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More Peace, Less Process: The Key to Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations
(JNS-Algemeiner) Ben Cohen - Every day, it seems, an American politician declares that time is running out, that windows of opportunity are closing, that the Israeli-Palestinian dimension of the broader Middle East conflict is propelling the region towards apocalypse. Yet today there is a Palestinian Authority that shuns direct negotiations in favor of a unilateralist strategy to secure recognition of an independent Palestinian state by everyone except Israel. Israeli academics Joel Fishman and Kobi Michael, in the academic journal, the Jewish Political Studies Review, discuss the notion of a "positive peace." They warn against efforts to create a Palestinian state without worrying about its governance and internal political culture, since this would increase "the chances of bringing into being one more failed and warlike state that would become a destabilizing force in the region." Positive peace is not just about the absence of war, nor about elevating the right of national self-determination above all other considerations. The real problem is that would-be peacemakers, in order to avoid disagreement, "concentrated on process and postponed the substantive issues of content. They hoped that the dynamic of congenial negotiations would facilitate a favorable outcome....They neglected the real goal: building a stable and sustainable peace, or positive peace." Israeli scholar Yehoshafat Harkabi observed that in Arab discourse, the idea of peace with justice is equivalent to the vision of a Middle East without Israel. In spite of all the economic incentives waved at the PA, for the Palestinians a near-metaphysical belief in a struggle to the death has prevailed over the rational, sensible notion of territorial partition. Negotiations that are not preceded by meaningful, internal political reform in the Palestinian entity will share the fate of the Oslo Agreement. The path to peace begins not with discussions about settlements, water rights or the size of the Palestinian security forces, but with what the Palestinians themselves believe about the world around them - and whether they are capable of change.