Middle East Strategy at Harvard

MESH invites selected authors to offer original first-person statements on their new books—why and how they wrote them, and what impact they hope and expect to achieve. Matthew Levitt is senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a member of MESH. His forthcoming book is Negotiating Under Fire: Preserving Peace Talks in the Face of Terror Attacks.

From Matthew Levitt

In 1993 I was a graduate student focusing on the Middle East, international security studies, and negotiation theory and conflict resolution. In many ways, events of the day—that is, the just-signed Oslo Accords—forced upon me what became a decade-and-a-half-long study of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. This particular peace process, however, was simply the most relevant and immediate case study available to me as I set out to develop a theory of conflict management applied to ongoing negotiations over protracted social conflicts. So, with the support of a graduate fellowship from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, I set out for Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and Washington (the last being the most dangerous, by far), and conducted over seventy interviews of Israeli, Palestinian and American negotiators, decision-makers and intelligence and security officials.

My working hypothesis—no great leap of genius—was that spoilers will always seek to undermine peace processes through acts of violence. But is there anything that can be done to insulate ongoing negotiations from the impact of these security crises and preserve peace talks in the face of terror attacks? Of course, this assumes the parties are truly committed to pursuing peace and are ultimately willing to make sometimes painful concessions and then sell them at home to their constituencies. That may or may not be the case in any given peace process, including past and present efforts to secure a negotiated settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that Israeli and Palestinian leaders truly dedicate themselves to making peace, and the biggest obstacles they face are radical extremist groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad or Kach and Kahana Chai. Sure, it’s a leap of faith, but the journey led to some interesting findings. And, as the international community tries to reinvigorate Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, these questions are of critical importance.

And yet, they remained unanswered even though they are not new, as the crises examined in Negotiating Under Fire make clear. A year into the Oslo Peace Process, in February 1994, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were making slow but steady progress when Baruch Goldstein entered a Hebron shrine and massacred 29 Muslims at prayer. On October 9 of that year, just weeks after the signing of an accord transferring a litany of powers and responsibilities to the nascent Palestinian Authority, Hamas terrorists kidnapped and later assassinated Nachshon Wachsman, a young Israel corporal and dual Israel-U.S. citizen. And in February and March 1996, following the smooth handover of major Palestinian cities to Palestinian control, Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists conducted a string of suicide bus bombings killing 63 and wounding 238 over a nine-day period.

The Oslo peace process continued in fits and starts until September 2000, when it collapsed in the wake of the failed Camp David Summit of that month. This ushered in six years of violence unprecedented even in the Israeli-Palestinian context. In January 2006, Palestinian politics was turned on its head when the militant Islamist group Hamas defeated the long-dominant Fatah party in national elections and assumed majority control of the governing Palestinian Authority. For the vast majority of Israelis, the Hamas victory, coming just months after Israel’s complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, reinforced the already dominant view that unilateral moves, like building a fence in and along the West Bank, are the only answer to the perceived absence of a credible Palestinian peace partners. This position was still further reinforced after the Hamas takeover of Gaza in June 2007.

The impact of acute security crises on ongoing negotiations represents one of the most significant yet under-researched facets of modern conflict resolution theory. Ironically, it also stands out as the factor most likely to derail inherently sensitive negotiations. These events unleash waves of public opposition to the very idea of sitting down to negotiate with those perceived as responsible for the crisis. How can decision-makers cope with such incredible challenges? How are they to answer these challenges so that their constituents acknowledge their continued authority and legitimacy as negotiators? How can decision-makers remain credible partners in the eyes of their negotiating partners in the wake of such events?

Focusing on three types of legitimacy—decision-makers’ authority as negotiators for their constituencies, the legitimacy of their policy of pursuing negotiations, and their credibility in the eyes of the other party—provides an analytical framework to study the changes in the negotiating environment that result from acute security crises in ongoing negotiations. Understanding how decision-makers perceive such attacks, and the means by which they undermine the legitimacy of peace negotiations, provides the foundation for a practical set of recommendations to preemptively insulate peace talks from acts of terror that are bound to occur, and a theory of crisis management on how to contain them when they do.

Unlike my last book on Hamas, Negotiating Under Fire discusses terrorist attacks but is not about terrorism. And despite the downward trajectory of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, this is an optimistic study. That’s because the book is not really about that particular conflict. As an academic discourse on resolving protracted social conflicts, it gives reason to hope. It all comes down to decision-makers’ willingness and ability to make difficult decisions and sell them at home—albeit easier said than done.

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