This approach requires an asymmetry of power in Israel’s favor – it assumes that the Palestinians will renounce their deontology only through coercion, whether active (Israeli assassinations of Palestinian terrorists) or passive (Israeli retention of the West Bank as a bargaining chip).  Rubin verifies that Israelis accepted the land-for-peace risk because they believed that shifts in the global and regional balance of power “would push Palestinian leaders…toward a peace agreement with Israel”: the resolution of the Cold War and the Gulf War seemingly had strengthened Israel against its Arab nemeses, and “the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), after decades of battling Israel without achieving its goals, had reached a low point.”[6]

          Yet Herbert Kelman advocates – and authors like Jeremy Pressman, Jacob Shamir, and Khalil Shikaki build upon his premises – that a final peace agreement must transcend “a compromise achieved through power bargaining” in order to achieve “a principled peace…that addresses the fundamental needs of both sides.”[7]  He differentiates between the two results because the latter incorporates “a measure of justice”[8]: “it would provide the best balance between [the two sides’] competing legitimate claims.”[9]

          But if two claims are “competing,” then they cannot both be categorically “legitimate.”  Therefore the justice of the compromise does not rest on its deontological merits, but rather on its utilitarian satisfaction of “the fundamental needs of both sides.”  And hence each side’s “fundamental needs” become bargaining chips – its weaknesses become its strengths – and Kelman’s utilitarian approach reproduces “power bargaining” by redefining power as neediness.[10]

          The Palestinians, however, are the weaker party in their conflict with Israel.  Thus Kelman’s paradigm reverses the power asymmetry that underlies the land-for-peace approach as explained above.  Jeremy Pressman’s explanation of Palestinian behavior at Camp David II provides a revealing example of this paradigm’s results: “Palestinian leaders may pursue policies not because they want to destroy Israel, but because vocal and often armed domestic political factions demand such policies and would not support alternatives”[11] – therefore appears not as an indictment of Arafat’s failure to transform Palestinian deontological views, but as an excuse for his rejection of Barak’s offer and as a reason for Israel to make further concessions.

          This paradigm resurfaces in various authors’ proposals for a final Israeli-Palestinian settlement: Shamir and Shikaki state that “[w]hen public opinion constraints on negotiators are largely of a symbolic nature” – here they seek to bypass Palestinians’ vigilance to the Palestinian refugee issue – “intentional and agreed-upon constructive ambiguity may help to alleviate them.”[12]

          The two authors may consider one of “the most difficult obstacles for reaching a comprehensive peace agreement”[13] to be merely symbolic, but within the land-for-peace negotiating framework, symbolism is the only return that Israel can expect on its territorial concessions.  By leaving Palestinian deontology intact, peacemaking based on “constructive ambiguity” may cost Israel its half of the bargain – but more worrisome, from an Israeli vantage point, is the authors’ acquiescence to this lopsided exchange.  Shamir and Shikaki are not alone:

          Kelman’s negotiating framework requires “some revision in both sides’ national narratives – at least to the extent of eliminating from their own identities the negation of the other and the claim of exclusivity” over the territory of Mandatory Palestine.  But by Kelman’s own admission, these revisions must “leave the core of each group’s identity and national narrative – its sense of peoplehood, its attachment to the land, its commitment to the national language, welfare, and way of life – intact.’”[14]  Yet if Palestinians are to give Israel the peace that the latter demands, they must surrender that “core,” a capitulation of increasing magnitude as Palestinians embrace Islamist (or, as in the past, secular leftist or Marxist) ethical and political precepts:

The fact that Islam ontologically is entitlement-driven (focusing on content) while the "peace process" epistemologically is cost-articulated (focusing on process) sets them on incommensurable planes of interaction. Harmonizing thought systems, however, requires that they be positioned within the same logical framework.  To harmonize the "thought logic" of the Arab/Muslim world with that of the "peace" strategy requires that counterthoughts be peripheralized and if necessary crushed. What is at stake consequently is no longer the politico-national problem of usurpation of land but rather the very extraction of a nation's religio-national and historical heritage.[15]

          Yet however agonizing this “extraction” may be to Palestinians like Sabet, any final Israeli-Palestinian settlement that neglects such a deontological transformation cannot resolve the ideological conflict and therefore will jeopardize the long-term security of the state of Israel.