Insights
Encountering peace: People of Israel – Wake Up!
A unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens – or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state.
A unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens – or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state.
Netanyahu has failed his state and his people. He has failed history. He had a chance, he could have done it. He decided to play petty politics.
Gershon Baskin says that trips by Israelis to Ramallah are needed to foster understanding after years of enforced separation that deepened the divide between the two peoples. There will never be peace in this land unless the people living on the land talk to each other and drop these walls of fear, animosity and hatred.
Israel has the ability to “cut to the chase” and to understand that in order to protect its own interests the best thing to do is to find the path toward agreement.
“The Negotiator” is not entirely reassuring when it comes to the larger peace process. “Look, Gershon, I will never recognize Israel or make peace with it,” one senior Hamas leader told Baskin. “Neither will my son. What my grandson will do, I do not know.” But Baskin insists on seeing a glimmer of hope in these words: “At least the door might open in two generations.”
The Palestinian Authority’s fiscal stability is already on the verge of collapse – a little push and it could easily go over the edge.
Gershon Baskin CEO of the Israel Palestine Research Centre [IPCRI] said that the security co-operation that has been occurring between Israel and the Palestinian security forces “will not continue if there’s no paradigm for a Palestinian state”
In January 2014 I drafted this document and shared it with the Israeli, Palestinian and US negotiators.