Normative conflict resolution rests on a deceptively simple proposition; that conflict can be moved from confrontation into conversation. Its approaches (dialogue, mediation, negotiation, reciprocity, and collaborative problem-solving) generally seek to replace the logic of winning and losing with one of mutual recognition and accommodation. Conflict, in this view, becomes resolvable when adversaries can enter a shared space in which perceptions shift, relationships are repaired, and competing needs become negotiable rather than irreconcilable (Deutsch, 1973; Fisher, 1997).
The reach of conflict resolution, however, extends far beyond the boundaries of ordinary dispute. The field moves across scales with remarkable breadth, from interpersonal disagreements to protracted international conflicts marked by deep-rooted grievances and intractable tendencies. In this sense, conflict resolution is deliberately expansive; its theories are built to travel, offering ways of understanding conflict whether it unfolds between individuals, communities, institutions, or states (Coleman, 2003; Vallacher et al., 2010).
The State of Palestine has, in recent years, undergone a parallel struggle over territory and narrative. In the aftermath of October 7, the unprecedented visibility of Palestinian suffering circulating through journalism, social media, testimony, and images emerging directly from Gaza, has unsettled long-standing narratives surrounding the conflict and brought questions of occupation, displacement, and the representation of Palestinian life into sharper global focus. This reckoning, however, has unfolded at an extraordinary human cost, amid mass civilian deathand destruction in Gaza, a genocide that has become the subject of ongoing international legal proceedings (Shaw, 2026).
To understand why Palestine strains the assumptions of normative conflict resolution, it cannot be approached simply as a sequence of disputes between two opposing parties. Palestinian suffering must instead be situated within a longer trajectory of occupation and profound asymmetries of power (Gallo & Marzano, 2009; Rouhana, 2004). Viewed through this history, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict raises a more difficult question for the field; What becomes of dialogue and reciprocity when occupation and unequal authorities define the relationship?To properly examine the conflict through the lens of the conflict resolution field we must understand that October 7 did not create the conditions under which Palestinians were living. It erupted within a landscape already shaped by decades of occupation, displacement, settlement expansion, and territorial fragmentation. By 2023, the occupation had endured for more than half a century, while Gaza and the West Bank remained geographically and politically fractured (Clarno, 2018; Cohen & Shany, 2022).
An Occupation Takes Hold in 1967:The decisive territorial rupture came in 1967, when Israel illegally captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. What international law understood as occupation, by nature temporary, gradually acquired the architecture of permanence. Settlements expanded, East Jerusalem was brought under Israeli law and administration, and Israeli control increasingly extended across occupied Palestinian territory (International Court of Justice [ICJ], 2024).
The Nakba of 1948:But the Palestinian experience of dispossession predates the occupation itself. The 1948 war and establishment of Israel produced the Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe, describing the mass displacement of Palestinians and violent depopulation of hundreds of Palestinian communities (United Nations, 2025). Israel emerged from the war illegally controlling substantially more territory than the UN had allocated to the proposed Jewish state (United Nations, 1992).
The British Mandate Before 1948:The roots of the conflict stretch further into the British Mandate, when Britain governed a predominantly Arab Palestine while simultaneously committing itself to facilitating a Jewish national home. It was here that false national claims competed with Palestinian identity and statehood, a debate which became embedded within the institutions governing the territory, laying much of the political groundwork for what followed (United Nations, 1978).
A Geography Rewritten:Palestine's modern history can therefore be read through a geography and false narratives repeatedly rewritten; Mandate, partition, Nakba, occupation, settlement. By 2023, roughly 465,000 Israeli settlers lived in the West Bank and another 230,000 in East Jerusalem; in 2024, the ICJ concluded that Israeli policies had amounted to the violent annexation of large parts of the occupied Palestinian territory (ICJ, 2024).
October 7 therefore entered a history already in motion; it did not set it in motion. The field of conflict resolution may therefore give two parties equal seats at the table, but it cannot pretend that history seated them there as equals.
Through the Lens of Conflict Theory:In Characteristics of Protracted, Intractable Conflict (Coleman, 2003), the field turns its attention to conflicts that seem to resist the very mechanisms designed to resolve them. Coleman describes these protracted, intractable conflicts as deeply embedded across issues, relationships, processes, and the wider social context, acquiring a durability that can outlive the disputes that first produced them.
At this depth, conflict begins to reproduce itself. Vallacher describes intractability almost as a gravitational pull; political, psychological, and social structures become organized around the conflict until even new events are drawn into its existing logic. Resolution, then, is no longer simply a matter of finding agreement on the original dispute; it requires transforming the system that continually returns the parties to conflict (Vallacher et al., 2010).
One answer the field offers is to change the gravity of the conflict itself. Through a dynamical systems approach, transformation targets the reinforcing patterns that repeatedly pull a conflict back toward the same destructive state, attempting to destabilize them so that new and more constructive patterns can take hold. Resolution, here, becomes a question not of settling what happened, but of changing what keeps making it happen (Vallacher et al., 2010).
Transformation is proposed through strategic disruption; weakening the feedback loops that feed destructive patterns while strengthening alternative ways of relating that can endure intheir place. This may require shifts across institutions, policies, intergroup relations, and everyday patterns of interaction, because changing one piece of an entrenched system rarely changes the whole. The aim is to make the old pattern harder to return to, and a different one easier to sustain (Vallacher et al., 2010).
On paper, the proposition is compelling, and experimental work within the field has shown that entrenched systems can, under the right conditions, be pulled toward more constructive patterns (Coleman et al., 2007). But transformation encounters a harder limit when the autonomy of one people is itself interpreted as a threat to the security or sovereignty of another.
That tension is visible in Israeli political discourse, where Palestinian Identity and statehood has been framed not as the destination of conflict resolution, but as an existential security threat (Nowroozian, 2025). In such a setting, transformation confronts a paradox; how does a system make room for an outcome that one of its most powerful actors understands as a danger?Why the Conflict is Currently Beyond the Point of Resolution:Power is the first rupture. Conflict resolution research on power asymmetry recognizes that conflicts rarely begin on equal ground; differences in resources and global influence become differences in what each party can demand, refuse, or survive. When Israel possesses vastly greater coercive capacity and external backing, reciprocity becomes deceptive; the same concession does not cost both sides the same (Coleman et al., 2010).
Then comes recognition. Transformation assumes that harm can be identified and acted upon. But when Palestinian suffering and civilian genocide itself becomes politically contested and humanitarian relief becomes subject to restriction (International Court of Justice [ICJ], 2024; Shaw, 2026), the remedy is no longer outside the conflict; it has become part of it.
Local agency presents an even sharper paradox. Peacebuilding depends upon those living the conflict participating in the construction of what comes after it (Donais, 2021). Yet where Palestinian organization and political action, like the Hamas resistance movement is interpreted through an Israeli security lens (Oliveira & Cravo, 2026), the very agency theory needed for peace can become something the conflict is organized to prevent.
Nor is the international system necessarily an escape from this imbalance. External actors are expected to help create the conditions for peace, yet powerful states have also reinforced existing asymmetries through diplomatic, military, or institutional support (Atallah, 2021). The outside world, in other words, is not always outside the conflict.This leaves normative conflict resolution with an uncomfortable problem; its mechanisms may be coherent, yet the conditions they require may be precisely what this conflict has made unavailable.
Concluding Remarks:Humbly, I propose that explicit equalization must begin before attempts at transformation. Israel would first need to publicly acknowledge and take responsibility for discriminatory and colonial practices, renounce territorial expansion, and translate that renunciation into material policy. Only then could the psychological terrain of negotiation beginto change; security would no longer depend upon guessing whether the other side intends to erase your political identity and future.
The Palestinian leadership has repeatedly articulated a two-state settlement based on the 1967 lines set by the UN. What is missing is an equivalent Israeli commitment; indeed, the current Israeli prime minister has not only enacted a genocide on Palestinian civilians in Gaza, opposed by his own people, resembling traits of fascism and dictatorship, he also publicly rejected Palestinian identity and statehood.
Before two entities can negotiate a shared future, both must first accept one another’s rights to have one.