Principles for Implementing a Potential Solution to the Middle East Conflict

Introduction The purpose of this paper is to show how the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) applies mathematics to deal with the most complex problems of the world in a comprehensive and holistic way—in this case the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This process has been helpful in finding solutions to some of the world’s most complex struggles, including those in South Africa and Northern Ireland. But it has not been used extensively to address the Middle East conflict because of the unique aspects of that struggle. Five years ago, we began preliminary work to organize the excruciatingly difficult issues associated with that six-decades-old confrontation. We began by testing how this retributive conflict (one in which both sides profess to desiring a solution but are equally committed to inflicting pain on the other party) could be profitably addressed by the AHP. This paper should serve as an illustration of how mathematics can help quantify the value of tradeoffs through relative scales (priorities derived from pairwise comparison judgments). The reader can find the mathematical foundations of the theory in an article recently published by the first author in these Notices in February 2013 [3]; see also [4]. Figure 1 shows a map of Israel and Palestine as the borders currently