Negotiating Intractable Conflicts: On the Future of Jerusalem

The dispute over the political status of Jerusalem has commonly been regarded as one of those 'unresolvable' conflicts which illustrate the limits to international negotiation—problems which cannot be negotiated successfully because the parties' positions are too rigid or extreme to offer a basis for compromise and reconciliation. Under the terms of the Oslo Accords concluded between Israel and the PLO in September 1993, this most emotionally explosive and difficult core issue in the Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict is for the first time specifically and formally scheduled to be tackled at the negotiating table. Following a brief historical background this article analyses and applies to the case of Jerusalem a range of strategies for negotiating intractable issues. The strategies include resource expansion, compensation, issue linkage, functional division, sharing, and delegation. By focusing on creative ways of allocating functions of ownership and usage, they seek to identify and integrate the underlying core concerns of the parties rather than strike a compromise between their official positions in the conflict. A careful analysis of proposals made for Jerusalem, both official and informal, demonstrates that these strategies have already been used implicitly to a limited extent. Thus the taxonomy of strategies serves as a tool for analyzing the main features of and logic behind the great range of complex plans put forward for resolving the Jerusalem problem to date. The taxonomy also provides a basis for identifying promising components of these proposals, on which approaches for tackling Jerusalem in negotiations may successfully build. It is argued that intractable conflicts such as that over Jerusalem are best approached by using a combination of the strategies to tackle the typically core problem of sovereignty.