The Israel-Palestinian conflict has been characterized as
intractable, inextricable, and the root cause of suffering and
misery for many of the people who live in the Middle East. Whilst
it would be unwise to be
lieve that the solution to this problem can
be provided by negotiation support systems, we believe such
systems can provide useful advice and allow disputants to more
understand their goals and perform the trade-offs necessary to
arrive at acceptable solutions.
Given our research on interest based negotiation support systems
to provide family mediation ad
vice, we pose the question about
the ability of such systems to
provide useful advice about the
Israel – Palestinian dispute. We examine the differences between
family mediation and international conflict resolution and reflect
upon whether results from the former can provide useful advice in
the latter.