In her fourth visit to Israel this year, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has still not laid out a detailed plan to help put an end to the lengthy conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians. The only (vague) solution she has offered is to call for a “strategic dialogue” between leaders of both parties. But what is lacking in Rice’s promotion of peaceful democracy in the Middle East is that it fails to recognize the needs of the very people it is meant to help.
As the actor and Boston University alumnus Jason Alexander put it recently in a CNN interview, “The moderate voices are by far and away the vast majority on both sides [of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] … They already acknowledge there is a two-state solution here, and they pretty much know the path to get there. What they don’t believe anymore, they don’t believe they really have a partner to negotiate with on the other side.”
The majority of Israelis and Palestinians are suffering because of the much fewer – but much more dominating – extremists on both sides who seem ready to terrorize others no matter how close both sides come to signing a peace deal.
Alexander, together with the One Voice Foundation, has proposed introducing a way for the people – rather than politicians – to decide how best to resolve the issue by using a method the U.S. government has not yet come up with: a referendum for a peace agreement.
The plan, which has been called a “public negotiation platform” that aims to satisfy the majority of people on both sides, is expected to take up to four years, and conclude only after a series of amendments is finally agreed upon by the people.
For now, the extremists are winning because the people have never been so directly involved in the peace negotiations. “They don’t trust politicians … and now they don’t trust negotiating partners. So, the extremists have had an open playing field and have pretty much blurred what’s going on,” Alexander said in the interview.
A lack of thinking beyond the border, which Rice displayed on her short visit to Jerusalem, is not the type of thinking the U.S. needs to improve its image – and even better, put an end to the crisis – in the Middle East.
Even if Rice’s visit to Israel was purely for public relations purposes, failing to set forth a detailed agenda is not going to help America’s already deteriorating image in that part of the world.
Rice needs to put an end to her abracadabra solution to the conflict, and bring into the spectrum some real ideas instead.
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