A Rare and Uncertain Gift

[Sept. 10 1999] For this Jewish New Year, we have a rare and uncertain gift, the hope of peace. The long suspended implementation of the next phases of the Wye accords has come to life. Israel has released hundreds of prisoners and the PNA and Israeli negotiators have signed a further agreement regarding redeployment. Details of these stories are and will be at MidEast Web.

It is not much. It is not where we hoped to be or should have been in the peace process. It is not a great liberating and exalting experience for either the Jewish-Israeli nor the Palestinian-Arab nations. However, it is the hope of peace, and a bit of the substance, and as such is better than the alternative. A possible sign that the agreements may be fair is that they have been bitterly condemned by extremist critics on both sides.

The peace has many enemies and critiques and “guardians.” Some are obvious villains. Some are not so obvious. There is a self-appointed committee for enforcement of ‘non-incitement’ clauses of the Wye River Accords, and they take care to tell us about incitement. There are Guardians of Justice, trying to ensure that there no agreement takes place that does not satisfy the demands of justice. Justice, of course, includes perfect compensation for each side of all the losses calculated since some arbitrary critical year in history, such as 1914, 1917, 1880 or 0069.

There are those who work every day to show the faults of the peace, to show another incident of incitement, or another case in which the army mistreated Palestinians, and to blame these on the peace rather than on the fact that we have not achieved peace.

War is an old story in the Middle East, and peace is a new and fragile one. The slim candle of peace that has been lit with a tiny flickering flame since 1993 has often been close to extinction by the vicissitudes of chance and the seekers of justice. So if we want to keep this gift of peace, we must make friends with it and be friends with it and defend it

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A peaceful and constructive new year to all the children of Abraham in the Middle East. If you will, it is no legend.

Ami Isseroff

Rehovot

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PEACE is a Mid - East Dialog Group commited to peace and neighborly relations.We have no official political opinions. PEACE was started by Ameen Hannoun, a Jordanian/Palestinian and Ami Isseroff, an Israeli. You are welcome to join, and to contribute ariticles and ideas for promoting peace and dialog.  More about PEACE.

An outsider looks at the Palestinian - Israeli Conflict - Anyone interested in creative solutions to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict must read this essay by Matthew Hogan PEACEMAKING VIA NON-IDEOLOGY or CONFESSIONS OF A PRO-ISRAEL ANTI-ZIONIST.

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