The distance between the two parties, especially on the issues of Jerusalem and refugees, made it impossible to reach an agreement at the Camp David summit. Although Barak offered a far more extensive proposal for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank than any other Israeli leader had publicly considered, he insisted on maintaining Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem. This stance was unacceptable to the Palestinians and to most of the Muslim world. Arafat left Camp David with enhanced stature among his constituents because he did not yield to American and Israeli pressure. Barak returned home to face political crisis within his own government, including the departure of coalition partners who felt he had offered the Palestinians too much. But the Israeli taboo on discussing the future of Jerusalem was broken. Some Israelis began to realize for the first time that they would never achieve peace if they insisted on imposing their terms on the Palestinians; the majority came to believe that if that was the case, Israel would have to learn to live with the conflict indefinitely.
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Since the early 20th century, numerous attempts to foster cooperation between basin riparians have been hampered by the regional political conflict which continues to stand in the way of any basin-wide agreement on water. A number of bilateral agreements encourage cooperation over water between Israel and Jordan, and Israel and Palestine.
The question of water sharing in the Jordan River basin is inextricably linked to the ongoing conflicts between Israel and Syria, Israel and Lebanon, and Israel and Palestine, and while a wide range of issues are at stake, control over water in the basin has added to existing regional tensions.
Realisation of the annexation plans might irreversibly undermine a future two-state solution with borders following the pre-war 1967 status quo (with possible changes mutually agreed as part of a final resolution to the conflict). This two-state solution has long been the central objective of international conflict resolution efforts, consistently advocated also by the EU. This focus has been based on the assumption that it would be the most effective, if not the only viable solution to ensure the realisation of the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people and sustainable peace and security for all. Fatah and the Palestinian Authority endorsed the two-state solution since the 1980s. Under the 1993 Oslo Accord, Israelis and Palestinians agreed on a plan to implement the two-state solution in a staged process over 5 years. The Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 endorsed the two-state solution and offered the normalisation of relations between the Arab States and Israel in exchange for the full withdrawal by Israel from the occupied territories and a just settlement of the refugee issue. Prime Minister Netanyahu has made it well understood, that he does not want a two-state solution. The annexation policy could be the tool to indeed make the two-state solution impossible.
We are fully aware that a peaceful solution of the long standing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians requires more than a reversal of the settlement policies and the prevention of Israeli annexations. It also requires positive steps on the Palestinian side but there is no justification for continued flagrant violations of international law and human rights by Israel. If annexation moves forward now, the conflict might be cemented for many generations.
Conflict reduces availability of production input and income, increases the number of days households had to rely on less preferred foods, and limits the variety of foods eaten and the portion size of meals consumed. While existing studies examine the impact of conflict on different food security measures (e.g., Food Consumption Score, Food Insecurity Experience Scale), the relationship between these measures as well as their relationship with political, economic, and agricultural factors remain under explored. Food insecurity may not only be an externality of conflict but also food deprivation may be utilized as a weapon to discourage residency in contested territories or to incentivize rebellions.
This study builds on the evidence that conflict simultaneously influences various aspects of food insecurity. While previous studies (e.g., George et al. [32]) examine the impact of conflict on different food insecurity measures simultaneously, the relationship between these different food insecurity measures have not been analyzed. Furthermore, evidence on the relationship between political, economic, and agricultural factors as well as the role each of these factors play in different pathways to food insecurity are sparse.
The aim of this study is to examine how political factors (i.e., political violence, needing a permit and submitting to checkpoints prior to passage), economic factors (i.e., loss of assets, disinvestment, restricted access to land and employment, loss of salary and income), and agricultural factors (i.e., shortage of water, bad weather conditions, damage to crops) may not only directly impact different dimensions of food insecurity but also serve as potential mediating factors in different pathways to food insecurity in a conflict-affected setting. This study poses the question: what is the relationship between political, economic, and agricultural factors and dimensions of food insecurity in a conflict-affected setting?
This study utilizes a dataset compiled from questionnaires administered at both the individual and the household level to evaluate pathways of food insecurity and how they vary according to the political and geographical division of the territory. The contribution of this study is twofold. First, the study highlights the direct impact of conflict on different aspects of food security as they interact with political, economic, and agricultural factors and evaluates the potential mediating role these factors play in the pathways to food insecurity. Second, as a sub-objective, this study adds to our understanding of the under-explored association between different dimensions of food security in conflict-affected settings and examines the relationship between two dimensions of food insecurity: food insecurity experience and dietary diversity. While this relationship has been explored in non-conflict settings, to our knowledge, there has not been a quantitative examination of such a relationship in a conflict setting.
The rest of the article is organized as follows. First, we present a theoretical framework that describes the relationship between conflict, political, economic, and agricultural factors, and aspects of food security. Next, we provide a background on the protracted conflict in the oPt. We then present descriptions on data and analytical strategy. In the last two sections, we present the results and discuss implications of the findings, which are followed by concluding remarks.
Conflict in its different forms affects numerous aspects of demographic and socioeconomic conditions, such as policies, economy, agriculture, and health [14, 73, 82]. A critical aspect of the relationship between conflict and food insecurity is that it is an endogenous one where conflict can impact food insecurity [29], and in turn food insecurity can exacerbate conflict [22, 35]. Conflict may influence availability through disrupting agricultural production and reducing access to land (e.g., [13, 73, 82]). Conflict-related factors that may influence access include loss of businesses, farmlands, unemployment (e.g., [42]). Food insecurity and deliberating food availability have been documented as a weapon to displace individuals and deter them from returning. One example of such an occurrence is in Yemen, where conflict threatens food security for millions when humanitarian and food aid are being restricted as an instrument in conflict engagement [52]. In addition to intentional versus unintentional effects, conflict has a direct as well as an indirect association with aspects of food security. Incidences of conflict are found to reduce calories or daily energy supply [37, 77].
Studies on the relationship between conflict and food insecurity employ a range of measures and proxies for food insecurity to examine determinants of food insecurity in the context of conflict; but how these determinants may interact with each other to influence aspects of food insecurity is lesser explored. More specifically, the evidence on how food insecurity experience influence household decisions regarding food consumption and dietary diversity in the context of conflict remain sparse. The diversity of conflicts brings an additional layer of uncertainty around the potential impact of conflict on food deprivation. Level of development and intensity, length, and type of conflict all play a role in the level of food insecurity.
Given the evidence that households that experience food insecurity in conflict-affected areas adopt smoothing and coping strategies, such as decreasing dietary diversity to maximize caloric intake, it is then logical to expect a negative relationship between food insecurity and dietary diversity, whereby those experiencing food insecurity have lower dietary diversity. Outside of conflict settings, dietary diversity and food insecurity experience tend to have an inverse correlation (e.g., [11, 12, 25]).
To our knowledge, there has not been a quantitative analysis that directly evaluate the relationship between food insecurity experience and dietary diversity in a conflict-affected setting. Leveraging data at the household and regional levels in the oPt, this study quantitatively examines how political and economic determinants interact to influence the relationship between food insecurity and diet diversity in a conflict setting.
To evaluate the pathways connecting living conditions to political, economic, agricultural hardships and aspects of food insecurity we employ a generalized structural equation model. Structural equation models [51] have been used extensively in social science to examine the relationship between observed and unobserved, latent variables [36]. These models test the direct and indirect effects on theorized and pre-assumed causal relationships [66] and provide estimates on the association between these relationships. It is important to note that a structural equation model does not address causality but contributes to the understanding of the association between variables. To our knowledge, this method has not been used to evaluate the complex relationship between conflict and food insecurity. We leverage this well-suited methodology for our study and take the first step to examine the association for the theorized relationships between conflict, intermediate political, economic, and agricultural factors, and different measures of food insecurity in a conflict setting. 2ff7e9595c
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