Have MidEast talks failure killed two-state goal?

Twenty years ago, when the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations were fresh and young, millions from both sides thought a peace agreement, at long last, was going to make their lives much better.

It didn't happen. Twenty years of off-on talks, punctuated by violence, have not worked.

In many ways, Israelis and Palestinians are further apart than they were when the peace process started.

For two decades now the world's favourite peace plan has been the 'two state solution'.

It assumes that the conflict is about territory. Two sides went to war over a single piece of land, and the idea is that if they can agree to split it they have a chance of living in peace as neighbours.

But negotiators, helped by a variety of foreigners, have been trying for twenty years, and they have not made a deal.
'Broken record'

Israelis and Palestinians have heard the arguments so often, and seen so many failures, that they have stopped listening.

One man summed it up. "While I think that we want peace, the other side wants peace, it just sounds like a broken record that's been scratched and is going around and around."

It so happened that he was an Israeli, wearing the knitted skull cap of the religious Zionists who are the backbone of the settler movement. But the same thing could have been said by almost anyone on either side.

On a sunny Jerusalem morning I met two 30-something men, a Palestinian called Sulaiman Khatib and an Israeli called Avner Wishnitzer.

They are peace activists, a species common in the 1990s at the height of the peace process, but hard to spot these days.

They are part of Combatants for Peace, a group that brings together former fighters.

Avner was in Sayeret Matkal, Israel's elite special forces unit. Sulaiman was sentenced to 15 years in an Israeli jail when he was 15 years old for attacking Israeli soldiers.

"If the solution is two states," Sulaiman said, "you need to give up part of your dreams and that's the truth. You have to meet in the middle somewhere, no side will get everything they want".

Avner said he tried to appeal to mainstream Israelis. He said their fears were real.

"The dangers are real. We have to convince people, Israelis, that Palestinians - most of them, not all of them - but most of them do not want to throw us into the sea."

It was good to see two men who once could have killed each other sitting down as friends. But I could have done the same interview 20 years ago.

In the 1990s some Israelis and Palestinians had come to the same conclusions. But today most Israelis and Palestinians still do not trust the other side.
Out of time?

Before the start of the talks that were meant to have ended, presumably in success, on Monday of this week, the US Secretary of State John Kerry warned Israelis that they might not get another opportunity.

In a news conference in Tel Aviv on 24 May last year, he said: "We are running out of time. We're running out of possibilities...If we do not succeed now, we may not get another chance."

Mr Kerry worked very hard, and so did all the negotiators. The secretary of state had 34 meetings with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and almost twice as many with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu according to the New York Times.

http://jobnite.com/index.php?task=66752