This book analyzes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through three alternative lenses. Drawing on different international relations and foreign policy perspectives, it examines two central issues in the history of this conflict: the dilemma of partition in 1947, and the acceptance of the principle of a two-state solution at Oslo in 1993. It offers a multilevel insight into the determinants of this conflict, specifying what aspects of it can be explained by cognitive, domestic and systemic factors. By looking at the same cases of decision, but from different angles, it shows how different theoretical perspectives produce different explanations for the same historical event.
Ben Soetendorp is Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science, Leyden University. His previous publications include Foreign Policy in the European Union: Theory, History, and Practice (1999), and Adapting to European Integration: Small States and the European Union (co-edited with Ken Hanf, 1998).