By Rachelle Marshall Peace means nothing to us. We cannot taste it.
Arab blood is still cheap.
Arab land is still occupied. Accounts of Israel s relations with its Arab neighbors have since Israel s earliest existence suffered from a divergence between fact and fiction, with illusion often replacing reality. This gap was especially evident in recent news reports of the faltering peace process, which portrayed Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak as making honest efforts to reach agreement with Syria and the Palestinians, only to be rebuffed by the Syrians and met with inflexibility on the part of the Palestinians. Even more frustrating, from this perspective, is the negative reaction by Syria and Lebanon to Barak s decision to withdraw Israeli troops from Lebanon. The reality is that Israel has not yet demonstrated to any of the other parties to the conflict that it is committed to peace.