Arabs fight to eliminate Israel. Israelis fight to win their neighbors’ acceptance. That’s why there’s no peace or ever will be peace.

Using the skills of some trained people, and involving the U.N. in a long-term peacebuilding role would relieve the US from trying to be evenhanded when our government’s financial arrangements and ties with Israel are so one-sided, favoring Israel.  This imbalance makes it difficult if not impossible for the US to be an “honest broker.”  Besides, the U.N. could refresh the situation by “starting over” so to speak, and listening more carefuly to both sides, adding fresh ideas.  Both sides would benefit from listening to more different viewpoints and suggestions. The situation desperately needs a breath of fresh air.  So I hope you will put up my previous suggestion just as a possible approach.  I think it might significantly help those who are working for peace in Israel and Palestine.  The idea occurred because I read information from both sides regularly and I just feel that a new approach is needed.

Occasionally sending in top politicians from outside with a mandate to “help” two opposing societies with decades of disagreement, fear and hatred, to come to agreement is probably doomed to failure.  Especially hopeless and cynical is to send in outsiders coming from nations whose reputation for peacemaking is not based on any evident qualifications or national successes in peacebuilding, or persons whose national interests might intrude.
    Suggestion: The spirit and intention of the United Nations might be used to found and invigorate an entire agency devoted to Direct Assistance for Peace-building in Areas of Conflict. Volunteers and/or appointees should be persons with meaningful credentials, who already have extensive education and experience in active, on-site reconciliation.  Such persons should have the best preparatory academic training and experience that the world has to offer, and have resources made available on request.   
    Warring parties who request the services of such bodies should be required to have in attendance people with long experience in their own societies, but who express a deep desire to find fair-minded answers to problems.  They should volunteer to stick with sessions through a specified course and mutually commit themselves to agree to solution of as many problems under consideraton as possible, so that success can be incremental.  Careful records should be kept for review and learning for future similar endeavors.
    Problems as intransigent as Israel/Palestine would prove more difficult than many because of the long, unabated period of violence and counter-violence.  Still, with sincere and qualified efforts from both sides and from others prepared to conciliate, the effort must be made because no viable alternative remains.
    Critics suspicious on grounds of expense, previous failures or the deep intransigence of problems perhaps need to remind themselves that some such intentional efforts will be necessary if the world is to avoid nuclear war. As an answer to hopelessness,  there are thousands of ordinary people volunteering in many war zones, coming from all over the world, working with very limited resources to help in peacebuilding initiatives, whose many small successes go almost entirely unpublicized.  There is hope, and possibility.

Before negotiatiing, Israel asked the Palestinians to agree that Israel was the national home of the Jewish people. The Palestinians refused because their whole narrative is about the roughly five million so called refugees coming back to live in the cities and towns of their fathers and grandfathers within Israel. Any Palestinian politician who abandoned this right of return (by the way a phrase stolen from Israel that in 1948 granted right of return to Jews)wouldn’t last a minute on the street. This formulation was made by Yasser Arafat who told this to Bill Clinton to explain why he rejected the comprehensive Clinton-Barak peace offer.

So if the only kind of peace available to Israel is one in which the Jewish nature of their state has to be abandoned, then there will be no peace. To those who say that Israel need not be a Jewish state, tell that to Saudi Arabia and all the rest of the Arab world that are proudly and exclusively Muslim.