Introduction

As this book elaborates, peace and the state form through contestation at the local, national and international levels at the intersection of peacebuilding, peace formation, statebuilding and state formation. In the Israeli–Palestinian case, this contestation is especially severe because conflict parties’ notions of peace, and consequently of the state, are mutually exclusive. Consecutive Israeli governments have demonstrated that their understanding of peace implies Israeli control over Palestine with regard to security, economics and resources, borders as well as full control over Israeli settlements and their infrastructure. This contradicts the Palestinian understanding of peace based on mutual sovereignty, self-determination, territorial integrity and security. A reconciliation between those notions has not been achieved. Instead, Israel has used the asymmetry in structural and direct power between itself (with its high-tech military, wealth and close alliance with the United States) and the Palestinian Authority (as an aid-dependent, temporary governance mechanism without a military or effective representation of its interests in the United Nations Security Council) to impose its notion of peaceas- control on the Palestinians. In its pursuit, Israel combines the military pacification of Palestine with collective punishment of resistance, aimed at yoking a governmentality of self-policing onto Palestinian society. The ‘peace process’, which was supposed to bring about a permanent settlement between the conflict parties, has failed to do so or to mitigate the oppressive reality of Israel's pacification strategy. Moreover, the Oslo Process has aggravated Palestinian dependence on its occupier, while serving as a veneer for continuous Israeli land grabs and military that many Palestinian grassroots initiatives refuse to be associated with it.

Instead, opinion polls point to the establishment of a Palestinian state as the top national priority within Palestinian society. While popular preferences regarding the nature of this state – whether a sovereign Palestinian state alongside Israel is more desirable than the one-state solution – are divided, mobilisation to overcome the ‘rightlessness of statelessness’ has rallied political agency at different levels. Hence, this chapter analyses local, non-violent state-formation processes in terms of their capacity and limitations in creating a viable basis for an emerging state in the face of national and international obstacles in the stateformation process.