Could peace be at hand?

Editorial

At this time of reflection, redemption and hope, there seems legitimate reason for hope on the issue that has been the defining factor of Jewish life for three generations.

True, we have stood many times at the precipice of what has looked like a peaceful new era for the Jews of Israel and their neighbors. And, each time, we have been disappointed. Yet now there is a geopolitical environment that makes potential for peace possibly more hopeful than ever before.

Last week, Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the West Bank Palestinian government, told a group of Israeli politicians that a final peace agreement would mean the end of Palestinian claims to cities within the state of Israel.

The statement should have been a yawner – in no other scenario on earth would the idea need to be expressed aloud that a bilateral peace agreement would mean the end of one party seeking the destruction of the other. Yet, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, what would appear self-evident in any other scenario is hailed as groundbreaking progress.

“People say that after signing a peace agreement we will still demand Haifa, Acre and Safed,” Abbas said. “That is not true. Signing the agreement will signal the end of the conflict.”

This statement, baffling to the proverbial Martian arriving to survey the scenario, is monumental. At its essence, the statement is a reversal of the long-standing, never-rejected Palestinian position (held by “moderates” and “extremists” alike) that the only satisfactory long-term resolution to the matter is the elimination of the Jewish state.

Is there, among the Palestinian leadership, a genuine potential for peace and a new willingness to live in peaceful co-existence?

Peace processes can evoke a sense of déjà vu. Israel optimistically placed its future in Yasser Arafat and ended up, arguably, worse for the effort. Now, Abbas is blaming right-wing elements surrounding Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for the slow pace of the discussions. But the resistance from the Israeli right to negotiating with the Palestinians in the years since Oslo collapsed has been mainly due to the presumption that the Palestinians might just be stringing Israel along again. It is a legitimate concern, given recent history. But even more recent history provides reason for optimism on this perennially disappointing front.

This time may be different, not because much has changed between Israelis and Palestinians, but because everything has changed between everyone else in the region.

Among other things, the beginning of the Arab Spring may have represented – finally – the refusal of Arab peoples to be hoodwinked by leaders who deflect attention from domestic troubles by focusing on the easy target of alleged Jewish usurpers of the Holy Land.

Perhaps Abbas sees his people’s moment passing. The reliable unanimity of the Arab and Muslim blocs unquestioningly prioritizing the Israeli-Palestinian issue above all others may be over. As the attention turns from Palestine to other flashpoints in the region, claims of Palestinian victimhood pale in comparison to what is happening to the people of Syria, in just the most obvious case, and to the instability and repression happening to others across the region at the hands not of an external entity, but of their own dictators and/or insurgents.

Now, in what may be an historic breakthrough, Abbas has opened the door to compromise. With the world’s attention rightly focused elsewhere, perhaps these two parties can finally interact without undue external influences and expectations, finding the compromise and the longed-for peace that has eluded us.

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