Daily Alert Archives

Getting Serious about the Prospect for Peace in the Mideast

[National Review] Emanuele Ottolenghi - Despite the failure of successive attempts at peacemaking, and despite the current lack of favorable conditions to renew peace efforts, there is a broad international consensus that bringing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a happy ending is both possible and urgent. Western leaders periodically produce their own peace plans, in the almost messianic belief that if they can bring peace to Zion, its light will radiate far and wide. Peacemaking belongs to yesteryear, and all that a realistic foreign policy can do is to ensure that the current bloodletting does not submerge our allies and subvert our interests in the region. Containment of our enemies and the management of conflict is all that our generation can hope for. The chance to make peace in 2000 was turned down by the Palestinian refusal to come to terms with history and the limits it imposes on national dreams and fantasies. Their failure to embrace reality now makes the quest for a new opportunity futile, until the historical tide has turned again. Until then, any policy that centers on Palestinian-Israeli peace in our times is futile, wasteful, and delusional. The writer is executive director of the Transatlantic Institute in Brussels.
2006-12-22 01:00:00
Full Article