Identity, ideology and the Jerusalem question

Type Thesis

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Summary

The Jerusalem Question has remained an unresolved element in the Arab-Israeli conflict for more than fifty years. What part do identity and ideology play in preventing or promoting a resolution between Israel and the Palestinian Authority on the final-status issue of Jerusalem? Both identity and ideology are underutilized concepts in international relations theory. Typically, when they are used, they generate separate lines of inquiry. Here they are deliberately conflated in a combination of Erik Erikson's and William Bloom's paradigms of individual and collective identity development and Willard Mullins's typology of ideology. The resulting model provides a more holistic response to the analysis of the question of Jerusalem's future status as the capital of two national entities—the existing State of Israel and the incipient State of Palestine. To demonstrate the value of examining this aspect of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict via an identity-ideology nexus, this study focuses on the place that Jerusalem has occupied in the personal and professional lives of fourteen key Palestinian and Jewish/Israeli leaders in the more-than-one-hundred-year Arab-Zionist impasse. In each case significant attachment to the city is evident from an early age, reinforcing the role that initial identity formation and early ideological commitment and latency play in later life. When coupled with the concept of interacting variables, the identity-ideology nexus helps explain why there are periods of stasis and movement on the Jerusalem Question.