Israelis and Palestinians: Can They Make Peace?^*

Abstract

In dealing with this problem, the future of which may determine the future of Israel, the Arab world, and peace in the Middle East, it is impossible to avoid a critical review of the past. Both Israelis and Palestinians conceive of the future in terms of ideas and concepts from the past, when the mutual ignorance of each other's realities and problems led to distorted images of each other's national aspirations. In debating a solution to the conflict, it is also necessary to strip from it the elements of propaganda which have brainwashed and poisoned the minds of both peoples to an extent where leaders and decision makers have become its prisoners and the its victims. A good example of this was former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir's famous saying that there is no such thing as a people and the PLO leaders' equation of Zionism with racism and imperialism. At the beginning of this century, Theodor Herzl issued a manifesto on the creation of a Jewish state. A short time thereafter, a Palestinian intellectual, Najib Azuri, wrote the first manifesto on Arab nationalism, which concentrated on the Palestinian question. Herzl predicted that within fifty years, a Jewish state would be a reality. Azuri predicted that within several decades, the Middle East would be the setting for a clash