Is There Any Hope Left For Israeli-Palestinian Conflict?
Akiva Eldar ponders why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the longest in history, proposing to resolve it instead of “managing” it.
On Saturday night, upon hearing the former (and maybe the future) Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman declaring on Israel's Channel 2 “Meet the Press” program that there is no chance of reaching an agreement with the Palestinians on the issue of permanent borders, and all that’s left is to “manage the crisis,” I was reminded of a little girl from Gaza who an hour earlier was sitting next to me, watching a circus show near kibbutz Yakum.
Wearing a white medical mask, she was sitting amid other Palestinian children who are coping with serious illnesses day in, day out. They were brought there for a day of fun. Sitting next to a bunch of Israeli children of roughly the same age, they all enjoyed watching the funny antics. For a moment, however brief, it seemed that there was hope.
When I heard Liberman casually dismiss any hope of ending the conflict, I thought of those children as well as of Yuval Rott who was strutting in the hall like a peacock. Yuval, whose brother was killed in a terrorist attack, is the driving force behind “The Road to Recovery” — an Israeli volunteer-based organization helping Palestinian children obtain treatment in Israeli hospitals. I looked at the flyer in Hebrew and Arabic that had been handed to me at the end of the show by Salamatecom (Get Well) volunteers. It said that the organization was founded in order to give hope to the sick and their families, put a smile on their faces, and make their wishes come true.
Compassion and hope have no boundaries, as we all know. However, without clear boundaries — or at least a persistent attempt to reach them — there's no hope. People who are carved up by cultural, religious and social borders need a political border. No interim agreement can be managed between the occupiers and the occupied without providing a diplomatic horizon.
