An Intractable Conflict and an Irreconcilable Past: Contesting the ‘Other’ through Commemoration in Israel/Palestine

Abstract

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most bitterly disputed and extensively critiqued conflicts of our time. It is a conflict that persistently progresses and regresses along Darby’s (2001) continuum, taking considerable steps forward towards a peaceful solution only to be thrown backwards following sporadic outbursts of violence or clashes over fiercely contested spaces (as witnessed in the latest altercation between the Israeli military and Palestinian militants in Gaza in November 2012). Territory is at the heart of this conflict and negotiations to reach some sort of settlement have, for the most part, proposed creating separate Palestinian and Israeli States. One of the first attempts to broker an agreement was the Oslo Accords of 1993, a settlement mediated principally by the United States, which was intended to provide a political space for a lasting peace in the region by providing for a five-year interim period to discuss how to move forward (Celso 2003). While it was undoubtedly a breakthrough in that it established the Palestinian Authority to administer territorial control over Gaza and the West Bank, ‘Oslo’ fell short of addressing the region’s most pressing problems (Hill 2008). The agreement concentrated primarily on the logistics of establishing the Palestinian Authority in Gaza and the West Bank, instead of confronting three of the most significant issues: sovereignty over Jerusalem; the borders of the future state of Palestine and the question of Jewish settlements on the West Bank; and the return of Palestinian refugees from the war of 1948.