A very final victory

Mr. Kerry’s original plans called for a nine month window in which to extract some sort of peace deal from a 66 year-old conflict whose roots go back as far as antiquity and maybe even earlier than that.

Too much of that American can-do spirit may have been a factor here and not enough appreciation of the tenacious grip that this Israeli-Palestinian struggle has had over a lifespan deemed to be one of the longest in modern history.

And yet some deliberate speed in the closure of this matter is understandable from every point of view.

Tens of thousands of lives have already been lost and how many more will succumb if this sorry saga is allowed to drag on much longer? Will only the very crack of doom itself provide the signal for its final dissolution?

We must realise that, in all the time this conflict has reigned over us, no breakthrough, no formula, no blueprint has ever been put forward or acted upon that was seriously expected to curtail activities and change mindsets so that peace stood a real chance of surviving the length of a single month, a week or even a day.

Has the problem grown too strong for us to challenge? Or are we all too weak to bring it down?

Have we let the situation get so out of hand that nothing now can stop it in its tracks?

If this should be the case, then what would be the harm in deploying that most potent of weapons in humanity’s vast and formidable armoury, the one that brings us all these troubles in the first place?

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Sometime we forget that we ourselves are the cutting edge when it comes to tomorrow’s victories. And victory over ourselves might easily prove to be the last one needed for a very long time to come.