The complete idiot’s guide to Mideast peace – part 266

Heading toward a renewal of the Gaza conflict? | The Times of Israel  ‘ ‘Two weeks after the fighting stopped, there’s been no progress in rehabilitating Gaza or resuming Israeli-PA talks. Abbas and Hamas are getting impatient’

In the end, where is all this going? Is it actually heading in any direction other than that of yet more conflict, more pain and suffering and for whatever the time it takes? And how long will that be? Decades have already been and gone, whole lifetimes lived, new generations have arrived and others departed. And still there is no viable peace agreement in sight, no expectation of final closure for a situation that has survived every attempt at any sort of permanent settlement for the past 66 years and more.

But, no matter who is more in the right or in the wrong here, nothing has fundamentally changed, and, until something does, no movement forward will be observed, no meeting of minds, no mutually agreed exit plan worked out that might one day resolve this entire business.

Unless some radically new element is introduced into so stubborn and volatile a dispute, nothing and no one is ever going to salvage the situation from the next Intifada, the next Operation Protective Edge and whatever other dire prospects are now waiting up ahead in the timeline.

The choice has ever been one of two options. To endure or to prevail. For 66 years, Israel has endured. But the other thing has yet to happen.

And how that might come about requires some serious lateral thinking on a scale far above and beyond that which has been the case thus far.

www.laxiankey.com  –  ‘ for those of us with better things to do.’

.             .