One million voices

I’m a cynical bastard. It’s a self-defense mechanism I guess, a callus on the soul that treads a little softer on the daily carnage spewed out by the newsreel. I’ve long ago given up my belief in any kind of interventionist deity. History is manmade. Every individual, and every aggregate of individuals is driven by the will to live and, whenever possible, live better. That’s all there is to it.

At risk of oversimplifying matters, this, I believe, pretty much sums up the seemingly intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The winner takes all. Losing is not an option, and every inch given equals defeat, blasphemy. A “Thunderdome” fight to the death of sorts.

And yet, a little voice inside me begs to differ. We split the atom for crying out loud, and I look at this big map I have of this purported Holy land and think; “why, that’s a lot bigger than an atom. Or a whole bunch of atoms for that matter. Shouldn’t be rocket science to find some kind of agreement here, no?”

This little voice, the bird’s eye view of an inside outsider, would be a lonely voice indeed if I didn’t know that a whole bunch of people actually agree with this. Half a million to be exact. One Million Voices, a grassroots organization set up by Israeli and Palestinian citizens, eponymously aims to double that, leading up to a large-scale event on the 18th of October. This people’s summit, taking place simultaneously in Tel Aviv, Jericho, Ottawa, Washington, and London will formulate what opinion polls have been steadily showing for years; a majority of Palestinians and Israelis wants a two-state solution.

At the same time, it’s a deadline, a parallel thumbs down to the political leadership, local and international, and their top-down approach that has so far been unable to solve the riddle. People are fed up with waiting for the next American administration that will be more inclined this way or that, waiting until there’s a so-called partner for peace on the Palestinian side, a stable Israeli government, or a European Union with enough balls to help clean up this mess that in so many ways is a product of its own loony genocidal history.

“Imagine there’s no country,” John Lennon sang, “it isn’t hard to do.” Let’s imagine him for a second without the long hair and funny glasses, and imagine, in stead, two countries. Sure, it’s an awful small place to divide, but it’s the only reasonable conveyance away from all-out conflagration.

For forty years Israel has been calling all of Palestine Israel without bestowing Israeli rights on all who dwell within it. Palestinians call all of Israel Palestine. I’ve become almost cynical enough to stop caring about the semantics here. It’s the same frigging map, and no matter what, my words are bound to offend. Likewise, we can diplomatically nuance this thing to death and grind our wheels into the mud before we even get started.

Let’s all get out of the car and push. One Million Voices believes that the Arab Peace Initiative represents a credible opportunity to break the deadlock. So far 262,364 Israeli and 274,757 Palestinian citizens have signed up, in addition to nearly 12.000 international supporters.

Now, we can continue to be fixated by a man like Ahmadinejad who pretends to speak for the Palestinian cause to mask the fact that he’s unable to let Iranians live better. (It’s the economy, stupid.) We can fool ourselves to believe that the Christian right honestly champions the Zionist cause for any other reason than to usher in the Rapture, triggered, if possible, by the aforementioned nuclear Satan.

History is manmade, regardless of the fictions that motivate the gullible. It’s time for the silent majority to speak, and if this is truly an age of democracy, then history should be made by all of us, not the extremists, not the cowards, and certainly not the cynical.

It’s not rocket science. It’s not thát hard to imagine.