Yes, that’s what happens when four generations of stateless refugees exist in dreadful conditions under foreign military occupation. No present-day hope is being offered them, so they live with the memory of a terrible injustice and the fantastic hope passed down to them from the generation that lost everything in 1948 to the next, and the next, and the next. Three generations of Palestinians who can’t remember and have never known any other existence but refugee camps and occupation have grown up with the original generation’s pain, anger, and dreams — because they have been given nothing else.

So when you write that “the majority of Palistinians are not ready to free themselves of the hope that someday they can defeat Israel and return to a state that they totally control and where the Jews have gone elsewhere,” my question to you is: What positive motivation or realistic possibility have they been given by the state of Israel to free themselves of that hope? What alternate vision has Israel committed to, that it can offer Palestinians in place of that hope?

Until that question can be answered in a productive way, nothing will change.

Rather I believe that they majority of Palistinians are not ready to free themselves of the hope that someday they can defeat Israel and return to a state that they totally control and where the Jews have gone elsewhere. Generations of Palistinians have been schooled on this idea and so they see their suffering as a down payment (investment) in an ultimate victory.

That is why Araft did not take the great deal offered to him and why each time we get close to a peaceful settlement we have a palistinians uprising. Arafat did not take the deal because he couldn’t . Had he done so he would have been assasinated.

Truth be told there was never stong support for peace within the Palistinians community only moving towards peace in ways that would limit their misery, but no final deal. Because making the final deal would require them to give up the dream.

There was a time in Israel when many believed they could defeat the Palistinains and that they would simply melt back into the rest of arab society and Isreal could expand its borders. Few believe that anymore. Israel is ready for peace.

Palistinains are not ready for peace, when they sit down at the dinner table they don’t think about two state solutions and peaceful co-existence. Their writers and thinkers are not discussing those options and their professors in the diaspora are not taking about a time when a Palsitinians state and the of Israel will co-exist. Until that begins to happen there will be no peace.

The quandry for Israel is whether peace is best achieved by tightening or loosening the control over the live of Palsitinains. That is the debate in Israelie society. Sadly, I believe that the debate in Palistinian society centers around whether it is better to particpate in the peace process as a tactic in the war of liberation or to reject that peace process.?