Five miles and a world apart: younger activists dream of a new peace process
Ms. Salman and Ms. Pundak are members of a younger generation of peacebuilders who want to be part of the dialogue about the “day after,” when the guns fall silent and Israelis and Palestinians are forced to grapple once again with how to live with each other. They acknowledge the obstacles to rearranging a diplomatic puzzle that has confounded world leaders and their envoys for decades. Even talk of peace in a time of scorched earth war can, they say, seem fanciful.
But Ms Pundak said: “It is crucial to have those conversations now because they will have an immediate impact on what happens in Gaza. The more civilians we kill in Gaza, the harder it will be to get anywhere.” She is the Israeli director of an organization, A Land for All, which has Israeli and Palestinian members.
Ms Salman, the co-director of another group, Combatants for Peace, agreed. “For Israelis, this is the first time they have felt the same pain as Palestinians since, I would say, the Holocaust,” she said. “This is a huge test of whether people are really committed.”
Her group recently brought together Israeli and Palestinian members for a meeting that she said was anguished but inspiring.
Under the terms of the two-state solution, Israelis and Palestinians would live in sovereign states, divided along Israel’s 1967 borders before it occupied the West Bank and Gaza. Previous attempts to reach an agreement have failed over disputes over the allocation of land to the Palestinians, a problem that has deepened as Jewish settlements have spread across the West Bank, as well as other issues.
What has changed since the Oslo Accords, both women said, is the viability of an agreement based on the principle of separation between Israelis and Palestinians. With nearly two million Palestinians living as citizens in Israel and more than 500,000 settlers carving up the West Bank, they said the two peoples were irrevocably intertwined, each clinging to a vision of a homeland on land which was claimed by both.
The answer, Ms. Pundak said, was neither a single state nor a simple division into two. Instead, it would be two states, united in a shared homeland. Her model is the European Union, which, she noted, consisted of countries like France and Germany, which had been at war with each other not long before the bloc began to unite.
“Eighty years ago, would you have expected German hipsters to live in France?” Mrs. Pundak said. “But they do.”
For such a confederation to function, both sides would have to accept conditions such as the free movement of Israelis and Palestinians, the settlement of refugee claims, and the authority of joint institutions to address issues of human rights, natural resources, and economic cooperation. Palestinians living in Israel would vote in the Palestinian elections; Israelis living in a future Palestine would vote in Israel.
Jerusalem would be a shared capital, she said, and the holy sites would be administered by an international authority that included religious representatives.