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Some Israelis Dread Peace Talks

(Al-Monitor) Einat Wilf - The renewal of talks between Israelis and Palestinians fills me with dread. For more than 20 years, peace talks meant more terrorism and more death. The more serious the talks got, the greater the number of violent deaths. The closer the negotiations came to addressing the core issues, the worse the violence became. In the 1990s, victims of terrorism were called "victims of peace." But peace should have no victims, and neither should the road to achieving it. The fact remains that the longer the stalemate continued, the less we were killing each other. During the last few years without negotiations, the number of Israelis and Palestinians killed has been the lowest in decades. True, a stalemate is not heroic, but for Israelis, as well as Palestinians, the stalemate of the past few years has meant life. The aphorism that trying and failing is better than not trying at all does not apply, because trying and failing means going back to a time when there was fear in going to cafes and buying pizzas and terror in getting stuck in traffic behind a bus. I know that the right thing to do is to applaud the renewed negotiations, but I wanted to share the feelings of one citizen who dreads their renewal and feels that this time around, if she has to choose between peace and life, she will choose life. The writer was a member of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee in the 18th Knesset.
2013-08-09 00:00:00
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