In Chapter 8, through the presentation and analysis of our four conceptualized kinds of personal narratives of intractable war – distancing, victimhood, ambivalence/paradoxes, and embracing the other while remaining in one’s pain – we address a major issue, which has always divided Jewish-Israeli society: Arab–Jewish/Israeli–Palestinian relations. This issue tends to divide the left wing from the right wing and the secular from the religious Jewish citizens. This schism exploded in late 2022, when a very right-wing coalition was formed in the Israeli Knesset and government, which led to numerous legislative proposals that have been perceived by many as endangering Israel’s fragile democracy. This political upheaval further led to massive demonstrations and strikes that threw the country into turmoil. While this specific ideological/religious divide is mainly between Jews and Jews, it ties into the Jewish–Arab/Israeli–Palestinian conflict, as its roots connect to the question of the desired nature of the state and to the often-hostile intergroup relationships that characterize Israeli society. In this chapter, we present personal narratives connected to Jewish–Jewish relations, a very “hot” topic in Israeli society today.

Anyone can conceive the fantastical image of a ‘green sun’, but to create a world inside which a green sun will be credible and command belief requires a special skill, ‘a kind of elvish craft’. Note the metafictional artifice: fairy tales, which so often have elves as their characters, are themselves a product of elvish magic or enchantment, the ability to create imaginary worlds that other people will take for the real one. Inside these worlds, what the world contains is true: it accords with the laws of that world. J. R. R.Tolkien distinguishes between magic and enchantment. The former aims to produce a change in the real world, what Tolkien calls the primary world. Modern technology, in the sense of machine technology, Tolkien regards as akin to magic, a desire for power and for making the will more immediately effective; the word he uses in this context is ‘bulldozing’, an act of destruction, levelling mountains and filling valleys.

In the twelfth century AD, European elite warriors, knights, finding themselves in dire straits during battle, adopted the practice of surrendering themselves to adversaries who then guaranteed the safety of their prisoners. In turn, prisoners promised to pay a ransom to their captors, payment of which would free the prisoners and allow them to take up arms again. This practical transaction was considered honorable, even praiseworthy. Because ransoms could be substantial, it might be necessary for a prisoner to return to his lands to collect the funds. To do so, he would swear on his word of honor, parole d’honneur, to return with the required funds. The practices of honorable surrender, ransom, and parole were established in customary laws of war, and disputes between captors and their captives could be appealed to courts of honor. There were circumstances in which honorable surrender was not permitted. For example, military commanders could forbid their forces to accept surrenders until a battle was decided, lest their men disperse during battle to collect prisoners and ransoms. The recourse to honorable surrender was limited to the elites; common soldiers could be overwhelmed or killed outright in battle or siege.

Americans invaded Afghanistan and Iraq during the “War on Terror” following 9/11. Because the Taliban gave sanctuary to al Qaeda, the United States attacked Afghanistan in October 2001. Within months, Osama bin Laden had fled, and the Taliban took refuge in Pakistan. However, the Taliban launched an offensive in 2006. Despite Allied efforts, the Taliban gained control of Afghanistan. In 2020, Trump agreed to a peace plan that would remove all Allied troops from Afghanistan in 2021. Biden carried out Trump’s capitulation. Like Vietnam, the fighting ended in American surrender by withdrawal in a chaotic evacuation. Justified by faulty rationale, Americans invaded Iraq in 2003. After a quick victory in the conventional attack, Iraqi resistance transformed into an insurgency that brought the Americans to the brink of defeat. In December 2006, Bush authorized the Surge, increasing the number of troops and instituting a new counterinsurgency strategy. The Surge proved successful, and Obama reasonably extracted all American combat troops by December 2011. The treatment of detainees during the War on Terror began with Bush abandoning humane guidelines. Abu Ghraib strikingly revealed American abuses. But with the Surge, detainee operations emphasized rehabilitation and release to increase trust among the Iraqi population.

Despite the promise of a well-ordered trading system and expansion of trade liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s, why is trade governance deadlocked? This puzzle is addressed by elaborating the meaning of “crisis of success” and what such a crisis looks like at the global trading order. I argue that the global trading system is revealing a “crisis of success” in that its current failure to ensure functional trade liberalization change is a result of the initial accomplishment in successfully undergoing a power shift in global trade governance especially at the WTO, marked by greater inclusion of new emerging powers. The success of the initial first phase of trade governance (1990s–2008/2012), especially in aiding an institutional power shift at the global level, created conditions for new problems, leading to a fragmented turn toward preferential trade agreements as well as trade-mediated conflictual strategies rather than sustainable peaceful change. The chapter’s dynamic historical argument delineates how early successes in global trade policies and governance led to maximalist peaceful change, followed by crisis leading to greater use of tariffs and ensuing US–China economic and trade competition. The mechanisms that underwrote the paradox of crisis despite institutional strength are elaborated.

Taking a rationalist approach to institutions as equilibria, I develop a critical perspective on whether and when intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) promote peaceful change. I challenge the standard view that cooperation through IGOs is necessarily “peaceful” by tightening the definition of peaceful change to include not only being nonviolent and voluntary but also being noncoercive. Whether voluntary cooperation is peaceful now depends not only on the means used and end point of change but also on its starting point. Whenever prevailing institutions overly favor (previously) powerful states, seemingly cooperative change within IGOs entails implicit elements of coercion. This is especially true of formal IGOs (FIGOs) whose rules and agency are tightly tied to the interests of the powerful. By contrast, the greater flexibility of informal IGOs (IIGOs) enables them to promote change that is more inclusive of the interests of all concerned. Their greater operational capacity may give FIGOs a comparative advantage for adapting international order – and thus for peaceful change when the international order is just. But IIGOs are more effective for promoting peaceful change when larger transformational change of the international order is needed.