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Is Israeli-Palestinian Peace Possible?

(Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars) Walter Reich - Any effort to bring peace between Israelis and Palestinians must reckon with the fact that bitter experience has taught many Israelis to doubt that their foes want a lasting concord. For the Obama administration to have any chance to succeed in brokering such a peace treaty, it will have to convince Israelis that the kind of treaty it wants them to accept will be worth the cost because it will result in a real peace - one that will actually last, that's less threatening than the situation they're now in, and that will truly and finally end the conflict with the Palestinians. Increasingly, Israelis are convinced that no concessions they make to the Palestinians will ever be enough - that each concession will be followed by another demand, that each new demand that isn't conceded will be a pretext for more violence, and that each response to that violence will provoke international condemnations of Israel for using disproportionate force, no matter what forewarnings are given and what precautions are taken to prevent civilian casualties. The Palestinians systematically teach their children that they must never accept the existence of Israel. Media controlled by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank regularly undermine any readiness to accept Israel alongside a future Palestinian state. They glorify suicide bombers, quote Muhammad as saying that Jews must be killed, accuse Israelis of poisoning and spreading AIDS among Palestinians, deny that the Holocaust happened, and claim that Jews never had a history in the land. Moreover, the other Palestinian territory - Gaza - is governed by a group, Hamas, that is forthright in declaring that it will fight until Israel is gone. After years of Israeli buses being blown up, after the refusal by Yasir Arafat to accept a peace in which nearly all of the West Bank and Gaza would become a Palestinian state, and after Arafat's successor, Mahmoud Abbas, refused concessions that were even more generous, many Israelis concluded that no concession would ever be enough. The main peace plan to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict aims at a "two-state solution." But, Israelis ask, why would any sane person believe that, two weeks or two months after a Palestinian state were to come into being - a state that would abut the length of Israel's narrow waist as well as Jerusalem - rockets wouldn't be flying over its border and blowing up in every Israeli city and airport? The writer, a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, is former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
2010-08-10 08:02:49
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