An increasingly corrosive expedient? Israel’s evolving relationship with back-channel diplomacy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s use of ‘Back-channel Diplomacy’ with Palestine and Saudi Arabia. The paper advances a new typology of back-channel diplomacy, which is used as an analytical framework. Those in Israel who favour the so-called ‘two-state solution’ have generally pursued back-channels to explore whether a two-state deal is possible, while those who favour a permanent Jewish retention of much of the West Bank have used back-channels to buy time for this project, including by making secret deals with sworn enemies of Israel’s existence. Former PM Netanyahu’s reliance on back-channels, both for ‘doing business’ with Hamas, and for contacts with Saudi Arabia, was the culmination of the second approach; a strategy intended to both appease his political base and prevent peace with the Palestinians, while seeking to tactically manage relations across the region. However, this strategy contains a fundamental tension which may be difficult to ignore for much longer.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".