New Year peace prospects are looking good for Israelis and Palestinians, if only because they couldn't have started much worse. Eleven days and counting, limited strikes escalating into an all-out offensive with civilian death tolls rising faster than their military counterparts. While diplomats debate how to implement a short-term ceasefire in the region, long-term peace prospects may be receiving an unexpected extra-regional boost from what can be described, metaphorically, as "wedging" peace between two positions that have been joined at the hip for a half-century.
When Israel's two-eyes-for-an-eye security strategy resumed in Gaza in later December, protests erupted in Europe and elsewhere against its lopsided reaction to Hamas' ill-devised provocation. A large contingency of these protesters had ties to the region, but many who didn’t were simply appalled at the brandishing of the disproportionally big stick Israel has been bestowed. Lest we forget, the twentieth-century history of Jews in Europe is one of immemorial horrification, which makes the recent radical (though segmented) shift in sentiment display at the dawn of the twenty-first all the more shocking.
However, this sift can also be considered a wedge for peace insofar as it may represent a wider and wider realization that it is not necessarily anti-Semitic to be anti-Israeli, just like to be anti-Bush is (or was) not necessarily to be anti-American. No doubt there are conscious efforts on all sides to keep these positions inseparable having less to do with peace than with power, especially within the U.S. Nevertheless, the wedge between being anti-Semitic and being Anti-Israeli, which Israel itself is making wider by the day, could very well turn the tide of world opinion against it for good.
Whether or not this widening wedge will improve Mideast peace prospects from the outside in by balancing the backing of the current war's participants into a provisional stalemate then status quo then normalization and demilitarization is, of course, too soon to say-- not in any way barring much more pacific, constructive communication- and/or economically-based means to the same ends. But one way or another, it's current events creating the future.
