ICYMI: For Israelis and Palestinians, Separation Is Dehumanizing – NYTimes.com

Interesting commentary on how Israelis and Palestinians have moved further apart by Ethan Bronner of the NYTimes:

Israelis — especially in the heartland around Tel Aviv, where two-thirds of the country lives — can now go weeks without laying eyes on a Palestinian or ever having to think about one. In Gaza, Israelis do not exist except in a kind of collective nightmare. In the West Bank, the Israelis are mostly settlers and soldiers. Apart from a few pockets of industry and shopping where Palestinians are employed, interaction is highly limited.

At the height of the peace efforts, in the 1990s, Israeli and Palestinian leaders, locked in rooms negotiating with one another, built a poignant bond and developed a form of trust that they then sought to spread — not always successfully — to their peoples.

Yossi Beilin, then an Israeli official, and Mahmoud Abbas, who went on to become the president of the Palestinian Authority, wrote a peace plan together. In the early 2000s, Sari Nusseibeh, a Palestinian official and intellectual, joined with Ami Ayalon, a former head of the Israeli Shin Bet security services, and gathered hundreds of thousands of Palestinian and Israeli signatures for a two-state solution. They traveled together for months. They got along famously.

The relationship between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Mr. Abbas is one of mutual loathing, according to Martin S. Indyk, who resigned last month as American envoy for peace negotiations after nine months of futile efforts. The two sides and their leaders have become total strangers. Each vilifies the other and imagines its own people to be morally superior, forced to defend itself against the cruel predations of the other.

A generation ago, there were plenty of causes for tension and concern. But Palestinians building what they hoped would become their state, and Israelis working with them, had an often moving sense of shared purpose. Some discovered that they liked one another and looked forward to working together. Today, those feelings are virtually dead. And while mixing the populations in those years was no panacea, divorcing them has only made things worse.

For Israelis and Palestinians, Separation Is Dehumanizing – NYTimes.com.