Israel & Palestine: Ten Ways To Make Sure that Peace Stays Dead

Palestinian militant groups offered to stop firing rockets into Israel in exchange for a cessation of all attacks on the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank, an official said on today.

Islamic Jihad leader Khader Habib said the main Palestinian factions including the governing Hamas group, the rival Fatah of President Mahmoud Abbas and other smaller groups reached the understanding while meeting Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.

"For the good of the national Palestinian interest ... there is a position supporting calm (a ceasefire) by stopping rocket fire in return for an end to the aggression against our people in Gaza and the West Bank," Habib told Reuters.

Habib said a deal would only take effect after Israel agrees and actually ends military actions. The offer was limited only to rocket firing and did not include other forms of attacks by militants such as cross-border attacks and suicide bombings.

It was the first time that all Palestinian factions and militant groups had agreed on a common proposal.

If the Isaeli's agree to a truce - how long can it last? How long before either side breaks the truce?

Below is a great article published in Haaretz, 23.11.06 by Bradley Burston

We're six dreadful years into this war of ours. The number of dead has passed our ability to keep track, many more than 4,000 Palestinians, many more than 1,000 Israelis.

We are in a state of permanent eclipse. Never have we been more distrustful of the other. Never have we had less faith in our leaders. So poverty-stricken are we in leadership, Israelis and Palestinians as one, that even our leaders have lost the little esteem they may have once had for each other.

In Israel, the only conflict that Ehud Olmert and Amir Peretz are conducting with vigor and precision is a war with each other. The public having long lost all faith in either of them, each of them now shares at least the public's view of the other.

In Gaza, Fatah has long since lost its credibility, and Hamas is fast losing the adoration it held for nearly two decades.

Six dreadful years into this war, we have uncounted reasons why neither side can recognize the other long enough to sit at the same negotiating table. Neither side can quell its own internal spats long enough to discuss a cease-fire with the other.

Six years older, none the wiser, we have learned only this:

This is the place where peace plans come to die.

At this point, perhaps intransigence is all we have left. On both sides. Having lost our hope, we've lost our freedom. Having lost our compassion, we've lost our self-respect. Having lost our faith, we've lost our very future.

In the dim light of a spent horizon, in a place of crushed hopes, what, really, do the two sides have in common?

Too much, it turns out.

Incompetent in governance, unwilling to do what is needed to provide for our needy, incapable of finding ways to protect the vulnerable from enemy attack, we, Israelis and Palestinians both, have becomes masters only at making certain that peace stays dead.

Two peoples once known for their industriousness and creativity, we have become energetic only in dismissal, creative only in rejection.

Too many people on each side see the other as wholly culpable. Too many people on each side see themselves as wholly innocent, wholly victimized, ill-served by the well-meaning, abandoned by former allies, betrayed by the media, misunderstood by people who should know better, forgotten by the world.

Too many people on each side see only the suffering that has been caused them. Too many people have learned to wall themselves off from the suffering that they have caused.

At this point, even those of us who still have an ember of faith in a far dawn, may find that we're playing into the despair. Those of us who believe that the two sides should have an opportunity to listen to what the other has to say, run the risk of making it possible for each side to hear the other at its very worst.

Witness the Talkback.

For good or ill, there is nothing like this in human communication. Enemies talk. Real enemies.

Furious, battered, vengeance-starved mortal enemies.

Now and then, enemies even listen. They may even learn.

Let this be said: the great majority of those who send talkbacks are people who honestly want to participate in an ongoing exchange of ideas.

But the price of relatively free speech - we will pause here for a moment to allow virtual produce and eggs to be thrown at our hard-working crew of censors - is the need on the part of a minority to vent, and thus propagate, venom.

For some among the community of the Extreme Talkbacker, the voice of reason is often the voice of racism.

For others, the talkback is tantamount to PlayStation 4, an entirely virtual world at your fingertips. A world that you yourself can construct. A fellow talkbacker takes issue with your opinion? Hit the Thesaurus of Death button. Take pride in a newfound epithet, a new vein of mud heretofore unslung.

The World According to Extreme Talkbacks is to the real world, as PlayStation is to actual warfare, actual martial arts, actual artistic endeavor, actual pleasure, actual blood.

But as virtual as this world can be, there is no question that the Extreme Talkbacker can do real harm.

Perhaps the harm is intentional, a function of rage and activism with no available address. Like the reader in Connecticut who feels the need to respond to an Israeli moderate who expresses sorrow and dismay and responsibility for the unintentional deaths of Palestinians, by telling the Israeli that he probably rejoiced in the killing of a fellow Israeli in a Palestinian rocket attack.

Then there are those, Palestinians and Israelis alike, who do not want to see peace, who have no interest in co-existence, who do not believe that the Holy Land was meant to be shared, and who could not care less if the talkbacks they send, only drive a further wedge between our two peoples.

So, for their sake, we unveil a new set of Extreme Talkback Guidelines, as seen from the viewpoint of the talkback terrorist, intended to maximize the strife here, intensify the conflict, and render any eventual peace accord so distant as to be hopeless:

1. There is only one side to any story. My side.

2. The people on the other side, children included, are undeserving of sympathy.

3. Even the maimed and the dead on the other side are undeserving of sympathy.

4. The term massacre may only be used to describe casualties on my side.

5. The automatic fire, bombing, shelling or other lethal action taken by my side are acts of self-defense. If there are fatalities as a result of fire by my side, whether intentional or incidental, they deserved to die.

Pro-Israel version I: Palestinian terrorists are to blame for the deaths, as they operate in residential areas, drawing fire that kills innocent civilians.

Pro-Israel version II: They're all terrorists. They all deserve what they get.

Pro-Palestinian version I: Suicide bombings, Qassams and drive-by's are the only defense that a vastly out-gunned people has against well-armed occupation forces.

Pro-Palestinian version II: All Israelis ultimately serve in the army, so all are legitimate targets.

6. The concept of drawing comparisons of moral equivalency or mutual responsibility for violence is, in all cases, obscene, disgraceful, artificial, mendacious.

All political, military, social and religious modalities can be reduced to pure victims and pure villains, which is to say, Us and Them, which is to say, Us and animals/murderers/mass-murderers/racist genocidalists/Nazis/Hitler.

Option 7A: The goal of the left, the center, this newspaper, its writers, even some of its readers, is the destruction of the State of Israel.

Option 7B: The destruction of Israel is a worthwhile goal.

8. If I am a pro-Israel extremist, responding to a pro-Israel moderate, I should attack and dismiss the writer as a whiner, a crybaby, a defeatist, a moron, a wimp, an imbecile, a self-hater, an extreme leftist, naïve, brainwashed, a pipe-dreamer, duped by the pro-Arab bias of the mass media, a traitor.

9. If I am a pro-Palestinian extremist, responding to a pro-Palestinian moderate, I should immediately dismiss the writer as a sell-out, a fool, misguided, an Uncle Tom, unaware of the real facts, duped by a the pro-Israel bias of the mass media, a traitor.

10. The depth of my conviction, that is, the degree of my extremism, is directly proportional to the distance from my home to the Holy Land. The farther away, the more foaming-at-the-mouth my fanaticism.