http://www.romirowsky.com/11621/peace-process
THERE IS NO POSSIBILITY FOR ANY ARAB SOVEREIGNTY BETWEEN THE PRE 1967 LINES AND THE JORDAN RIVER….PERIOD….RSK
Something has gone horribly wrong with the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, and Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s recent decision not to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is only the latest example and reason for the widespread pessimism about its trajectory.
The so-called Middle East conflict has grown more rather than less intractable since Palestinian and Israeli leaders began their efforts to resolve it through negotiations. Indeed, almost two decades of negotiations have failed to convince Palestinian and Israeli leaders of a way to share the land and its resources. And in fact the core of the conflict is more about co-existing on the same land than just dividing it.
Perhaps the realization of how many dreams would remain unfulfilled if the compromises necessary for an agreement were struck convinced politicians on both sides that resolving the dispute would be more costly and unpopular than perpetuating it.
Perhaps, both sides have clung more tightly to their national narratives than to proposals to be exchanged for concessions because discussions, themselves, disclosed the gap, not so much between the two sets of negotiators, but rather between reality and the dreams ordinary Palestinians and Israelis have been encouraged to imagine of the final resolution.
At the very least, national narratives give Israelis and Palestinians a clear definition of their collective identities even if they lock them into their confrontation.
For Palestinians, a narrative etched in the injustices of exile and oppression is preferred to the founding of a state that leaves behind too many refugees stuck in the same camps created for what was believed a temporary displacement. For Israelis, whose national story is woven around the survival of the Jewish people, it is preferable to retain control over territories serving as staging ground for attacks – even though the patrols, checkpoints, and the separation barrier are often described as marks of oppression – than surrendering the land without a clear Palestinian commitment to stop their wars and end their grievances against the Jewish state.
So, the conflict persists; the negotiations are deadlocked and the calls by the international community through the Quartet for compromise and negotiations seem more akin to linguistic rituals than to imperatives for action.
Thus, a peace process cannot be successful unless the tight grip of narratives sustaining the conflict is dislodged. And they can only start to loosen if both Palestinians and Israelis begin to have different experiences of one another and of the two states a solution is expected to produce.
Focus on state building