does the concept of the “third side”

Thinking about your Week 6 project and the conflict you chose to analyze, does the concept of the “third side” seem relevant to the international negotiation process? Why or why not?

I look forward to reading your posts and providing feedback on the discussions! I may ask follow-up questions after you have presented the initial post, 

feedback 

This is an interesting paper on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the negotiation efforts of the international community. This conflict is categorized as an “ethno-territorial conflict,” meaning that one group’s gain in territory results in the other group’s loss. The Israelis are firm believers in a unitary state, while the Palestinians advocate for a partitioned country. Unfortunately, neither side is willing to accept the compromise solution or consociationalism, which makes the conflict incredibly challenging to resolve. In addition to this, the conflicting ethnic and religious identities of various sectarian groups living in the region add to the complexity of the situation. If one group prevails, the other group’s territorial identity will be erased. To complicate matters further, non-state actors such as Hamas and Hezbollah make finding a negotiated solution even more difficult. In my opinion, it would be beneficial to allocate more space for the analytical aspects of future discussions and less for descriptive ones.

With all that said, In the future, please, use more space for the analytical part and less for the descriptive one. This could have been done by incorporating the points on the relevance of Steven Walt’s “too-hard box” to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Most importantly, you need to use your own analysis and less points borrowed and paraphrased from others.