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Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
Journal of Military and Strategic Studies
Mira Sucharov. The International Self: Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peace. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005.
Scott Fitzsimmons, University of Calgary
Abstract
In The International Self: Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, Mira Sucharov poses the intriguing question of what leads long-standing adversaries of unequal military power to seek peace. In doing so she confronts a puzzling and understudied phenomenon - a stronger party agreeing to seek peace with a much weaker adversary. Such a scenario played out during the Oslo peace process in 1993 between the State of Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). As Sucharov explains, the Oslo process is puzzling because, unlike a traditional peace process at the end of a war, “wherein the stronger state may be motivated to terminate the fighting by prospective war spoils, for an occupier, withdrawal usually represents a net material loss” (p. 2). Sucharov seeks to explain Israel’s peace seeking behaviour by pushing past purely material explanations and taking psychic costs into account.