Unwinnable Wars: Asymmetry and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

This paper illustrates the inadequacy of understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, more broadly, conventional studies of power and security in violent conflicts, through traditional IR tools. Both the theoretical hegemony of Neorealism and the military hegemony of Israel in the region are called into question by the asymmetrical warfare between Israel and the Palestinians. Contrary to Neorealist expectations about war in the international system, the Israeli military has never faced a regular Palestinian army; this has also confounded the Israeli military, which was designed to fight inter-state wars with normal Arab armies. Since the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the first Palestinian uprising in 1987, the predominant form of Israeli-Palestinian confrontation has been low-intensity conflict, between a conventional Israeli military and Palestinian guerrilla movements, paramilitary organizations, and individual suicide bombers. This paper discusses how militarily weak actors can render strong actors’ power irrelevant through a combination of various strategies, objectives, and tactics. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict illustrates that the primary threat to stability and security in the Middle East no longer results from interstate war, but rather from violent domestic disputes waged on the basis of ethnic nationalism, religious fundamentalism, terrorism, and other transnational issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]