This time, I simply copied it from the original (snipped) version posted in I/P a few days ago.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1118888333134Dialogue of the Deaf
by Judea Pearl
The age of terror, it seems, has sprouted an era of dialogue. A host of conferences meant to bring together East and West have been cropping up. There was World Economic Forum's recent Middle East regional summit in Jordan. A few weeks before the star-studded Mideast "Davos" conference, I had the opportunity to attend the similarly high level US-Islamic World Forum, held in Doha, Qatar.
snip
As a person sensitive to this issue, I was deeply impressed by the civility with which the issue was discussed...I was curious to find out what the participants had in mind when they pressed for "progress" on the Palestine issue: progress toward what?
Deep in my heart, I had hoped to find the Doha participants more accommodating of the so-called "two-state solution" and the road map leading to it. If this were not the case, I thought, then we were in big trouble again. Muslims might be nourishing a utopian dream that the US cannot deliver and, sooner or later, the whole dialogue process, and all the goodwill and reforms that depend on it, would blow up in the same conflagration that consumed the Oslo process.
snip
The author reports his disappointment at finding no accomodation for idea of Israel's existence, even in the context of this civil and intellectual meeting:
snip
This was somewhat disappointing to me, given the official Palestinian Authority endorsement of the road map. "Road map to what?" I thought, "to a Middle East without Israel?"...I discussed my disappointment with an Egyptian scholar renowned as a champion of liberalism in the Arab context. His answer was even more blunt: "The Jews should build themselves a Vatican," he said, "a spiritual center somewhere near Jerusalem. But there is no place for a Jewish state in Palestine, not even a national-Jewish state. The Jews were driven out 2,000 years ago, and that should be final, similar to the expulsion of the Moors from Spain 500 years ago."
The problem with Muslim elites could be seen again, even at the University of California at Irvine, where the Muslim Student Union organized a meeting entitled "A World Without Israel" - cut and dry. Also in May came a colorful radio confession by the editor of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Arabi Abd al-Halim Qandil: "Those who signed the Camp David agreement ... can simply piss on it and drink their own urine, because the Egyptian people will never recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli entity."
snip
One side dreams of a world without Israel, the other sees Israel as a major player in the democratization and economic development of the region. Will this clash of expectations burst into another round of bloodshed? My heart goes out to all the Europeans and Americans who believe they have found a spark of flexibility on Israel's legitimacy in the progressive Muslim camp. But looking ahead at the plentiful attempts to build bridges to the Muslim world, one wonders whether this outpouring of goodwill should not first be harnessed toward hammering out basic common goals and educational campaigns to promote them, rather than glossing over oceans of fundamental disagreement. Failure to address uncomfortable differences has a terrible way of extracting higher costs later on.
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The writer, Judea Pearl, is president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, an organization that promotes cross-cultural understanding named after his son, a Wall Street Journal reporter murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002.
***
Note, this is a long article and I've altered things here and there to accomodate DU copyright regulations.
It's cross posted with discussion here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=124x93832
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