To drain the swamp in which al-Qaeda and other U.S. adversaries operate and make it harder for this nation’s foes in the Middle East “to speak above the heads” of moderate Arab leaders, Levy says, a way must be found to end Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territory.
December 18, 2007 7:17 pm Israeli-Palestinian conflictDeWayne Wickham, Linkage of two conflicts key to peace in Mideast, USATODAY.com, December 18, 2007
If Daniel Levy is right, the way out of the morass the Bush administration has stumbled into in the Middle East is through the Palestinian territory.
To drain the swamp in which al-Qaeda and other U.S. adversaries operate and make it harder for this nation’s foes in the Middle East “to speak above the heads” of moderate Arab leaders, Levy says, a way must be found to end Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territory.
The long-running struggle between Israel and the Palestinian people “is the mother-of-all grievances” for many in the Muslim world — and the United States’ backing of Israel is the root cause of the antagonism that many in the Muslin world harbor for this country, Levy argues.
He should know.
Levy is no backbencher when it comes to trying to find a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An Israeli citizen, he’s director of Prospects for Peace Initiative, a group based in Washington that seeks to bring “new think” to the quest for Middle East peace. Levy was an adviser to former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin, and a member of the negotiating team that tried to broker a peace agreement with the Palestinians in 2001.
New peace proposal
Last month, Levy helped draft an open letter from a bipartisan group of U.S. foreign policy experts to President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. It urged them to back a peace agreement that returns Israel to its 1967 borders and creates an independent Palestinian nation. It also called for Jerusalem, which both the Palestinians and Israelis claim, to serve as the capital of both states.