Today I went to a Harvard Middle East seminar about the upcoming Palestianian - Israeli peace confererence that Condoleezza Rice is pushing to make happen. The guest speaker Henry Siegman Director of the U.S./Mideast project said right off that bat that there is practically no chance that it would succeed. He said that it willl fail because it is only an US-Israeli pretext for destroying Hamas. Siegman said that the two sides are too far apart to agree on anything and won't even reach a joint statement.
There was much discussion about the history of the establishment of Israel and how the Arabs origonally thought the Palestinians would get half the land. Now they have only 22% of it and he said that Israel demanding more was like trying to squeeze blood form a stone. Both sides see themselves as persecuted and oppressed.
Someone asked Siegman if any of the current presidential candidates had anything to say about the subject. Guliani says that the Palestinians shouldn't get a state. When Howard Dean announced last time that we should have an even handed approach in this issue his campaign was over.
Henry Siegman hopes that maybe a 3rd party ie: the UN can step in and try to get the 2 sides to negotiate.
But the bottom line for any eventual agreement is for both sides to put themselves in the other party's shoes...a quality that doesn't presently exist on either side of the proverbial fence. The seminar had very little optimism. The last seminar about the prospects in Iraq had no optimism whatsoever...not even a glimmer of light at the end of that tunnel.
