The Absence of Peace: Understanding the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Suicide bombings continue remorselessly to traumatize the Israeli people as the world's media, on each occasion, bring dramatic pictures of the terror and carnage caused. Much less wellknown, and very little publicized, however, is the daily fear, poverty and anger of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians as a result of the continuing presence of over 300,000 Jewish settlers in their midst, as well as the ongoing Israeli military occupation, economic sanctions and constant retaliations. This is what this book is about. Equally important, Nicholas Guyatt examines the Oslo Peace Accords which, when the Israeli Government and the PLO signed them in 1993, raised such high hopes of a permanent settlement of the Palestine Question. He shows the problem to be not just incomplete implementation of the Accords (although Israel is frequently procrastinating), but their very conception. There can be no economically viable Palestinian state, nor one which can command the respect and enthusiasm of Palestinians, so long as its territory remains fragmented by a growing number of Jewish settlements, the Palestinian Authority becomes a surrogate policeman for the Israeli government, and the Palestinian enclaves are dependent on Israel for access to the outside world, for electrical power, for jobs and so many of the other necessities of life. This book needs to be read by all those who are puzzled by why the Oslo process, from which so much was expected, now seems to be making so little contribution to peace on the ground, and who wish to understand whether there may be alternatives holding out more hope of a permanent and just settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.