Human rights and conflict transformation: The challenges of just peace

Human Rights and the Imbalance of Power:
The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict
Marwan Darweish
www.berghof-handbook.net
Michelle Parlevliet’s article Rethinking Conflict Transformation from a Human Rights Perspective
offers a refreshing and new approach, linking the direct, structural and cultural types of violence and
human rights violations and highlighting the implications for conflict transformation practitioners.
This response and commentary will engage with the article by focusing on the relevance of some of
its aspects for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
In 2008, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict entered its 60 th year, as the state of Israel celebrated
its 60 th anniversary while Palestinians marked 60 years of displacement and dispossession. Systemic
structural inequalities are at the roots of this conflict and are the causes of injustice and oppression.
These structural conditions were partly inherited from the colonial era and partly modified or
created by Israel over the years. 1 They have been used to maintain the control and power in the hand
of one ethnic group: the Jewish majority in Israel. It is important to analyse the roots of current
power inequalities and their manifestations in the daily life of the Palestinians (the symptoms), but
also to explain how structures, systems, sub-systems, laws and regulations have been put in place
that organise and determine how rights have been manipulated and violated to ensure privileges
to the Jewish group in control. Parlevliet argues that such policies will result in “exclusion and
marginalisation” and “provide fertile ground for the outbreak of violence” (in this volume, 19) which
can explain some aspects of the high level of inter-party violence.
In the following, I will examine the situation of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip, and Palestinians inside Israel, analysing the functioning of the Israeli state and society in order
to understand the logic of inequalities that have been institutionalised through the different systems
1 For instance, the Emergency Military Law Regulations (1945), which were inherited from the British Mandate period and
upgraded by Israel, are part of the state system and structure that has been used for many years in Israel and the occupied
Palestinian territories in order to place restrictions on the liberties of the civil population and political activists.
© Berghof Conflict Research/ Berghof Forschungszentrum für konstruktive Konfliktbearbeitung. Berghof Handbook Dialogue No. 9 – First launch June 2010
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