Please visit Edge.org when you can, if you don't already. It may be weeks or even months between visits there for me, but every encounter brings something eye-opening and important. Last week was no different.
In an article dated Jan. 27, 2009, Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges reported on the results of their research conducted from 2004-2008 with over 4000 Israelis and Palestinians. Here are a few bullets detailing their findings:
- across the political spectrum, almost everyone we surveyed rejected the initial solutions we offered—ideas that are accepted as common sense among most Westerners, like simply trading land for peace or accepting shared sovereignty over Jerusalem
- in general the greater the monetary incentive involved in the deal, the greater the disgust from respondents
- Palestinian hard-liners were more willing to consider recognizing the right of Israel to exist if the Israelis simply offered an official apology for Palestinian suffering in the 1948 war
- Israeli respondents said they could live with a partition of Jerusalem and borders very close to those that existed before the 1967 war if Hamas and the other major Palestinian groups explicitly recognized Israel’s right to exist
What good is land or money when you know your neighbor wants you dead? And how hard is it for one side to say "we're sorry, we shouldn't have done that 40 years ago," while the other simply needs to "explicitly recognize" the right to exist of the other people? Harder than it sounds, apparently, as current events in the Gaza Strip and West Bank testify to on a daily basis.
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