From Poverty to Power Green, Oxfam 2008 - weman

4 RISK AND VULNERABILITY VIOLENCE AND CONFLICTthe start of the second Palestinian uprising in 2000, has cost the livesof over 4,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis, including in total 900children. 155The occupation that lies at the heart of the conflict continues.Nearly half-a-million Israeli settlers have illegally transferred into EastJerusalem and the West Bank. Two-and-a-half million Palestiniansliving there have been denied access to 40 per cent of the land,90 per cent of water resources, and 1,600km of roads. 156 The panoplyof Israeli restrictions – checkpoints, permits, closures, and the ‘Wall’that cuts through the West Bank – destroys Palestinians’ lives andlivelihoods, and prevents thousands of people from taking theirproducts to market.Of course, negotiating an end to conflict is never easy, but one ofthe more encouraging trends of recent years is that most conflicts thatare resolved are resolved peacefully. For most of the twentieth century,the most common way of ending wars was through outright victory,often at enormous human cost. Since the end of the Cold War, thatseems to have changed. Sadly, most mediation efforts still fail, butbetween 2000 and 2005, peaceful mediation ended 17 conflicts,whereas only four were concluded by military victory. The empiricalevidence that it is worth giving peace a chance is getting stronger. 157In preventing and resolving conflict, huge responsibilities also liewith rich-country governments. They share the responsibility to protectcivilians, and their own actions often fuel conflicts, for examplethrough their hunger for natural resources, their refusal to receiverefugees, their unbridled arms production and exports, or thedestabilising impact of the ‘war on terror’. These issues are discussedin Part 5.285