Quite late in his presidency, George W. Bush has sent Condoleeza Rice to the Middle East in an effort to help restart Israeli–Palestinian peace negotiations. If what they have in mind is the same kind of negotiations that occurred during the Oslo Peace Process or at Camp David in 2000, there will never be peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. Never.

Those negotiations were inherently flawed. They were based on a zero-sum game mentality in which any gain by one side is at the expense of the other side. The best way to illustrate this is to think in terms of traditional labor management negotiations. Both sides start out with maximal demands and then give away as little as possible, with the assumption that the more powerful side will get more of what it wants and the weaker side will get less. Any gain by one side means a loss for the other side. 

There are several reasons why such an approach to negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians will never work. First, in labor–management negotiations there will always be future negotiations and the weaker side this year may be the stronger side in the future and thus have a chance to make up for losses suffered in this contract. In contrast, an Israeli–Palestinian peace agreement wouldn’t get renegotiated every few years to adjust inequities; it would be an agreement for all time. So the Palestinians would never sign an agreement that met Israeli, but not Palestinian, needs, no matter how “generous” the Israeli offer might be.

Secondly, under this model Israel, being the stronger party, would presumably get more of what it wants while the Palestinians would have to settle for less than what they want.  But the Palestinians will never sign an agreement that does not meet their basic needs and/or if they feel the Israelis have not dealt with them fairly. Nor should they. Such an agreement would just feed the bitterness that already exists among the Palestinian people and would result in a continuation of violence in both directions.

So any effort to restart the traditional style of negotiations is a waste of time since, by their very nature, they’re doomed to failure—and indeed might make the situation worse if, like Camp David, they raise hopes that will inevitably be dashed.

But is there an alternative to traditional, zero–sum negotiations?  Indeed there is. Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton of The Harvard Negotiation Project describe it in Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. Getting to Yes is based on the premise that negotiations are much more effective when two sides move away from a confrontational position and instead work together with a commitment to do what they can to meet each others needs. They refer to this approach as Win–Win or Mutual Gains Bargaining.

To illustrate this in terms of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the beginning assumption would be that it’s in Israel’s best interest to have a prosperous and friendly Palestinian state next door (rather than what it currently has), that it’s in the Palestinians’ self–interest to have a secure and friendly Israeli state next door (rather than what it currently has), and that it’s in the interest of both peoples to cooperate with one another in order to achieve these desired outcomes. If the two parties accept this premise, then they’ll approach negotiations with a mindset that it’s in their self–interest to do what they can to meet the basic needs of the other side, because that’s the only way that their needs can be met. If each side approaches the negotiations in this spirit, the two sides will be so cooperative and accommodating that the negotiations will work because the two parties want them to—because this is the only way that their own interests can be realized.

In order for Mutual Gains Negotiations to even begin, both sides would need to set aside the mentality that draws red lines in the sand, such as each side’s assertion that it will never sign a peace agreement that does not give its side sovereignty over the Temple Mount/Haram al–Sharif. 

Past, zero-sum negotiations have been based on the assumption that the Palestinians would have no choice but to give in on this issue, which is why President Clinton blamed Arafat for his failure to accept Barak’s “generous” offer at Camp David. But as Arafat told Madeleine Albright, no Palestinian leader who signed such an agreement would survive the assassin’s bullet. It’s just not possible for Palestinians to accept such an outcome, whether the Israelis think that’s reasonable or not. Nor was it reasonable, given the nature of the negotiations, for Arafat to think that the Israelis would give up their claim to sovereignty over the Temple Mount.

The only way that such a conflict can be resolved is through Mutual Gains Bargaining in which each side commits itself to figuring out a way to satisfy the other side’s needs in this area, whether it be something like shared sovereignty, or divine sovereignty with shared administration, or whatever they come up with. In other words, if each side sees that it’s in it’s own self–interest to meet the other side’s needs, surely a creative solution can be arrived at in which both side’s needs are met and peace is possible.

It’s become accepted wisdom that there can’t be any negotiations toward a peace agreement until there’s an end to the violence. But this gives a veto over peace negotiations to that segment in each society who don’t want a peace agreement because it would mean the other side would get land that these rejectionists feel should be theirs alone. Any act of violence on their part will be met with a violent response and thus negotiations will never occur. In this way they can use violence to achieve their goal of preventing a peace agreement.

Therefore, the accepted wisdom must be turned on its head to say that the only way to end the violence is for the Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate a peace agreement—one that the people in both societies who support a two–state solution find so compelling that they’ll work to end the violence in their own societies because they’ll see that violence as an obstacle to the implementation of this peace agreement.

Given the political realities in Israel and Palestine, such a peace agreement can only be reached through secret negotiations out of the public eye, mirroring Oslo. Well aware of the failure of the Treaty of Versailles, those who wrote the peace treaties for Germany and Japan after World War II attempted to fashion a peace that would turn their former enemies into prosperous allied states. Clearly, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict cannot be resolved by an imposed agreement. But just as clearly, it can’t be resolved through traditional zero–sum negotiations. It can only be resolved by Mutual Gains Negotiations in which the two sides do all they can to turn their former enemy into a secure and prosperous neighbor.

It may seem unrealistic to think that the two sides would agree to negotiate in this spirit.  But it’s even more unrealistic to think that traditional negotiations have any chance of success. What’s realistic is what will work.