Hart Nat Hentoff David Horowitz Arianna Huffington Marianne Jennings Michael Kelly Mort Kondracke Ch. That's the Middle East. The peace process that has looked inevitable for a decade since the whole, arduous series of conferences began in Madrid back in 1991 now begins to look decidedly evitable. The Israelis and Palestinians find themselves at the end of the road, not sure whether it has led them to a new vista or another dead end.
Talk is almost always preferable to letting contentions stew.
The president is to be commended for getting the two sides together at the highest levels. At least, both Israel's Ehud Barak and a nascent Palestine's Yasser Arafat will have explored their differences, and will surely have been shown what bounties peace could bring. Yasser Arafat may be coming to Camp David expecting to hear not the Israelis' final offer but only the Israelis' latest final offer. Throughout every stage of this process, it is the Israelis who have had to make the tangible concessions, while the Palestinians need promise only a peace that somehow is never reflected in their words back home. On the contrary, there are times when the whole machinery of the developing Palestinian state seems enveloped in the kind of hate-speech that poisons the atmosphere, and the next generation.