonization of Palestine, mostly explicit in all those documents (see, e.g., the Basle Declaration of the First Zionist Congress, August 1897⁶). Those perspectives either deliberately ignore the existence of several communities that lived in Palestine at that time or imply that their will over the land is not worth consideration.⁷ By silencing or even erasing the existence of other identities that were connected to Palestine—and, needless to say, corresponded to the majority of its population⁸—this narrative has granted those individuals the status of mere observers, thus removing their right of agency—an imminently human condition. According to Ilan Pappé in his book The Forgotten Palestinians, there is plenty of evidence from the many diaries left to the analysis of contemporary historians by early Zionist settlers that although they

were well received […] [and that] the local Palestinians in most cases offered these newcomers some accommodation and advice on how to cultivate the land, […] the settlers did not reciprocate in kind […] [since] they referred to the native Palestinians as aliens roaming the land that belonged to the Jewish people [while] some came with the notion that the land was empty and assumed that the people they found there were foreign invaders. (Pappé 2013: 1)

As per the Palestinians—mostly Arabic autochthonous populations living under the Ottoman Empire in the region of Palestine—their national claims were not structured at the beginning of the twentieth century. In this regard, it is worth noting that it would be anachronistic to analyze the rise of this identity in formation by using the lenses of Western modern thinking, in which identities started to be expressed in terms of national aims, because this understanding only became universalized after the territorial reorganization and decolonization processes that followed the Second World War. Notwithstanding, according to Rashid Khalidi, in his book Palestinian Identity (2010), there exists a great amount of evidence that the relative administrative autonomy granted by the Ottoman Empire to important cities in Palestine such as Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, Nablus, Hebron, Nazareth and Gaza⁹ created the conditions for the construction of a modern national consciousness that became increasingly expressed as differentiated from the Arabic identity as a whole (Khalidi 2010: 35–38). By investigating the story of important Palestinian families (notables), in the end of the nineteenth century, Khalidi argues that there was already a widely spread will between political and economic elites connected with European scholarship, and sharing liberal values of modernity, secularism and nationalism, to establish a Palestinian state in the region. His research challenges mainstream contemporary narratives that attribute the existence of the Palestinian identity to later reactions and resistance to the establishment of the Zionist Movement alone (Peters 1984; Avneri 2009).

For the purpose of this book, it is important to note that the Palestinian identity is the product of a twofold process of differentiation and affirmation that is not only connected to the Zionist ‘other’ but also that, from its inception, arises from the greater Arabic identity into which Palestinians were assimilated at that time (Muslih 1988; Khalidi 2010). Nevertheless, references to what was supposed to become a “Palestinian citizenship” date back to 1922.¹⁰ It would be then simplistic to state that the Palestinian identity is the mere product of the opposition to the Jewish immigration and the discourses and narratives of the Zionist Movement that organized the international Jewish community into a Jewish national identity—which is also a product of heterogeneity since it is composed by several communities from diverse origins. Moreover, this view could be considered complicit with the mainstream Zionist narrative that denies the existence of the Palestinian identity (Pappé 2013: 1–8). As a matter of fact, many efforts toward self-determination were taken during the late Ottoman rule of Palestine and especially during the British Mandate, simply because the situation had changed with the fall of the Empire (Smith 2010: 33–36). For instance, documents from this period reveal a clear intention on the part of the indigenous population of constituting a national state in Palestine, although the formula for this aim was definitely diverse (Cleveland and Bunton 2013: 228–229).

Albeit, as has been argued, the first stages of the construction of both Israeli and Palestinian national identities can be dated back at least to the end of the nineteenth century, both have begun to assume a strong character of opposition to the ‘other’ only after the developments of the end of the First World War, when the fall of the Ottoman Empire led the League of Nations to the decision of placing Palestine under the administration of Great Britain. Despite the commitments made in order to respect the wishes of the people of Palestine (UNISPAL 1978), the British Mandate legitimated the claims to a Jewish State in that region by conceding to the Zionist Movement’s requests. The Balfour Declaration (November 2, 1917),¹¹ in which Lord Balfour declares the British Empire’s commitment with the establishment of a Jewish homeland, is considered by many the birth certificate of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Laqueur and Rubin 2008: 16; Tessler 1994; Mendelsohn 1989; Gerner 1991). In this letter written by Lord Arthur James Balfour to Lord Rothschild, it is said that “His Majesty’s Government views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object”. Reactions from Arabic communities¹² inaugurated discourses aimed at the affirmation of their national identities—given what started to be perceived as a threat to their claims and very existence as a people.¹³ These discourses have been strongly connected with the negative dimension of identity building, being its relationship with the ‘other’, rather than with identification and a sense of pertaining to the same community.

The growing tension that led to early signs of the negative interconnectedness of those identities expressed in terms of dehumanization processes can already be seen in the first documents related to the conflict. As an illustration, both the King-Crane Commission’s Recommendations (August 28, 1919)¹⁴ and the Churchill White Paper (June 1922)¹⁵ express great concern with the growing opposition to the Zionist Movement in Palestine and Syria, anticipating what was about to become one of the most emblematic cases of protracted social conflicts in contemporary history. On the one hand, the former identifies the increase of cultural violence and its potential for the escalation of the conflict by warning that “the Peace Conference should not shut its eyes to the fact that the anti-Zionist feeling in Palestine and Syria is intense and not lightly to be flouted”. On the other, the latter summarizes the feelings of the indigenous populations at that time by assuring that the British Empire had not “at any time contemplated, as appears to be feared by the Arab Delegation, the disappearance or the subordination of the Arabic population, language, or culture in Palestine” [the italic is mine], what is an evidence that Arab concerns at that time already corresponded to what was identified in this book as the dimensions of dehumanization in Chap. 3. Both documents, as well as the ones connected to the Zionist Movement that were mentioned above, point to the beginning of what was about to become an identity conflict, focused on identity needs such as those of recognition, community rights and distribution of resources (Lederach 1997; Regehr 1993; Burton 1990).

Although this book defines the peace process as having been initiated with the United Nations’ interference in the matter, since it established the contemporary characteristics of this conflict, some argue that it in fact began with the developments that followed the Balfour Declaration (e.g., Khalidi 2006: xi). This section made the brief point that although dehumanization cannot be considered a product of the protracted peace process, it has definitely been impacted by this process from whichever starting point one wishes to define it. However, as could not have been different, the first attempts to peacemaking in the region were deeply influenced by the goal of promoting reconciliation. More specifically, in this case, the British Mandate’s approach to accommodate divergent interests has dominated the understandings of reconciliation in this period.

Next section will analyze the meaning of reconciliation employed in this period, trace its manifestations in early discourses and discuss briefly the implications of this approach to the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

2 Reconciliation as the Accommodation of Interests in the British Mandate

The Principal Allied Powers […] [are] in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine […].

League of Nations, 1922 ¹⁶

The quotation above represents a great summary of the meaning of reconciliation employed by the British Mandate in the first attempts to solve the early manifestations of what would become a more than a century-long protracted conflict between two national projects. The idea of reconciling divergent and competing interests was key for the interventions that took place in the region before the Second World War. This section traces early signs of reconciliation developed during the period of the League of Nations’ mandated British rule over Palestine. It assesses the evolution and development of policies and practices that have attempted to promote some form of reconciliation in the dawn of what would become known as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as their impact on social identities. This is an enlightening analysis since the absence of a peace process under the League of Nations did not mean extensive international interventionism in the region did not take place. Moreover, the first approaches to deal with what was still a young dispute between political elites were not only defining features for the subsequent periods; they also had deep implications in the very course of events.

Resuming the narrative developed in the last section, this analysis begins with the consequences of what was already referred that is considered by many scholars to be the birth certificate of the conflict, the more than a hundred years old Balfour Declaration (November 2, 1917).¹⁷ As such, this important historical landmark can be considered the very reason why reconciliation would become a necessity in the years to come. In this document, Lord Balfour made a twofold promise that has determined the fate of the region (and the decisions made about the region) in subsequent decades. On the one hand, he declared His Majesty’s sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations and officially accepted their national claims for Palestine. On the other, he conditioned this promise to the safeguard of the “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. Nevertheless, as argued in last section, this declaration provided the legitimization of the Jewish aspirations yet ignoring the Palestinian identity claims and even existence.

Instead of promoting recognition, one of the indicators of reconciliation identified in this research,¹⁸ this declaration reinforced the Zionist Movement’s denial of the Palestinian identity. In this document, the Arab Palestinian people, that, as mentioned before, constituted more than 85 percent of the population, were actively made inexistent by the Mandate that merely referred to them as non-Jewish communities, “a strange reference to the vast native majority” (Pappé 2006: 13), and promised them “civil and religious rights at the expense of crucial political and national rights” (Khalidi 2017: 8). The legitimization of one’s identity alongside the denial of the ‘other’s’ makes it an unavoidable milestone for any analysis about dehumanization and reconciliation in Israel and Palestine.

A consequence of this approach, Arab rejection to the Balfour Declaration provoked violent reactions and contestations all over Palestine (Sorek 2013: 6; Darweish and Rigby 2015: 15). Following the controversy of the Declaration, first signs of discourses and policies that aimed at promoting the conciliation of narratives, claims, aims and, more importantly, identities of Palestinian Arabs and Jews can be seen in the 1922 Churchill White Paper.¹⁹ In this document, there is a clear effort of the then-British Colonial Secretary to create a paradigm of cooperation instead of competition, at least in the official discourse, since the British Government policy during the period of the Mandate consisted mainly of an attempt to balance Zionist claims and local pleas for self-determination, while maintaining their very position in the region (Smith 2010: 67). Churchill’s argument in this document was that cooperating would be a way to improve Arab standard of living at the same time that it would allow for the creation of the Jewish homeland.

According to Cleveland and Bunton, the Churchill White Paper was an attempt at promoting coexistence—that, as set out in Chap. 3, is a minimalist albeit necessary condition for reconciliation—as the basis for future relations and politics in the region, since “his first constitutional proposal called for the creation of a legislative council composed of elected Muslim, Christian, and Jewish representatives plus eleven members nominated by the high commissioner” (Cleveland and Bunton 2013: 228). This proposal can be connected to the political dimension of reconciliation, insofar as it consists in an attempt to balance previous declarations by promoting the reparation of what was assumedly a past wrongdoing at the institutional level. In doing this, it consisted of an important recognition of the existence and claims of other identity groups, at least at the symbolic level. Nevertheless, this was an episodic situation that can be better connected to the exception rather than the rule, thus failing to find echo in future approaches to this conflict in the years to come. Moreover, this proposal granted equal treatment and opportunities to groups whose representation in society was severely disproportionate, therefore still privileging a minority over the majority. As Rashid Khalidi points out, despite the conciliatory tone of the content of the Churchill White Paper, the British Colonial Secretary had in fact promised the Zionist leadership that Palestine would be turned into a Jewish State (Khalidi 2017: 9). The feeling of injustice sparked by the British suggestion of parity led not only to the Arab refusal to accept it, but also to a Palestinian uprising in 1929 (Pappé 2006: 14).

However, an analysis of this document is in order since it addresses the dimension of recognition of identities that is present in the concept of peace-less reconciliation developed in this book. Although it was just one of the few glimpses of recognition in this period, the Churchill White Paper is paramount in reversing the denial of the Palestinian Arab existence that was a dominant feature of the Balfour Declaration. In his narrative, Churchill assured both parties to the recently created conflict that “the Secretary of State is of opinion that [the Balfour Declaration] does not contain or imply anything which need cause either alarm to the Arab population of Palestine or disappointment to the Jews” [the italics are mine]. Differently from Lord Balfour’s discourse in 1917, the Churchill White Paper recognizes explicitly the existence of at least two competing claims, expressed in the existence of legitimate identity groups with national aspirations, and the need to manage them in order to reach a solution to the recently created conflict. Therefore, Winston Churchill’s document was one of the first to recognize the need to promote some type of reconciliation between the two peoples and their identity needs.

Almost ten years later and following the riots of 1929 against the intensification of Jewish immigration and the extensive land sales to Jews (Laqueur and Schueftan 2016: 36–37), British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald issued a document known as The MacDonald Letter (February 13, 1931).²⁰ Although this document maintains the tendency of addressing the conflict in an asymmetric and, above all, unbalanced way, which did not correspond to the actual disproportionate weight of each party in the region, reinforcing Zionist claims to the land already recognized by the Covenant of the League of Nations and the Balfour Declaration, it can also be read as another expression of early signs of reconciliation, this time in its economic and social dimensions. In his Letter, the Prime Minister recognizes “the existence of differing interests and viewpoints” and goes even further in affirming that “these, indeed, are not in themselves irreconcilable, but they can only be reconciled if there is a proper realization that the full solution of the problem depends upon an understanding between the Jews and the Arabs” [the italics are mine].

While this document reinforces the British policy of artificially establishing a future Jewish State in Palestine, it expresses concern regarding the “control of [Jewish] immigration”, the “number of displaced Arabs” and the deprivation of “the present population of their employment”. Nevertheless, this document is another example of how reconciliation was mainly addressed in this period. It was seen as a balance between interests in the political level and a way to mitigate the conflict (usually referred in the documents of this period as a “problem”) between the population of Palestine and the Jewish immigrants, that was in fact created by previous promises made by the Mandate to the Zionist Movement. According to Ilan Pappé, those were “British ideas of how best to solve the conflict Britain itself had done so much to exacerbate” (Pappé 2006: 13).

Another example of a document in this period that refers to reconciliation—although very different from the others in its consequences and actual impact on the conflict—is the Peel Commission Report (July 1937).²¹ However, this document is relevant not because it considers the need to promote some sort of reconciliation, defined in terms of interests to solve the dispute, but because it explicitly addresses the relationship between reconciliation and identity. It was precisely due to the recognition of the existence of two different identity groups with competing national claims that Lord Peel recognizes in this document that the national aspirations of Arabs and Jews could not be reconciled under the Mandate. According to Lord Peel, Arabs and Jews

differ in their religion and in language. Their cultural and social life, their ways of thought and conduct, are as incompatible as their national aspirations. These last are the greatest bar to peace. Arabs and Jews might possibly learn to live and work together in Palestine if they would make a genuine effort to reconciliation and combine their national ideals and so build up in time a joint or dual nationality. But this they cannot do. […] no solution can be satisfactory or permanent which is not based upon justice. [the italics are mine]

As emphasized by the italics on the text, the Peel Commission Report was also the first document produced in the context of this conflict to connect reconciliation to coexistence, identity, justice and peace.²² Based on the belief that the proposal to create a Palestinian citizenship—into which Jewish and Arabic peoples would be assimilated within a liberal secular state with equal rights and international governance of religious sites, in order to protect the major faiths of Jews, Christians, Muslims and Armenians—would not be possible, Lord Peel suggested in this document what would become the actual implemented solution to the conflict: the partition of Palestine.²³

In conclusion, these examples show that reconciliation in this period of the British Mandate had been approached as a delicate balance between divergent interests (including British ones). As Rashid Khalidi puts it, those documents were in fact “quintessentially colonial proclamations by the greatest power of its era of its intent to replace an indigenous people with another, whom it proposed to bring into existence on their territory” (Khalidi 2017: 8). As argued in the previous section, the inability (or willful lack of intention) expressed in most documents of this period to recognize the identity of the people of Palestine, as well as their active denial of this people’s national claims, is reflected not only in a grossly misrepresentation of the idea of reconciliation but has actually promoted the dehumanization of Palestinians. Moreover, based on the widespread belief that reconciliation was not a possibility, future approaches to this conflict have developed into the idea of artificially partitioning the land, thus institutionalizing divisions in the political, moral, cultural, geographic, economic and social realms that were to be translated into practices in the societal level. As we will see in the next chapter, this approach to reconciliation merely as reconciling interests will be maintained and reproduced during several decades in the context of the newborn peace process after the Second World War.

3 Legitimacy and Recognition in the Wake of Conflict

The analysis developed in this chapter thus far shows how the international attempts to manage the region of Palestine in the beginning of the twentieth century, following the establishment of the Zionist Movement and the fall of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, had created the very need for external intervention in the decades to come. It was in the context of the first declarations of the British Mandate and the League of Nations about the future of the region that the conflict, or to use the words at the time, the “problem”, has arisen. In this sense, the mediation of the external powers and the first attempts to negotiate a solution for the competing aims and expectations regarding the political and national projects that were being drawn for Palestine at that moment had become a privileged arena for manifesting one’s claims and identity as opposed to the other’s, a paradigm that will continue and intensify during the next decades in the context of the protracted peace process.

This chapter has shown how the development of competing narratives and aims, connected to the necessity of legitimization in the face of the international powers that administered the region, created the basis for disputes over the land and, later on, over the affirmation and recognition of identity needs (Pappé 2013: 1–2). Practices and discourses that aim at the dehumanization of the ‘other’ appear in this context as self-defense mechanisms, a way to legitimate one’s national claims by delegitimizing the ‘other’s’ (Rouhana and Bar-Tal 1998: 763–764). This has created the beginning of what Herbert C. Kelman calls negative interdependence between identities (Kelman 1999: 581), insofar as the existence of the ‘self’ became intrinsically related to the conflictive relationship with, and representations made of, the ‘other’.

Moreover, the impacts connected with these documents on social identity are manifold, since the discourses and practices in the political level about the future of the territory under British jurisdiction, known as Palestine, have affected the very relationships between Jews and Arabs in this period and, more importantly, found resonance in the years to come. On the one hand, by activating the moral/cultural and political/institutional dimensions of dehumanization, with few exceptions mentioned in last section, this approach has contributed to the institutionalization of meanings, policies and practices that aimed at legitimizing one’s identities and claims by denying the existence of the other’s (Kelman 1999; Khalidi 2010). This can be seen in the reactions and discourses of both Israeli and Palestinian political elites in this period, analyzed in the first section.

The examples addressed in this chapter that counteract this pattern in the period of the British Mandate were episodic manifestations of what Lisa Strömbom calls “thin recognition” (Strömbom 2013) of the indigenous population’s claims for self-determination and were accompanied by a disproportionate support of the Zionists claims (Pappé 2006: 12–15), thus failing to create a sustainable reconciliatory paradigm and actively promoting direct violence and conflict. On the other hand, the political/institutional approach to reconciliation, defined as the balance between competing interests, had promoted a series of reactions in the societal level that allowed for a reorientation of the political leadership and collaborated to an increasing self-awareness as an identity group in the societal level (Khalidi 2013). In sum, the very actions undertaken in this period that can be connected to the concept of reconciliation have in fact collaborated to the exacerbation of the conflict, the increasing feeling of injustice and disregard for history, collective memory and the past.

In this sense, and as has been suggested and will be further argued in the next chapters, internationally mediated attempts to solve the question of Palestine have played a huge part in both reinforcing and transforming those processes of dehumanization, deeply affecting the interconnectedness of both identities ever since its first interference in the region. This has happened because the mediation of those powers has been considered to be legitimate and, therefore, as briefly showed in this chapter, a convincing narrative of one’s rightful claims necessarily started to be connected with the devaluation of the other’s. The self-perpetuating dynamics created in this phase will be reproduced in the next ones, creating the paradigm of protracted conflict that exists until today. This is because the very existence of each national project became intrinsically connected with the conflict and the enmity toward the other, turning since this moment the very conflict of an aspect of ontological security (Rumelili 2015; Lupovici 2015).

In conclusion, this chapter identifies the struggle for legitimization and recognition as the main drivers of dehumanization in the first stages of the conflict. Recognition is understood here as the product of intersubjective human negotiations that are connected to their identities insofar as these are shaped and become meaningful only in relation to others (Strömbom 2013: 24–25). In this sense, the need for recognition in this phase of the conflict led to the denial of the ‘other’ and their existence, insofar as the realization of the competing claims regarding the region was only possible insofar as the ‘other’s’ were rendered illegitimate. Since both projects have positioned themselves in terms of which claim was more accurate, legitimate and just, the defense of one’s case became increasingly related to the deconstruction/delegitimization of the other’s. As the examples aforementioned show, this led to the creation of a narrative about the ‘self’ that was strongly connected with the inexistence of the ‘other’, thus turning the denial of the ‘other’ into a very important aspect of the definition of the self, reinforcing what Chap. 2 refers to as the negative dimension of identity building.

As a final note, even though this book considers that the beginning of the contemporary version of the conflict and, therefore, of the peace process, coincides with the United Nations resolution 181 (UN 1947) that created two states, the period analyzed herein is relevant for this study since it sets, as explained above, the basis for the next one. While the League of Nations through the British Mandate had attempted to manage the conflict by dealing with political elites in a colonialist style, the United Nations will maintain this paradigm almost until the end of the Cold War, thus collaborating in the alienation of the population and actively promoting social detachment instead of reconciliation. Next chapter will deal with these dimensions, levels and practices of dehumanization and reconciliation developed within the peace process from the Partition Plan to the First Palestinian Intifada.

4 Conclusion

This chapter has set out the basis for the main argument of this book. It suggests that a teleological view over the peace process reveals that although it was not—understandably—constructed since the beginning as such, as there was not an ongoing conflict yet, let alone a protracted conflict, to address in the first half of the twentieth century, it can be read in retrospective as a set of non-coordinated—and, sometimes, uncoordinated—initiatives toward promoting peace, coexistence and reconciliation. By looking at these events from the point of view of the current historical developments between these relationships or, put differently, identities in conflict, it is evident that they have systematically influenced the course of the events and, as we will see in the next chapters, have become an invisible, although ever existing, presence—or, in constructivist terms, structure, either material or symbolic—in the dispute, thus impacting the actions, interests and identities of the parties involved in what is now a widely recognized protracted conflict.

The importance of taking full account of what Avi Shlaim called a conflict of narratives urges for a historiographic analysis that can trace the early manifestations of both dehumanization and reconciliation in light of the peace process, even before its official beginning—what I have designated in this chapter as its embryonic phase. This is a way to grasp how these two intertwined processes came to existence, the conditions that have allowed for one to prevail over the other and even their still coexisting dynamics. Moreover, the contextualization of the antecedents of the peace process shows how recognition, legitimacy and ontological security are so closely connected with the concept of dehumanization. It also allows for an exploration of the impact of dehumanization on identity building and of the role the peace process has played in this regard even before its first breath.

Finally, this chapter also makes the point that investigating national identities in the making is an indispensable enterprise as a means to avoid anachronistic readings of a period that antecedes the widely spread establishment of modern national states in the International Relations system. The impact of the protracted peace process on identities in conflict at this point was connected to the efforts to gain international legitimacy and recognition for the future existence of each national project in the context of a yet colonial world, which also implied the need to render the other national project illegitimate. In this sense, both identities became forever intertwined making it impossible to conceive the history, narratives and collective memories of both Israelis and Palestinians without the other. While these negotiations were not part of the peace process as we understand it and were only between political elites of national identities still in formation, this phase has set the basis for the next ones and the way the international powers responsible for managing the region in the first half of the twentieth century dealt with the situation greatly informed the future paradigm of the conflict and the subsequent attempts to solve it.

As we will see in the next chapter, it was in the midst of the decolonization wave that followed the end of the Second World War that this process intensified and consolidated by widely reaching the societal level rather than just official discourses in the political elites’ level. The decision of the United Nations to legitimize the claims of the Jewish people definitely partitioning the region into two states strongly contributed to the unavoidable interconnectedness of those identities from then on. Ever since, developments connected to the establishment of a peace process deeply affected the construction of Israeli and Palestinian identities, national claims and policies designed to strengthen statebuilding efforts since both developed the need of affirmation and international recognition as the future of the territory was mediated by international powers. Next chapters analyze how what was about to become a protracted peace process has affected identity building impacting dehumanization processes and the failed prospects of reconciliation in the more than 70 years that have passed since 1947 to nowadays.