Peace between Israel and Palestine seems a teensy bit more possible this week than the last.
Negotiations are apparently entering a bulldozer phase: Israeli politician Zehava Gal-On “>later denied that he would impose a plan, saying, “Let me categorically dispel any notion that there is anything other than the track that is formally engaged in between Israel and the Palestinians.”]
And now — riding that wave of renewed hope — Currently, popular support for a two-state solution is at about 55 percent, both “>in the West Bank. But that slim majority of approval is more theoretical than practical — because most Jewish Israelis still don't want to withdraw from the settlements in the West Bank, and most Palestinians are still hoping for a “right of return” to Israel. And those figures don't even begin to address cordoned-off Gaza. As author China Miéville wrote in his tragically beautiful piece for Peace Now, however, knows that despite the deep-set physicalities and ideologies driving the Israel-Palestine conflict, we have to find an in-road somewhere. In a video released yesterday called “Why We Struggle For Peace,” the non-governmental organization — formed in 1978 to push through an Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, which they succeeded in doing — goes back to basics, reminding Israelis what's really at stake.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry may finally be giving that decades-long struggle a hard deadline. Here's what's coming in early 2014, “The Obama administration plans to achieve a diplomatic breakthrough at the beginning of 2014. The Americans want to move from coordinating between the two sides to a phase of active intervention. This coming January, they will present a new diplomatic plan that will include all the core issues and will be based on the 1967 lines, with agreed-on land swaps. The plan will include a gradual timetable for implementation and will also address the dimension of regional peace based on the Arab Peace Initiative. It will also include an economic plan to invest billions in the Palestinian economy.”
The most stubborn obstacle to peace between Israel and the West Bank, in my observation, is mutual mistrust — the sum of daily injustices that build and harden and grow deep, twisty roots. A Palestinian boy is shot by an Israeli soldier on his way home from school. An Israeli girl is hit by sniper fire in her West Bank settlement. Jewish settlers destroy Palestinian olive groves in the night, trampling their neighbors' pride and livelihood. Everyone knows someone, or knows someone who knows someone, who was hit by an IDF bomb or bullet, or targeted in an anti-Israel terror attack.
And where there's not fear, there's complacency. At least in Tel Aviv, over months and sometimes years of calm, it's easy to go about one's charmed city lifestyle and forget about the actively caged-in people just a short drive south or east.
But this status quo is no longer acceptable, says Peace Now — the process must move forward. In a statement circulated through the organization's daily news blast, Peace Now Secretary General Yariv Oppenheimer wrote:
“The film illustrates in a minute and a half the contemporary vision of all those who believe in a two-state solution and support reaching an agreement. The peace camp must demand that Netanyahu overcome political and psychological barriers and reach a comprehensive peace agreement with the Palestinian side and with the Arab world. From our point of view, possibility of holding a national referendum is real and and the work of persuasion must start from now.”
For more on the U.S. branch of Peace Now and its remote crusade for a two-state solution, see
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