Expert cites loud minorities as Mideast peace roadblocks

Friday, March 18, 2005 | 10:22 a.m.

It's extremely rare to see UNLV's name next to Harvard's on a research project, much less a research project that examines the internal conflicts within Israel and Palestine that serve as roadblocks to peace.

But by simply inviting a renowned Harvard legal scholar and mentor to speak at UNLV law school's Saltman Center for Conflict Resolution, director Jean Sternlight scored just that for the university.

Through the generosity of Las Vegas developers Mike and Sonja Saltman, Sternlight was able to arrange for the UNLV Boyd School of Law to co-sponsor a Harvard Law School conference looking at the issues involved in removing Israeli settlers from the West Bank and Gaza.

Led by law professor Robert Mnookin, director of Harvard's Program on Negotiation, the international, multidisciplinary conference in Cambridge last October explored the religious, ideological, psychological, political, legal and international dimensions of the internal conflict, Sternlight said.

Coincidently, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon released his plans to remove 8,500 settlers from Gaza and from four settlements in the West Bank within days of the conference.

Mnookin, one of the country's leading scholars on conflict resolution, lectured on the conference's findings Thursday to about 70 people at the Saltman Center at UNLV.

While focusing on Israel, Mnookin said that internal conflicts within Israel and Palestine have consistently served as "roadblocks to peace." The map to peace has always been clear in that Palestine has to give up its right to return to Israel and that Israel has to give up at least the majority of its settlements in concession to a Palestinian state, Mnookin said.

The problem, Mnookin said, is that there are loud minorities within both Israel and Palestine for which these concessions are intolerable.

"The failures of the peace process have reflected the fact that there are internal conflicts behind the table," Mnookin said, noting that leaders on both sides have repeatedly ignored these conflcits.

Mnookin, who grew up in what he described as a reformed, assimilated Jewish family in Kansas, said he began looking at the internal conflicts at work after repeated opinion polls showed that the majority of Israelis and the majority of Palestinians supported the Oslo Peace Accords. He spent more than a year in Israel talking with what he called the more nationalistic, messianic settlers and with more secular, cosmopolitan Israelis.

Within Israel, there is essentially a religious and identity conflict between the religious settlers and the cosmopolitan Jews, Mnookin said. The majority of the settlers moved to Gaza and the West Bank for housing and other opportunities to improve their quality of their life, but for those who moved there for religious and national reasons, they see it as their life work, Mnookin said.

Many in this group, which has disproportionate power in comparison to its size, believe that Israel has a God-given right to the land and that the promised Messiah will only come when Jews again fully resettle, Mnookin said. It is a belief shared by many Christian fundamentalists.

For them, staying in the settlements is a national and religious duty taken at great personal risk, Mnookin said.

More secular Jews, the majority in Israel, disagree and believe that the settlers insistence to stay is "corrosive" to the country and that their actions have violated basic human rights that are essential to Judaism.

Both sides have wounded each other, Mnookin said, and some within Israel fear that it may eventually lead to internal violence.

"I have never seen a higher level of internal anxiety in Israel," Mnookin said of Sharon's plan to begin removing the Israelis from Gaza.

He compared it to America's conflict between "red and blue states," but said the U.S. political divide is nothing compared with the "internal hostilities in Israel."

As an informal consultant to several Israeli bureacrats, Mnookin has helped address some of the legal issues in removing the settlers and brokered off-the record dialogue talks between the settlers and anti-settlement leaders, both Mnookin and Sternlight said.

The end goal is to promote a "deeper understanding" of what the settlers are being asked to give up while still asserting the need for removal, Mnookin said.

"There needs to be greater empathy for those really going to be paying the price," Mnookin said.

There was an internal conflict among many of the Jews in the audience Thursday, with some saying that the "liberal" professor was too slanted toward Palestine and others sayings that he nailed the internal dilemnas "100 percent."