Ma'an Hosts David HaIvri

David Ha'ivri, executive director of the Shomron Liaison Office, northern West Bank

Contrary to general perception, the American pressure to reach a peace agreement within a year is not only unhelpful but actually counterproductive. Peace is not made by negotiators; peace is made by neighbors. Twisting the arms of our leaders and forcing them to pose for a photo-op with President Obama will not make our people love each other any more.

These direct talks are really not about Israel and the Palestinian Authority and not even about Netanyahu and Abbas. This charade is all about Obama, who is losing popularity in both Muslim and Jewish support bases in America. The results of these direct talks are completely secondary to the main agenda of this event. America's unaccomplished president will have his prize as soon as he finishes posing with the two leaders and can hang that picture next to similar ones of Jimmy Carter and George Bush. He will then go down in photo history as the man who brought peace to the Middle East. That will complement the Nobel Peace Prize that he received with no effort.

Traveling 9,000 kilometers from the problem does not bring us any closer to the solution. True peace in the region will only emerge through local efforts based on local prescriptions. The Mideast is not the Midwest. The temperature and the temperament as well as the values of the Middle East can not be understood better in the luxurious air-conditioned halls of the American government in Washington, DC. If peace is the ultimate goal, talks in these circumstances will surely take us further from it; we see that both sides have become aggravated from the pressure and have acted like trapped animals looking for a way out.

Time has come for our peoples to develop our own brave leadership that will have the wisdom to say "thank you, but no thank you" to foreign powers which wish to impose their policies on our local issues. If we are ever to reach stable understandings, they will only come about through locally based leaders who can conduct themselves like grownups without babysitters. We are in no need of their timetables and frameworks. We will work out our differences at our own pace with our own local solutions that very well could be totally revolutionary to the Western concepts that they wish to force-feed us.

Here's an intro into Ma'an:

Launched in 2005, Ma'an News Agency (MNA) publishes news around the clock in Arabic and English, and is among the most browsed websites in the Palestinian territories, with over 3 million visits per month. Considered the main source of independent news from Palestine, MNA has become the first choice for online information for many Palestinians, and is also attracting a growing international readership and interest from prominent international news organizations and agencies.

Ma'an News Agency is an integral part of Ma'an Network, a non-profit media organization founded in 2002 to strengthen professional independent media in Palestine, build links between local, regional and international media, and consolidate freedom of expression and media pluralism as keys to promoting democracy and human rights. Ma'an Network is a partnership between independent journalists throughout Palestine, including nine local television stations and nine local radio stations. In addition to MNA, its activities include television, video, and radio production, and training courses for Palestinian journalists and media personnel.

Ma'an News Agency offers up-to-the-minute professional news reports for local, regional, and international readers, as well as feature stories, analysis, and opinion articles by a range of authors. Like Ma'an Network, MNA scrupulously maintains its editorial independence and aims to promote access to information, freedom of expression, press freedom, and media pluralism in Palestine. Through its English website, MNA strives to convey a multi-dimensional picture of life in Palestine to a global audience, and to provide a forum for Palestinians to address the international community.


Congrats, David.

The other participants were Maen Areikat, ambassador of the PLO General Delegation to Washington, DC; Ali Abunimah, journalist and co-founder of the Electronic Intifada website; and Debra DeLee, president of Americans for Peace Now in Washington, DC.


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