Daniel Lubetzky

The Daily Star wrote a compellingly sad editorial on how Hamas and Fatah are killing the Palestinian dream. Both have cared more about their power than the Palestinian cause, but it is not a balanced blame. 

Fatah is indeed embroiled in corruption and ineptitude because it lacks a system to give young emerging locally respected leaders representative power, but Hamas is the party that staged a coup and killed hundreds of Palestinians.  Hamas is the party whose "Foreign Minister", Mahmoud Al Zahar, recently said it alone was the representative of God on Earth. 

Under President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad, the West Bank is experiencing some level of development, growth, order, and an admirable push for transparency. Under Hamas, Gaza has become a Taliban-like enclave of terror against ordinary citizens, suppressing all freedoms according to Palestinians living there.

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Khaled Diab wrote a nice article about OneVoice‘s Imagine 2018 project, asking Palestinian and Israeli kids to visualize what their lives will look like in 10 years IF a peace agreement is achieved between Israel and Palestine.

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Today was a very bloody day in Gaza, yet the Western media barely reported it, partly because Hamas has blocked them out, so instead of redoubling efforts to cover things, many in the media just move on.  In the meantime, apparent infighting within Hamas is being blamed on Fatah sabotage, even though Fatah is pretty much inoperative in Gaza.  More alarmingly, Hamas rounded up hundreds of people, not just Fatah-aligned politicians, but also unaffiliated civil society groups.  People are terrified and have no recourse – or voice!

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James Montague from The Guardian newspaper just posted an article about Eytan Heller’s vision for Israel and Palestine to co-host the World Soccer Cup in 2018, an idea which so far has already spawned OneVoice’s Imagine 2018 Campaign.

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Two articles recently posted on PeaceWorks and OneVoice and our efforts…

JEWCY.COM: Peace Through Pesto: Daniel Lubetzky Schools Us on Building Bridges and Empowering Moderates,  by Helen Jupiter, July 11, 2008

and

JERUSALEM POST, Don Quixote comes to Israel, Jul 24, 2008, by Heather Robinson

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As painful as it is to bear this in mind, Shlomo Avineri agreed with the view that negotiating with Hezbollah to get the bodies of fallen soldiers in exchange for convicted terrorists, and creating an obsessive cry in the public arena for the release of Gilad Shalit at all costs only plays into Hamas’s hands and is against Israel’s interests.  It incentivizes extremism.  The logic may be cold, but it is logical:

Shalit’s return is not a primary strategic challenge for Israel.

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It is a sign of how messed up the region can get that Palestinians in Gaza were motivated to throw rockets at Israel to try to undo the cease-fire agreement, rekindle the fighting, ensure a continued closure of the borders, preventing imports and trade, and thereby keeping at artificially high levels the prices of seeds they had purchased to sell to farmers within Gaza.

I am not making this up.  Hamas, now motivated to keep the cease-fire, arrested Palestinian seed traders who had thrown rockets at Israel, and received their confessions.

Hamas continues to institute more draconian and totalitarian impositions on Palestinians living in Gaza, including heavy monitoring and filtering of internet and telephone communications.

Mainstream media is not reporting about this.

This article from the Christian Science Monitor summarizes pretty well the political developments that have for now kept the current Israeli parliamentary coalition afloat.

Instead of recriminations and fights for personal political advancement, for once these considerations were borne in mind:

…it’s not as if we don’t have a few other things to keep us busy… …Israel’s shaky truce with Hamas, which is just six days old and already being tested by militants who fired rockets into Israel Tuesday; possible negotiations with Hezbollah over Israel’s captured soldiers; indirect talks with Syria; and nuclear tensions with Iran.

…not to mention the little detail about Olmert’s commitment to achieve a framework agreement with Abbas within 2008.

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David Ricardo introduced the theory of "comparative advantage" – advising that each country has the ability to produce a good at lower cost, relative to other goods, compared to another country.

Ricardo’s theory advises countries to specialize in the production of goods and services they can produce most efficiently – or with lowest relative costs. 

Complementary Comparative Advantage involves identifying countries (or parties or companies) where each has a comparative advantage over complementary areas of production – so that partnering will bring both economic benefits. 

This was the language I used in my college thesis and law school work to explain the economics of peacemaking.

When we started PeaceWorks in 1993, we relied on this theory to encourage Israeli food manufacturers to purchase their olives from Palestinian growers, their sun-dried tomatoes from Turkish growers, and their glass jars from Egyptian manufacturers.

Another requirement of PeaceWorks is to ensure symmetry in economic relations, which is another prerequisite to ensuring or maximizing the chances of positive impact from economic cooperation.  Besides the agricultural field, where Israelis and Palestinians and other Arabs can make symmetrical contributions, other areas in the Middle East where there are symmetrical complementary comparative advantages include the textile sector, and the area of Dead Sea cosmetics, where we dabbled in 1993. Furniture (where Palestinian craftsmanship from Gaza has a lot to offer) is another area ripe for collaborative cooperation, as is construction, and of course tourism.  Business leaders like Dov Lautman have spearheaded cooperation in the textile industry between Israel and Jordan, between Israel and Egypt, and within Israel between Jews and Arabs cooperating side by side.

As my prior post notes, Zvi Schreiber has now also proven that even in the hi-tech world you can achieve worthwhile synergies between Israelis and Palestinians.