by Michael Deqel

Created on: February 12, 2008

Resolving the conflict in the Middle East requires the patience and skill of an archaelogist piecing together the broken shards of an ancient pot, not to mention historical and cultural understanding at least as deep as that same archaelogist. First, one has to define which of the many conflicts and what part of the Middle East, something like deciding which fragments of clay belong to each other and how many vessels there really are in all of those bits of pottery. Usually, "the Middle East" includes Israel-Palestine and the surrounding countries, where the main conflict is the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The conflict in Israel-Palestine will not be resolved by science, technology, politics, or philosophical theories. It certainly won't be ended through religious means. It will take people, working with their hands, digging in the dirt, piecing together a future both from the broken bits of the past and new clay.

It is a huge and complex archaeology of the human spirit I am writing of. However, as archaeologists of Middle Eastern conflicts, we should begin by categorizing our shards. The political situation in Israle is much like the land itself, where an archaeological site has layers and layers of artifacts including twentieth century remnants, Ottoman period, Crusader period, Byzantine period, Romaneverything in between and going back to the stone age (flint tools lie just below the ground in some Jerusalem neighborhoods). First, there are many peoples in the area of Israel / Palestine. There are the nomadic Bedouin, the Druze, Arab Christians, European Christians, religious and secular Jews, and religious and secular Muslim Arabs. Many of the Palestinians were Jordanians before the 1967 war, when Israel took over the West Bank area. The Israeli Jews include religious Jews who oppose the existence of Israel on the grounds that it cannot exist until the Messiah arrives (among other reasons), religious Jews who are Zionistic and want Israel to reach its presumed historical-biblical borders, secular Zionists who want a Jewish State but not necessarily a religious state, and many other shapes and sizes of vessel. The Muslims are similarly pluralistic.

Next, among those groups of people, there are intramural conflicts. The recent armed conflict in Gaza between Hamas and the Palestinian Liberation Organization demonstrates one of these. However, citizens of the town of Sderot (currently under daily fire from Qassam missiles), joined by supporters from other parts

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