NO NEWS IS BAD NEWS
'News' is, by definition, new. By that standard, very rarely does 'news' every come out of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Or at least that's the conclusion I've come to. Palestinian terrorist bombing kills innocent Israeli civilians. Outraged Israeli authorities respond by targetting terrorists and causing "collateral damage" or by closing the borders to all Palestinian workers. This provokes even more outrage and anger among the Palestinians. Young Palestinians who are not only pissed off but, due to the border closure, can not get to their jobs in Israel proper; they thus become pissed off young men with a lot of time on their hands. Etc, etc, etc. Really, hardly anything ever changes. It's the same cycle. The "leaders" on both sides always read from the same script. Only the names of the places targeted and the names and number of victims changes from incident to incident. It's an infernal cycle.

But worse, there is little hope of anything changing in the foreseable future. The only possiblity for real change is if both of two things occur...
1) Arab governments stopping the use of the problem as a smokescreen to deflect their domestic population's attention away from their own repression and corruption
2) A mass case of collective amnesia across Israeli and Palestinian socieities (or the arrival of the local equivalents to Mandela and DeKlerk or a mass uprising against the leaders who insist on brute force to solve problems, even though brute force hasn't fundamentally changed anything there in three decades)

Progress would require BOTH, not just one, of these things to happen. Sadly, neither seems likely, especially the first. And getting rid of the first is critical because it fans the flames of the second. I honestly believe that if the conflict were simply between the Israelis and Palestinians, free of outside pressure, that they'd come to an arrangement. Then, even if you get leaders who have the courage to take a gutsy stand, they risk getting assassinated by extremists in their own country like Rabin or Sadat.

Yet the area goes on and on with nothing really changing and innocents dying and the ordinary people just wanting to live regular lives but unable to because they are misled and betrayed by their so-called leaders, be they elected or self-appointed. Both extremes are convinced that it is the conciliators who are causing the problem; to them, their lack of success is not due to the failure of violence but due to the failure to use ENOUGH violence.

All this while most people just want to be able to travel to find a job without facing AK-47s pointed at them at a checkpoint or go to a restaurant with their family without being afraid a bomb will blow them to bits. It's really sad because most people, anywhere in the world, don't want.much more than that. If war is hell, then what does it say about the people who instigate war.