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Source: http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050124&s=diarist012405
Reserving Judgment
(New Republic) Martin Peretz - With perhaps the most open election in Arab history, the Palestinians are off to a salubrious start. Rhetorically, however, their elected leader has hardly digressed from Arafat's phantasmagoric promises. That may be the real reason Abu Mazen won so handily. The lesson of Palestinian history is that words matter; they condition the politics of the street. So let's establish the no-nonsense basics: The 1967 borders (which were not borders at all, but the flimsy, happenstance 1949 cease-fire lines where the exhausted armies stopped fighting) are bygones; there will never be a mass "return" of Palestinian "refugees" to within the agreed territories of Israel; the barrier separating what will ultimately be Palestine and Israel will not be taken down in our time, if ever; and the real territorial arrangements between Israel and its Arab neighbors have not yet been truly put on the table.