ABSTRACT

There are many challenges involved in the bottom-up transformation of the violent structures and systems that sustain the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. This book contributes to the examination of these structures and it assesses the actors and strategies that are contributing to the termination of cycles of violence and oppression. In the chapters that follow, peace practitioners and academics draw both on research conducted within Israel and the occupied territory, and insights from interdisciplinary perspectives, as they look to a future in which the multi-ethno-religious inhabitants of historic Palestine and their descendants might be able to realize positive peace. 1

In many ways, the arguments presented in this volume respond to the widely perceived failure of the 1993 Oslo Accords between the government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Subsequent abortive international peace processes for the region have included the peace negotiations held at the Camp David summit in 2000, the ‘roadmap for peace’ produced by the Quartet on the Middle East in 2003, and the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks which took place between 2010 and 2011 and from 2013 to 2014. The Oslo Accords, which were initially perceived as a dramatic breakthrough, were arguably designed to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory by ushering it through a series of classic conf lict resolution manoeuvres into a ‘new era of mutual recognition, reconciliation, and peace’ which would prop up Yasser Arafat as Israel’s partner for peace (Peters 2013).