This book looks at Israeli-Palestinian relations through three different conceptual lenses, corresponding to three levels of analysis: the individual decision-maker, domestic politics, and the international system. It examines key choices made by Israelis and Palestinians regarding three central issues: the 1947 UN Partition Plan, the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and the 1993 Oslo Agreements. The challenging structure and approach of these case studies teaches the importance of examining multi-faceted conflicts through several different lenses.
"Drawing on Waltz and Allison, Soetendorp summarizes an enormous amount of theoretical literature and organizes it into individual, state-level, and systemic explanations of foreign policy behavior. He then shows how each of these three "lenses" yields different plausible explanations of Israeli and Palestinian actions in the partition of Palestine in 1948 and the acceptance and ultimate failure of the Oslo Accords, doing a micro-level analyses of these cases. This book will be very useful for courses in international relations, decision-making, foreign policy, conflict resolution, and Middle Eastern politics." - Roy Licklider, Professor of Political Science, Rutgers University