Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine since 1989 by Mark LeVine
Zed Books, £14.99
The conflict between Israel and Palestine remains a live issue, and a priority for Barack Obama’s administration in the wake of the continuing violence in Gaza. Impossible Peace, Mark LeVine’s somewhat pessimistically titled study, is one of a series looking at upheavals in world affairs “since 1989” and the fall of the Berlin Wall but it goes back well beyond that date to trace the origins of the problem.
LeVine, Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History, Culture and Islamic Studies at the University of California, Irvine, shows how the roots of the conflict stretch back through the region’s colonial past to the days of the Ottoman Empire. Impossible Peace shows how history and the West’s
long-term colonial ambitions created the
pre-conditions for the present conflict.
The author categorizes the underlying issues in three areas: land settlement, the separation of Israel and Palestine as economic entities and the growing power of religious movements in both societies.
He charts the failure of the peace process from the Camp David agreement of
1979 through the doomed Oslo accords of 1993. One of the book’s main purposes is to analyse the failings of Oslo and LeVine argues that the accords collapsed not merely because of a failure to live up to the agreements signed by the leaders of the two peoples, but because the ideologies underlying those agreements made a comprehensive peace impossible.
LeVine characterises the Israel/Palestine problem as fundamentally one of entrenched ethnocentricity – a kind of apartheid. Failure to understand the situation in this context has meant that the peace process has never really got off the ground. He argues that the solution demands that we “move beyond conventional wisdom” and “re-imagine Israeli and Palestinian identities.”
He avoids the one-sided polemic that characterises so much commentary on the subject and calls for both the Israeli and Palestinian people to “escape from the burdens of their shared yet conflicted histories” and, once again, to “imagine new identities” for themselves. But this is no small requirement.
Impossible Peace is an erudite and balanced investigation into one of the most complicated and intractable conflicts of modern times. It will surely become recommended reading for academics and politicians alike.
Andrew Bunday
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