A Wall, Water, and Power

The journal that I read sparked my interest for a number of reasons. The first on was the title which is shared by this post, and it also referenced a scholar here at Ohio State being Alexander Wendt. I was lucky enough to take a course under him and found his thoughts to be utterly fascinating. The journal spent a lot of time reflecting on issues related to my thoughts on the Israel/Palestine problem and went more into detail as to why they are going to be a difficult problem to fix.

Alexander Wendt's quote on Israel and Palestine that spurred the journal on is:

"A social structure composed of inter-subjective understandings in which states are so distrustful that they make worst-case assumptions about each others' intensions, and as a result define their interests in self-help terms."

That brought me back to a lecture I had by Wendt where we talked about this very topic. The idea is that everyone in the Middle East desires three things and they are peace, justice, and security. In the case of the Israeli's and Palestinians, these are the same desires. The Israelis claim to desire security more so than justice  and they justify the building of the separation wall, in the very self-help terms mentioned, in order to attain that. While at the same time, the Palestinians strongly desire justice arguably more than security. That desire stems of the 1948 war and the exodus of the Palestinians that followed.

Now while both desire peace, their desire for their respective situations to be dealt with first takes precedence over that. Each of them was addressed later on in the article with having other major issues related to the two state or one state solution. The water situation will be a problem in the case of a two state solution and a one state solution has major issues with the division of power.

In order for all of these issues to be resolved, the problem Wendt proposed needs to be dealt with immediately. As long as each group is acting in its own self help terms, then we will continue to see problems such as the separation wall being built for Israel's security, and terrorist acts as an act of justice via vengence for the Palestinians. What needs to be addressed first is the misguided social structure based on how people view each other rather than the facts of the situation. That is why there is great hope in the dialogue. Through this dialogue we have communication of facts and are able to understand where everyone is coming from in this situation.

Trottier, Julie. "A Wall, Water and Power: The Israeli ‘separation Fence’." Review of International Studies 33.01 (2007): 105. Print.