RANTIS, West Bank -- Palestinians Fahed Abu Elhaj and Saleh Balut walked down the street of this besieged town and cajoled residents to sign a petition calling on Palestinian and Israeli leaders to make peace. It was a hard sell.
"I'll sign, and what will happen in the meantime?" said Nasir Zaydan, 65. "They'll take more land and build more settlements."
Fahed Abu Elhaj, left, a Palestinian coordinator of the People's Voice petition drive in the West Bank, seeks support from a dubious Nasir Zaydan in the town of Rantis.
(John Ward Anderson -- The Washington Post)
|
|
On trendy, secular Shenkin Street in central Tel Aviv, Israeli signature collectors Judy Duaniss and Ofry Levy confronted similar problems with their countrymen.
"All the territories are ours!" diamond merchant Yossie Kube, 32, yelled at them. "The greater land of Israel!"
"I have sympathy for the Palestinian people," said Rona Hirschon, 60, an English teacher who refused to sign. "All they have to do is stop the terror."
For the People's Voice campaign, the past five months have been a long, hard slog. But despite the hardened attitudes on both sides, 113,000 Israelis and 65,000 Palestinians have signed petitions demanding that Jewish settlers get out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, that Palestinians give up their claim to the right to return to Israel and that the decades of hostilities between the two peoples be ended with the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
The unprecedented grass-roots campaign is running in parallel with another initiative -- the Geneva Accord, an unofficial, 9,930-word plan negotiated by current and former Israeli and Palestinian leaders -- to revive Israel's long-dormant peace camp.
The two initiatives have generated much debate for their willingness to tackle topics that are often ignored because they are divisive: Jewish settlements; the Palestinians' claim to a right of return to areas in Israel that they left in 1948; and the status of Jerusalem, which both peoples claim as their capital.
Many peace plans -- including the U.S.-backed "road map," which is now stalled -- have deferred negotiations on tough topics. But the Geneva Accord and the People's Voice campaign stress that those issues must be addressed upfront so both sides know what they would get for ending the conflict, in which more than 900 Israelis and 2,500 Palestinians have been killed since the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation began in September 2000.
Noting that under current demographic trends, Palestinians could soon outnumber Israelis, retired Maj. Gen. Ami Ayalon, the Israeli head of the People's Voice campaign, said, "We are trying to activate the Israeli audience to influence our administration to change the direction we are moving in now, because we understand that the status quo is leading us to a place that a majority of Israelis don't want to be, which is one political entity from Jordan to the sea, which is not a state for Jewish people, and this would be the end of Zionism."
Ayalon, a former head of Israel's Shin Bet security agency, initiated the petition drive with Sari Nusseibeh, president of Al-Quds University and a leading Palestinian advocate of negotiations.
The two peace plans, which were drafted independently, lay out what many analysts and moderates see as the inevitable solution if a Palestinian state and Israel are to live side by side in peace: Israel gives up most of its Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, except for a few large, well-established ones, for which Palestinians would be compensated with a land swap; the Palestinians give up their demand to return to lands they owned in Israel, with some type of compensation; and the two countries would share Jerusalem as their capitals.
The framers of the plans said they hope they will eventually be the basis for a comprehensive, final peace accord. Neither government has accepted either plan.
The two initiatives have created a stir that is putting intense pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to demonstrate a greater willingness to compromise. He has recently talked of unilateral concessions that could include the evacuation of some settlements, according to Israeli news reports.
