a cease fire.
Palestine has negotiated in bad faith in the past. The entire problem, the entire conflict, boils down to whether Palestine is willing to enforce a peace on its own citizens.
If Palestine cannot control its own citizens well enough to keep them from throwing stones and other missiles across the border into Israel, then they are not a credible negotiating partner. And if they are not a credible negotiating partner, then Israel is wise to keep using its organized defenses.
Palestinian authorities hide their aggression in the stones of kids whom they encourage to sacrifice themselves to keep old, spiteful feuds going.
When the Palestinian authorities gain enough control over their own people that they can come to the table and make promises that will be carried out, they will find themselves on the way to peace.
Maybe this constant state of misery and war is what Palestinians want. Over many years of watching that conflict, I have drawn that conclusion. War and victimhood are habits that Palestinians are having difficulty giving up. Seems to be sort of an addiction for them.
We once had a neighbor who caused anger and trouble for the entire neighborhood. It was terrible. Neighbors would look at her place -- all the junk she stored on her lawn, the disrepair, the many tenants living illegally in it, all the unpermitted changes to it, the fact that the plumbing was not hooked up to the city sewers. . . . . It was awful. We lived next door and, personally, got a long with her well. But no one else did. One day my husband called to me across our house and said that he had just realized something. He said, "Our neighborhood is an ecology. We are part of it and so is our neighbor." That realization was what it took. We began to watch ourselves, how we responded to our neighbor. Were we apologizing for her? Perhaps we were not asking enough neighborliness of her?
Within the year, the city discovered that her house was not hooked up to the city sewer line and condemned the entire place. The following summer, my rose bushes near the bathroom of her house did not do so well. I realized that they had been feeding from all that moisture and fetid matter from her house. We really were all part of an interdependent ecology.
Palestine has to get its sewer hooked up to the community around it. It has to enforce its cease fire on its own people. It's tough, but I will tell you that when our neighbor moved out, we learned that she had quite a colorful past. She had a long sentence for a very serious crime. That news did not surprise us, not at all.
Palestine needs to negotiate with integrity and a willingness to enforce the peace it makes. It hides behind stone-throwers rather than take responsibility for what it does. Israel does not send civilians out to harass Palestinians. It has already abandoned some settlements in compliance with agreements to do so. Thus, Israel has proved that it will enforce its agreements on its own people. Palestine needs to either admit that it does not want peace or enforce settlements among its own. It could start by issuing apologies when its citizens violate agreements. And if Israelis violate agreements, then Israel should do the same.
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