| Chapter Introduction: | Introduction |
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in fact unattainable and that alternative solutions should be explored: first, the idea of “conflict management” instead of conflict resolution, and second, the proposal of a single, binational state. With this background in mind, in March of 2008, a group of academics from the United States, Israel, and Palestine gathered at a conference called Pathways to Peace with the purpose of exploring, discussing, and generating outside-of-the-box ideas, with the aim of bringing an academic perspective of peace with justice and security for both the peoples of Palestine and Israel. Academics from a diverse variety of scholarly backgrounds, including political science, economics, psychology, philosophy, and literature, among others, presented and brainstormed new ideas and approaches to attain the elusive resolution to the longest conflict of the modern era.
The present volume has been developed from the collection of papers and keynote presentations that were delivered at this conference. The volume is divided into five themes by scholarly discipline, each one with a unique perspective and proposals; however, a multidisciplinary thread unifies the chapters through the shared ideas.
The first chapter, dedicated to political science, explores the political and diplomatic ramifications of the conflict. It is perhaps the chapter that readers will be most familiar with, because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often analyzed from a perspective of borders, refugees, settlements, and such factors. For example, Professor Naomi Chazan explores a series of proposals, some of them well known, some of them outside-of-the-box, on how to move the peace process forward under realities that are not always conducive to peacemaking. In the second essay, Dr. Saliba Sarsar argues that there is an important difference between peacemaking, the process necessary to arrive at an agreement, and peace building, the process of changing realities on the ground to make peace practical. He argues that peacemaking can only be successful if it is accompanied by clear and concrete efforts toward peace building. To close this section, Dr. Andrew Winnick explores the likelihood of different future scenarios: a one-state democratic solution, a two-state solution, and an annexation of territories by Israel without giving full citizenship to Palestinians, which is called the apartheid scenario. He concludes that the only viable alternative is a