Flavour of the month

Now there’s a surprise. Israeli and Palestinian authorities both find themselves in agreement. They seem in no way enamoured of Secretary Kerry’s latest peace plan which, considering all the care and pains taken to cobble it together, must represent something of a major let-down for its creators.

The trouble, as always, is that each side’s agenda here is so much at cross-purposes with the other’s that all attempts to resolve even the smallest matter of contention appear doomed to failure right from the very start.

Opposing narratives, mantras and expectations on both sides have maintained the status quo in being and magnified its corrosive effects over decades; the field strength of so much constant hostility has experienced no appreciable diminution at any time in every one of the last 65 or so years.

Then the absolute necessity must arrive when a sudden reversal in that field’s polarity is urgently warranted. And this should be initiated before its intensity is allowed to increase still further.

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In this instance, conventional wisdom is scattered to the four winds, the entire situation pulled inside-out and the net result would be an almost complete inversion of many long established attitudes and practices.

And if the current conflict could be so easily inverted, what do you suppose might be its most likely outcome? Thoroughly up-ending so complex a mechanism would soon see it halted in no uncertain manner.

So, in the probable event that Mr. Kerry’s new offering cannot dissuade these two sets of combatants from following their time-honoured tendency to automatically reject every peace proposal put to them, then why not simply make them an offer they can’t refuse?

It might actually play that much better than any of the somewhat anodyne and predictable notions presently disposed to be flavour of the month.

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