The Israel-Palestine Conflict Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

The Israel-Palestine Conflict - Research Paper Example Generations upon generations of civilians have lived and died amidst this protracted war, victims of and witnesses to the seemingly limitless capacity of human beings for violence. The struggle for peace is indeed an aspiration that the whole world shares – and yet, history is rich with examples that tell us that peace without justice is an unsustainable project. The atrocities perpetrated in the context of the conflict must be accounted for, and there must be redress for the injustices wrought to the nameless and faceless victims. However, justice is not a one-size thing that fits all propositions. Efforts towards its introduction in a region as divided ethnically as Kosovo need to include clear-cut and streamlined efforts to address horizontal inequalities – defined by Stewart (137) as â€Å"inequalities among groups with shared identities – identities formed by religion, ethnic ties or racial affiliations, or other salient ways that bind groups of people toge ther†. Certainly, this includes looking at the broad and multiplex power dynamics that underlie these identities and become the basis for the conferral or denial of economic, political or social privilege. This is of course exacerbated when set against the backdrop of a conflict economy. Kamphuis (185) describes a conflict economy as one â€Å"that leads to the breakup of administrative and social institutions, the flight of human capital through migration, and the destruction of infrastructure for education and health care† – the clear contextual backdrop of the Israel-Palestine crisis. There are also political complexities that come into play. Writers like Danny Rubinstein write that Palestinian nationalism is on the wane and that â€Å"about twelve thousand Palestinians from East Jerusalem have received Israeli citizenship† (1). But almost on a daily basis, we are besieged by news report on intensified â€Å"terrorist† attacks by Palestinian figh ters. Indeed, it is hard to make a clinical assessment of the situation. I argue that investigating the extent to which horizontal inequalities were addressed may be done using the multiple dimensions of justice enumerated by Hellsten (79) as analytical tools or criteria – (1) justice as the establishment of public safety and individual security, securing the lives of civilians from acts of violence; (2) justice as reconciliation and redress for past grievances, embracing the concept of restorative justice; (3) distributive and social justice, which focuses on social and economic well-being on a more long term period, and (4) political justice, involving participation and inclusion is governance. This means that all these imperatives must be addressed and dealt with, rather than one criterion alone and sacrificing the rest, e.g. reconciliation at the expense of resource redistribution, economic growth at the expense of political participation, governance, without rectifying i ndividual criminal responsibility. In countries fraught with sharply-drawn ethnic lines where political and economic privileges are denied or granted on the basis of ethnicity, satisfaction of the requirements of these dimensions of justice cannot take place without addressing horizontal inequalities. In a similar vein, aspiring to address horizontal inequa