These developments are important not only because they can affect the quality of life in the state that will eventually emerge from the negotiations, but also because in the present they give the negotiations themselves more vitality. These processes, obscure and humble in their ambitions, convey more hope for the peace process than the high-tension political distractions and diplomatic negotiations that are displayed so prominently in the press. Politicians, religious leaders, and even a king have recognized the forces demanding peace at last. The variety of informal Palestine negotiations just below the surface of the Middle-East diplomatic staging is telling us something about how the public conscience can penetrate the surface of statecraft. Careful consideration of the ways in which the people will be have to live with the fruits of diplomacy is becoming an element that strengthens diplomacy itself.
Peace proceeds by rising degrees of readiness.
More and more the process is involving popular needs at an early stage, and not just after the more conspicuous leaders have produced a deus ex machina. These negotiations, almost for the first time in such diplomatic festivals, are ready to incorporate consideration of the living realities of the new condition that is being created. Peace is more than the gradual removal of a threat of war. Going beyond even the restraint of military responses to spastic political gestures, it is a positive condition in its own right. It demands as many details of logistics and planning as the conduct of war itself.