111 Days to Go
Hope Springs Eternal

By Sherwin Pomerantz

With 111 days to go to the opening day of the United Nations General Assembly’s 2011 session in New York I received a lot of comments on yesterday’s piece calling for a face to face meeting between Netanyahu and Abbas.

Some of it was supportive and, of course, a good number of people felt that what I suggested simply had no purpose as there was nothing these people could say to each other.

Many people, both here and abroad, in defense of their position saying that we should not speak with Hamas until they agree to recognize Israel, said we simply had to be tough, stand on our principles and defend our position. Easy to say, of course, when there is no personal risk involved.

If the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians deteriorates further, the people who are at the highest risk are those of us living here. I believe, therefore, that it behoves us to try to move this forward and nothing moves forward without discussions. There is no question that Hamas is an obnoxious group bent on our destruction (and in this case “our” ultimately means Jews living abroad as well, although, hopefully, not for awhile longer). However, Arafat’s people also had a charter that refused to recognize Israel and were bent on our destruction but at the end of the day we sat down together and hammered out an agreement. In retrospect that may not have been such a great deal but we did sit down with them. That’s the difference between Rabin, for example, and Netanyahu. Rabin had more vision and knew that it was in our best interests to try to hammer out some diminution of the conflict even if it meant taking chances. We took those chances and the bet did not work so well, but there are odds in every decision.

I was also reminded by one of my readers of something former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson said on this topic when he was criticized for “wasting time negotiating with the enemy.” He famously said: "I'd rather Jaw, Jaw, Jaw than War, War, War" Truth be told, no one ever died at the negotiating table and nobody can argue with that.

One of my readers also felt that I am overly concerned about what will happen at the U.N. in September and, in his opinion, nothing will happen. Yet, it is clear to every thinking person that as time moves forward Israel indeed is becoming more and more isolated. A vote at the U.N. to support Palestinian statehood will only add to that isolation. Ergo my suggestion that we act to prevent it from happening.

Earlier today I issued an invitation to both Prime Minister Netanyahu and Palestinian President Abbas to come to our home for lunch on the upcoming holiday of Shavuot (i.e. June 8th) to break bread together in a social and non-political environment. The face of the “other” looks quite different when people are eating together. I have no idea whether either will accept (the odds are, of course, that they won’t). But wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing if they said yes and found that sitting at someone else’s table who is not a head of state, that at the end of the day we are dealing with real people with parents, children, and possibly grandchildren at whose joyous events we would all like to be present.

The 16th verse of the 26th chapter of the book of Devarim (Deuteronomy) states: “This day the Lord God commands you to do!” Is anybody listening? I hope so. Do we have a right not to listen? No, we do not!