I have seen for the first time in 100 years of conflict, the two peoples - the Israeli people and the Palestinian people - are ahead of their leaderships.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
It's for the Palestinians to decide who will lead them.
It's remarkable that the failures of the Obama, Clinton, Kerry foreign policy are not only uniting the Left and Right in Israel but might even be creating some common ground between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
For a good chunk of Israelis, it doesn't matter who is in power when it comes to dealing with the Palestinians. Their focus was more on economic issues.
The Israeli government has proved over the past year its commitment to peace, both in words and deeds. By contrast, the Palestinians are posing preconditions for renewing the diplomatic process in a way they have not done over the course of 16 years.
When all is said and done, it looks like the Palestinians have been massively robbed and abused, and are engaged in a desperate struggle for survival and liberation. Israel, on the other hand, would appear to be conducting an imperialistic campaign of oppression supported and substantially armed by the most powerful nation on earth.
Israel, an embattled democracy, has been fighting terrorism for over 100 years.
The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.
The U.S. and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians, just slaughtering them, for years. Robbing them and slaughtering them.
The increasing mistrust between the Arab-Muslim peoples and the western world is rooted in the conflict in Palestine.
My friends, there is no Palestinian-Israeli conflict. There is only the global war on terrorism.