Peace in the Middle East? The Role of Israeli-Palestinian Peace Plans in the Ongoing Conflict

Sandra Abdella, Verrazzano Class of 2022, completed majors in Economics and Political Science and minor in Legal Studies 

Writing my thesis has summed up the majority of my final semester at the College of Staten Island. I started out with little to no knowledge about the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. I can now confidently say that I learned an immense amount of information on the conflict, the peace plans, and some reasons as to why peace has not yet been achieved.

My paper was about the conflict between the two territories, and the obstacles that contributed to the failure of reaching a viable solution up to today. It delved into three main roadblocks that I think had the most significant roles in the conflict. The United States Involvement, the Oslo Accords, and the domestic infighting within Israel and Palestine were analyzed and discussed throughout the paper.

My main takeaway from this thesis is that research is time consuming and difficult, but not impossible. The 25 pages took me about two months to finish writing. The research component started 3 months before that. To simply start the process, I bought a book and read through it once. I became confident in my topic and went back to annotate the same book again. It became easier after that because I chose a specific section of the conflict that I wanted to focus on and dived deeper into it. I read some articles to familiarize myself with broad concepts, and then found more scholarly articles and books that taught me more about peace plans and the road to peace.

To write the paper, I began by creating an outline for myself and started to write directly on the outline. By adding in bits and pieces all over the outline wherever I knew what I wanted to say without a specific sequence, I was able to gather my thoughts collectively and then organize them at a later time.

In my opinion, the most difficult part of the process was gathering research. Many sources were apparently biased from the start and others were opinion pieces instead of objective statements. It was challenging to read through the biases and collect the facts in order to analyze the events on my own. All in all, it was a fun experience and I am proud to say that I was able to finish it all with the help of my mentor, Professor Peter Kabachnik, PhD, Geography.