Rethinking security to restart the peace process
Analysis: Institute for National Security Studies project will broaden definition of security to reframe Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and break deadlock.
The wildly successful book about Israel, “Start-up Nation,” boasts that “Israel has more companies on tech-oriented NASDAQ stock exchange than any other country outside the US.” The book explains that Israeli society “uniquely combines both innovative and entrepreneurial intensity…Israelis put chutzpah over charm.”
Indeed, Israel has an innovative mindset and a good deal of chutzpah. So why is it that the issue that defines Israel more than high tech or venture capital investment, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is the issue Israelis seems least interested in reinventing? The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has claimed many lives and has come to define Israel in the international arena.
"Security" is the main Israeli concern in negotiations with the Palestinians, and yet the current definition of "security" in the minds of Israelis is narrow and limiting.
So, how is this even relevant right now? We are in the midst of election season, and the Palestinians have taken unilateral steps like going to the ICC. Terror is rampant, and there is no one to talk to on either side. Well, in less than two months the elections will end. There will be new ministers and MKs. And yet again the two sides will realize that violence will not solve the conflict and return to the negotiating table.
We will again be faced with the question, how can we avoid returning to the same deadlock we have been trapped in for years? How can we bring the Israeli chutzpah and creativity to the peace process?
A few months ago we set out to reconstruct the concept of security in the hopes of resolving the current impasse in the peace process. At the Center for Applied Negotiations, a branch of the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), run by seasoned negotiator Gilead Sher, we put together an innovative project to tackle this problem.
Our project aims to promote a change in the paradigm that has framed the negotiations for over twenty years and has contributed to the current impasse. Breaking down “security” and reconstructing it as a multidimensional notion will promote a peace agreement instead of hindering it.
We recruited a group of prominent actors from within Israeli civil society, academia, politics, business, and media, to engage in a dialog. This project is unusual in that it does not rely on the traditional security experts (military professionals), but rather broadens the discussion and the definition by relying on security experts from within the different realms of Israeli society.
The group is divided into smaller research teams. Each team focuses on one alternative meaning of security – social security, environmental security, human security, gender security, and ontological security – and how this new meaning could reframe the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. We hope that the results of our project will provide tools to negotiators in the next round of negotiations, so that they may finally overcome the deadlock and make peace.
March 17 is less than two months away. The elections are another chance for Israel to change, to reinvent itself and break free from the limiting definitions that have held it back. Israel has the chance to prove that its innovative mindset extends beyond the high-tech industry.
Voters must demand of their party, whichever it may be, that the party espouse a broader definition of security, one that acknowledges a wider range of issues as security concerns critical to Israel’s future, a definition that goes beyond numbers of tanks and missiles.
Voters must demand that the party commit to incorporating this definition into the budget, legislation, and the next round of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. In this way Israel can finally move forward.
Maya Kornberg is a researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) and a graduate student at Columbia University. She has a BA from Stanford in International Relations with a focus on the Middle East. Her work focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Israeli politics and society and she is a part of the Center for Applied Negotiations at INSS.
Roee Kibrik is a Neubauer research fellow at the Center for Applied Negotiations at INSS and a post doctoral fellow at the Davis Institute for International Relations at the Hebrew University.
