A couple of days ago Egypt’s former first lady appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
The full episode is available here.
Jehan Sadat was promoting her new book My Hope for Peace, and the interview wasn’t particularly hard-hitting. But what struck me was the simple clarity with which Jehan explained her late husband’s motive for pursuing peace:
He wanted to put an end to the bloodshed. He wanted to save his sons from being killed in the war. He thought: Who’s benefiting from this? Nobody. Nobody.
It’s a testament to Sadat’s courage and pragmatism that a group like Hamas still does not want to come to terms with this fundamental question: Is the empty bravado and relentless hard line worth the misery and death rained upon our populations? And it’s another testament to the impotence of Arab leaders that even today they still use the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the crutch to achieve cheap populism in the face of crippling inadequacy at home.
Be practical. Be pragmatic. And love your people.
(Image courtesy of Wikipedia)
It’s not the same for Palestine as it was for Egypt; we got all our land back, the Palestinians never will if they try to make peace with Israel, and with the current Israeli government it’s even less likely that Israel would even want to go for a two-state solution.
well, just as Bob Dylan cleverly said “Times are A-chagin”; the world keeps changing and nothing stays the same. Maybe when you look at Israel, you look at the elites who control the country. This ethnocentric look doesn’t actually say anything about Israel; just as the Israelis’ ethnocentric look towards Palestinians as terrorists and hate mongers doesn’t represent the true image of the Palestinians. To achieve everlasting peace, Israel and the Palestinians need to ignore their ethnocentric thinking and try understand, and possibly appreciate, each others’ societies, peoples, cultures, Ideologies, and religions; only then we can have peace.