There’s a widely-circulating meme among well-intentioned but ultimately underinformed American liberals which posits that if only the Israelis and Palestinians would sit down at the negotiating table and talk things out, peace in the Middle East would eventually (quickly?) result.  I came across a typically infuriating example of this while clicking around WordPress.com’s tag surfer.  The thrust of Deke Rivers’ article is  that the Bush Administration needs to start playing the role of Honest Broker and engage in Serious Diplomacy in 2007.  He writes:

If we have learned nothing else from the Middle East over the past six decades, we should at least understand that military solutions are not the answer to long simmering problems in that region of the world.  The only route to a real lessening of tensions is a step-by-step political process where all sides have the opportunity to engage others with ideas and proposals.  The first step in any such process is to actually start talking.

Rivers is absolutely right about that, but only because it’s a gross oversimplification. Engaging your adversary in a conversation of ideas and proposals only works when the ideas and proposals that the two sides bring to the table have some common elements. In the case of Israel and the Palestinians, Israel’s proposal is to split the land into two separate states for two separate people, and the Hamas government’s proposal is to eliminate the Zionist Entity from the land altogether. Not much common ground there, alas. Many players have been putting a great deal of diplomatic pressure on the Hamas government to change that view (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi, Italy, Britain, the EU diplomatic machinery, the UN…), but after months and months of this, and after months and months of an economic boycott, Hamas refuses to so much as join a “National Unity” government with Mahmoud Abbas with a platform calling for talks based on a two-state solution.

But if only Israel and the Palestinians would sit down and talk…