'First flicker of light at the edge of darkness'

Israel has gone on a major PR offensive.They talk nice shit now, but as history points out, it's just shit. Don't believe a n f'ing word they say. Period.

BTW, Western media is playing along with the Israeli song and dance. Remember all the stories of the Palestinians violating the ceasefire? The Palestinian attacks were in retaliation for the Israelis VIOLATING the ceasfire FIRST. Israelis break ceasefire .

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'First flicker of light at the edge of darkness'


Rory McCarthy
Tuesday November 28, 2006
The Guardian


Amos Oz, one of Israel's most prominent novelists, said it might be "the first flicker of light at the edge of the darkness". The ceasefire between the Israeli military and Palestinian fighters is only two days old, it only covers the Gaza Strip, not the still-occupied West Bank, and already it has been breached a number of times.
Yet some in Israel and among the Palestinians are hoping that the end to a particularly brutal round of violence, five months of clashes in Gaza that have claimed at least 380 lives, may be the beginning of a return to peace talks. If so, it would be the first time for major negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians in the six years since the start of the second intifada.

"Perhaps a change on both sides is occurring at present," said Oz, writing in yesterday's Yedioth Ahronoth, a popular Israeli newspaper. "The feeling of impasse and the fear of a vicious cycle apparently is shared by both sides." If the ceasefire was followed by other key steps it could be, he said, "the threshold of a new process".

Most Israelis and Palestinians understand, he said, what a future agreement would look like: two states on the 1967 borders with "reciprocal changes", two capitals in Jerusalem, no "right of return" but likewise the end of "most of the settlements" on the West Bank. But leaders on both sides have failed to move convincingly towards that future.

It may be that the arrival of George Bush in the region later this week has provided the final impetus. But the ceasefire, which began at dawn on Sunday, comes at a time when the leaders on either side need to reinvent themselves.

Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, has been desperate to recast himself since the Lebanon war damaged his government at home and brought a swift halt to his unilateral "convergence" plan to remove some West Bank settlements, consolidate others and draw up final borders. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president who appears to have orchestrated the ceasefire, is also trying to rebuild his position amid the surprise January election victory of the extremist Hamas movement. Hamas is struggling to run a government while still acting as a resistance movement.

The ceasefire and Mr Olmert's words yesterday suggest that negotiation has returned to replace the now discredited Israeli approach of unilateral actions. From positions of weakness, together the two men appear to want to work to strength through negotiated peace. But there are many sceptics. When the last ceasefire deal was struck in February last year, it unravelled as the months went by without any significant peace talks.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1958498,00.html