Munich Massacre Research Paper

The so-called Munich Massacre took place in the city of Munich on September 5, 1972, during the XX edition of the Summer Olympic Games. That day, a group of Palestinian terrorists called Black September took as hostages eleven of the twenty members of Israel's Olympic team.
This situation is consider as dispute because was a repercussion of a broader conflict, the war between Palestinians and Israelis; the differences in religion, believes and culture were the main causes of this dispute. This dispute was a violent, real, destructive, retributive, realistic, intergroup and interests’ conflict with ideological and historical causes and a parochial scope.
This whole situation had an intractable character because the parties refused to negotiate. It had different stages: Latent Conflict, since the biblical time with the searching of Holy land; Emergence and Escalation, after the kidnapping everything just started to escalate in a higher level of intensity; Stalemate, neither of them wanted to back out and let the other win; and the stages of de-escalation, dispute settlement, post-conflict peace-building and reconciliation can’t be identified yet.
The conflict reached the escalated form with the increase of the intensity, the change from light tactics to heavy tactics with the use of weapons, the kidnapping and
the murders. This escalation can be considered as a rational action and the predominant strategy used is the competing (I win, you lose).
The Munich dispute was settled because they refused to negotiate so they resolved that was not an option.
It was a predominantly competitive because the Palestinians and Israelis had a high concern for themselves and low concern for the others. The main type of power that was used was the coercive power because they were trying to pass over the other part. In this case there wasn’t any kind of trust between the parties, because the main conflict Palestinian-Israeli didn’t allow them to build a trust relationship. This negotiation was a domination, because the Palestine used the threat, and the psychological pressure in order to achieve their
objectives.
In this dispute the parties had a high concern for themselves, they just concerned about their own outcome. According to most of the elements the negotiation between Germans and Palestinian was Distributive and those weren’t real agreements at all, some of them were more like exigencies. The main characteristics of this agreement are the use of the violence as a source of power to get the objectives. During this dispute there were no alternative conflict resolution methods, because the scenario wasn´t the best for looking mediation of a third party. The media helped spreading worldwide the news allowing the people to know what is happening, but this can be positive and negative at the same time because in the positive way people outside the conflict could know about it, but in the negative way instead of doing it as a way to mediate the conflict what they did was to panic people intervening in a frivolous way on each action and also not telling the truth.
In conclusion, there was no space to commit or compromise, the objectives were achieved and things weren´t managed in a proper way.
The whole historical conflict is not ease to resolve, also in the struggles for land is very difficult to resolve a conflict, but the situation could have been avoided if the Palestinians could have looked for a less violent and also this situation should have been measured better by the German police.