israel and palestine

I read an interesting opinion piece in The Sunday Star-Ledger last week about the new policy Sharon is pushing. In hand with the traditional offer of "Give us land, we give you peace," Sharon is offering the Palestinians the deal "If you take our peace, we'll take your land."

The problem is that this is a game with nightmarish stakes for everyone, and I wish that something would happen to resolve the situation sensibly, but I have no idea what that would be. The hatred is deeply ingrained on both sides, ties into religious zeal and such a vested part of the culture that it would take tremendous effort to break away from it and make peace.

One might think that after nearly 40 years the young people at least would be able to look at the situation and say "These other people my age are not to blame for this situation; most of those who are to blame are already dead" and accept the status quo, but that remains difficult for many groups of people to do, especially where there is a strong sense of solidarity and national pride, just as many of my grandparents' generation still hate the Japanese for Pearl Harbor and just as many will grow up hating Muslims and Arabs because of 9-11.

Another point many are overlooking is that the land Israel is being pushed to "give back" is land that Israel won in the Six Days War, when it was attacked on all sides and drove back its attackers. I'm hard-pressed to think of examples where any other nation so attacked was then pressed to give back land it gained during the war, in exchange for peace.