ethnic identity and cohesiveness, and moral order suitable for self-governance.
It is the strength of these beliefs that brings the parties into conflict and at the
same time draws them closer in building a negotiation environment.

Nationalism consists of direct sentimental ties between individuals to the nation
or ethnic group and to its symbols, possessions, prestige, and history. It is a
generous spirit of identification with the sufferings of a group, a love of com-
patriots. It simultaneously promotes solidarity alongside hatred and suspicion as
it seeks to define people inside the group as trustworthy and outsiders as un-
trustworthy enemies. The creation and growth of nationalist feelings and the
evolution of a nationalist ideology may be related to the development of political
ideas generally within an ethnic group that has its source in a pattern of change
resulting from particular goal-directed causes. Nationalist feelings and ideology
may be influenced by the nature of the traditional political system, the sequences
in which new groups enter politics, the values and skills of political leaders, and
the relation between the expansion of political participation and the development
of political institutions. The political evolution of a society is influenced by its
external as well as its domestic environment and may take the form of importation
of ideas, models, techniques, resources, and institutions from other societies,
or reactions by groups within the society against the threat of foreign intervention
or rule ( Huntington and Dominquez, 1975:13).

Radical nationalism implies an excess of concentration or focus on the pursuit
of ideas, where a militant assertion of sovereign and unqualified supremacy of
rights replaces expediency and pragmatism. This approach lacks flexibility and
contains no element of compromise or accommodation. It is absolutist. The
objective of illustrating the parallel tracks of nationalist argument presented by
the Zionists and the Palestinians is to show how ideological devices sustain the
conflict by intensifying the identical claims in a zero-sum way. This may be a
good strategy to develop nationalism, but it is not suitable for international
negotiation in situations of nationalist rivalry.

The Zionists and the Palestinian Arab Nationalists began intense articulation
of goals more than a half century apart. But it took violence, victimization, and
suffering for both groups to accelerate the process, leading toward a declaration
of independence. In the Israeli case, only fifteen years passed between the onset
of the major refugee problem and persecution (the beginning of the Nazi era in
Europe in 1933) and the establishment of statehood, immediately following the
independence declaration, in 1948. For the Palestinians, if the main refugee--
human displacement problem is dated from the 1967 War, rather than 1948
(since the 1960s also brought the aspirations of nationalism into focus with the
founding and charter of the PLO), then roughly two decades passed before their
own independence declaration was proclaimed. By this logic, the issue would

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