아프리카ㆍ중동

The process of the Middle East peace negotiations at the beginning of the 1990s has its roots in the changes in the international system and in Israeli society. The end of the Cold War, the Gulf War in 1990-1991 and globalization forced all the region’s actors to resituate themselves within the new international context. However, Israeli society neither experienced the international changes in the same way as its neighbors nor did it undergo the same evolutionduring the conflict with the Arabs. Because of this, the debate over peace and the future of the occupied territories became a factor for political and ideological division. Influencing this debate were revised conceptions on security, the economy, and the role Israel should play in the world. The Middle East peace talks began because the strongest side in the conflict, Israel’s Labor government, came to perceive that the maintenance of the status quo was negative forits interests. From the Israeli point of view, the conflict had long been considered a zero-sum game despite the Palestinian’s compromises since the construction of the Palestinian State involved handing over part of the territory claimed by the Jews. Recent changes in the perceptions of Israeli’s own interests, though, led some sectors of Jewish society to re-think and diminish the supposed incompatibility between Palestine nationalism and Zionism, which then opened the doors towards peace. For the Labor government, the territorial occupation of all Palestine was no longer a central objective. In fact, the basic interests of the Labor party’s policies shifted due to the globalization of the international system. For Likud and the Zionist revisionists, however, the occupation and the colonization of Eretz Israel still form the basic ideology of the State –of its reason for being– for which even today both are associated with the national interest, together with Israel’s very survival. Seen this way, Israel’s internal divisions and the changes in the government of Tel Aviv have become the main threats for the future of peace in the zone, making this country the most unstable actor in the region.