President Victor E. Ferrall, Jr., welcomed Prof. Ashrawi at a reception in her honor. Bashar Qumseya'02 and Feras Qumseya'01, students from Beit-Sahour near Bethlehem, are at rear. On Making Peace There were many attempts at launching a peace process, some that worked for a while, others that didn t, but there was no real force for peace until we managed to . . . And peace never happens by default. Don t think that it will descend on you, because the impetus and the motivation for conflict are always much stronger and are self-perpetuating.
Any peace process has to have clearly defined objectives.
Peace means that you really have the courage to tackle the causes of the conflict, to address them, to disentangle them, and to solve them. We went through two or three American elections. This is the third. And our peace process was used either to support one candidate s chances or was put on hold pending the election campaigns. If all conditions were secure we wouldn t need a peace process.