A Way Out of the GAZA Crisis

[liberalpragmatist]

This is VERY interesting. Who knows if this might have worked. God knows, Hamas is not a "nice" organization, but I don't want to be naive; who knows how much power this Hamas representative had and whether it would have worked had the situation not escalated and extended to Lebanon. But it's sad that something potentially hopeful was swept up by events. Isn't that how it always is?

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D6B63C28-F631-4DA5-A76F-9014523ABCD6.htm

A way out of the Gaza crisis
By Arthur Neslen

"I'm talking to Hamas representatives every day," a weary sounding Menachem Froman told me by telephone from the West Bank settlement of Tekoa, where he lives and works as a rabbi. "We have had a lot of meetings and I have just spoken to an aide of my prime minister about this."

...

The day before the tanks rolled into Gaza, Froman had been due to launch an extraordinary peace initiative at a news conference in Jerusalem with Muhamed Abu Tir, the Hamas MP, Khaled Abu Arafa, the Palestinian minister for Jerusalem, and three Israeli rabbis.

The panel was to have made a collective call for the release of Corporal Gilad Shalit, the beginning of a process to release all Palestinian prisoners and the immediate start of negotiations with Hamas on the framework for a peace deal based on 1967 borders.

They would also have announced that Jewish and Muslim religious leaders could achieve peace where Israel's politicians had failed.

<cont>

[bunyip]

1. Politicians

don't gain as much by solving problems as they do by inflaming them.

That they can get away with it is a sad indictment of the rest of us.

I feel very sad after reading this article - so many basically decent people in the world, yet so few in positions of influence. :cry: