Arab acceptance of Israel will be difficult to achieve.

Submitted by Albert Fresco (United States), Mar 25, 2006 at 23:50

I agree with your premise that it is necessary for the majority of Palestinians to accept the existence of Israel before there can be a real peace. Unfortunately, I do not see any way to achieve this objective within the foreseeable future.

I am a Jew who was born and lived in Egypt for 18 years. Our family had Egyptian nationality, but that did not stop the Egyptian government from confiscating our considerable property and forcing us to leave after the 1956 war. We resettled in the US in 1962 and have lived here ever since. Within the last 6 years, I have regained contact with several of my Egyptian Muslim friends from an English high school we attended in Cairo and have had several discussions about the Arab-Israeli conflict. These people are highly educated, very cosmopolitan (many of them having lived in Europe or the US most of their lives before returning to Egypt) and constitute the elite of Egyptian society.

I found them rabidly anti-Zionist and primarily concerned with trying to reverse the "catastrophe" that befell the Arab world in 1948. Their most benign future vision of peace is the establishment of an Arab Palestine in which some native Jews would be allowed to live. These leaders are the ones who must first be made to see a benefit in accepting Israel before the masses can be converted.

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