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Israelis & Palestinians: Parellel Restraint an Objective?

"...... expectations need to be lowered: there will be no handshakes on the White House lawn, talks at Camp David or shuttle diplomacy. The peace process, for so long the subject of so much attention, is gone. The best we can hope for is that negotiations will be replaced not by unilateralism but by a form of parallelism. For while the Israelis are choosing to pull up stakes and establish new borders, Hamas may forsake terrorism for a while so that it can focus on improving the lives of ordinary Palestinians and show that it can run a functioning government with a minimum of corruption. It may put forward a reasonable face of moderation to the world, a face of restraint, at least temporarily."

So writes James Rubin, former Under Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration in an opinion piece in The Times.

Rubin says that the objective ought to be to bring about "parellel restraint". That said, he analyses what now confronts Israelis and the Palestinians and suggests how each should proceed from here onwards. It's an interesting take!

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