Monday, March 12, 2007

Face to face

In the editorial “Is The Tide Turning?” (The Jordan Times, March 4, 2007) it was suggested that “international powers might just be proving themselves big enough” for “constructive diplomacy”.

Yet one wonders how much longer citizens will remain dependent spectators to government professionals who prove themselves increasingly inept at anything but violence and capitalising on fear to maintain personal power.

In today’s near-absence of statesmanship and diplomacy, one wonders how much longer citizens will read these recycled headlines and continue to wake up each morning hoping that “things” will be different.

Is this not “the citizens’ century” when many of us, women and men, must be responsible for face-to-face meetings and listening?

Refusing to be enemies, must we citizens not finally transcend old-fashioned taboos and borders to discover for ourselves that “an enemy is one whose story we have not heard”?

When this face-to-face public peace process flowers and takes its place next to the government processes, then the tide will turn.

And it need not take as long as some people believe.

Libby Traubman, Len Traubman
Co-founders, Jewish-Palestinian Living Room Dialogue
California