There is a huge difference between the inter-state conflict between Israel and the Arab states, and the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. These are two very different kinds of conflict. In the conflict between Israel and the Arab states there is one bag of issues, one could say. That is the bag of issues relating to the war of 1967 and its consequences. In the negotiations between Israel and Egypt, or Syria, or Jordan, the issues that Israel, has to deal with are the territorial matters arising from its conquests in 1967. Peace with Egypt is possible if you give the territory conquered from Egypt in 1967 back to the Egyptian people. But between Israel and Palestine, there are two sets of issues, not just 1967. There is the 1948 set of issues, which is even more complicated, more demanding, and far more difficult for the Israelis to address than those of 1967. The 1967 issues are those that relate, ,as we have seen in the Oslo Accords, to territory and to Jerusalem. These are matters that Israel can concede on in principle without eroding the nature of the Israeli state as the nation state of the Jewish people. But Israel cannot address the 1948 questions .without touching upon its very essence :and the 1948 questions are two One is the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to Israel proper, and the other is the question of the political, collective rights of the Palestinian people who are citizens of the State of Israel itself. It is these two issues that belong to the 1948 set of questions. That Israel cannot address without opening the questions of Israel's very being as the nation state of the Jewish people. Therefore the 1967 issues, as difficult as they may be, are far easier to address than those of 1948. And the 1948 issues don't exist in the set of issues that Israel has to deal with, with the Arab states: Syria, and Egypt, and Lebanon, and Jordan too. as states do not have 1948 questions with Israel, but the Palestinians do, and that makes the creation of a long-standing agreement that would end the conflict for all time, much more difficult to attain. ,On the Israeli-Palestinian domain there is also an unbridgeable clash of the narratives. If, for Israel, the creation of the state of Israel was an act of Jewish self-defense against ,their pitiful history from the Palestinian point of view, this was never an act of self-defense, but an act of aggression from the very beginning of Jewish settlement in Palestine. In the Israeli view, the creation of the state of Israel was the epitome of historical justice for the people, who were the most oppressed of all peoples. From the Palestinian point of view, the creation of Israel was the epitome of injustice, quite the opposite. These are not narratives that are close to each other. These are narratives that the distance between them is so great that they are virtually impossible to bridge. The very being of the Palestinian people, Palestinian-ness, the identity of the Palestinians, is as Beshara Doumani, an American-Palestinian academic has described, being Palestinian is based on the "shared memories of the traumatic uprooting of their society and the experiences of being dispossessed, displaced, and stateless." It is these factors that were to come to define Palestinian-ness. Palestinian so defined is very difficult for Israelis to come to term with. It is very difficult for Palestinian-ness so defined to come to terms with Israel. The failure of the talks at Camp David, and the failure of the Oslo process gave way to what became known as the Second Intifada. The Second Intifada, the second uprising the Palestinians against the continued Israeli occupation was very different from the first one. The Second Intifada was not a civilian, unarmed uprising of demonstrations by men, and women, and, and young boys and girls against the Israelis. The Second Intifada was the Intifada of the suicide bombers. Perhaps the most violent confrontation between the Israelis and the Palestinians ever since 1948. This campaign of suicide bombings in Israel that took over a thousand of Israeli lives over the ,the next few years if intended to soften Israeli positions ,they did not. Quite the opposite Israeli positions were hardened very significantly because the bombings took place in Israel's major cities. And whether this was intended or not by the Palestinian side, how the Israelis understood the bombings in the cities of Israel, is what is important here. And if the bombings were taking place in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Beersheba, ,and the other towns of Israel the only conclusion the Israelis could draw from this kind of attack was that what was in the cards from the Palestinian point of view, was not a state in ,the West Bank and Gaza but a challenge to the entire state of Israel. The suicide bombings also gave rise to the old problematique of armed struggle and terrorism. By using this kind of armed struggle, the Palestinians again delegitimized their own movement themselves by carrying out acts which were deliberately ,designed to take civilian lives and therefore exposed them to the condemnation, again, as terrorists. The end result, was the Israeli reoccupation of the West Bank. And for the meantime, an end to any kind of serious Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.
