Plan for Arab-Israeli Reconciliation
The P.A.I.R. Initiative

We received many comments from those reading the PAIR Initiative. Most comments are favorable and encouraging, and they are very much appreciated. Others who liked the concept were ambivalent because they feared that it could not be achieved. A frequent reason for ambivalence argues that the Arabs, and the other countries, will never agree to anything like the PAIR Initiative. This is a serious concern of many people and could inhibit their willingness to actively support our program. This concern was touched on briefly in the PAIR Initiative, but it clearly needs to be addressed more fully at this time.

This response is in two parts - namely the general difficulty in introducing any positive changes in society and the more intense specific difficulty in introducing any societal change that would benefit the Jewish people.

1.  The general difficulty in introducing positive changes in society: 
Some critics of our plan accurately cite some of the obstacles that will confront  the PAIR Initiative’s adoption and implementation, and conclude that it is impossible of attainment. But history demonstrates that determination and persistence have time and again overcome strong, even overwhelming, entrenched opposition to progress, and have at last brought to pass what was once assumed to be impossible.

One example out of many is the woman’s suffrage movement in America. A century ago women were denied the right to vote. This obvious injustice against all women, black and white, rich and poor, was deeply entrenched in our society. One historian of the women’s suffrage movement has remarked that "Although Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton devoted 50 years to the woman's suffrage movement, neither lived to see women gain the right to vote. But their work and that of many other suffragists contributed to the ultimate passage of the 19th amendment in 1920." The struggle of the suffragettes was long and bitter and required well over fifty years of intense effort - even in a nation as relatively enlightened as America. Yet persistence in struggling for what is right, by peaceful means, ultimately paid off.

2 The specific difficulty in introducing any improvement in the lot of the Jewish people:
Achieving equal human rights is difficult enough, but achieving equal human rights for Jews is even more difficult, as history shows. But just as the difficulties faced by the Jewish people through the ages have been immense , so have their achievements, despite these obstacles, been remarkable. We need to be reminded of something that we already know but sometimes forget - and that is the achievement, in recent times, by the Zionist movement begun by Theodore Herzl.

For two millennia Jews were a dispersed, persecuted, vulnerable minority, with no army and no country. In 1897 Theodore Herzl, a journalist with limited resources, launched a movement to re-establish a Jewish State in the biblical homeland of the Jewish People,  after an absence of nearly 2,000 years.  It was an ‘impossible’ feat, never before accomplished in recorded history.  Yet fifty-one years later, in 1948, the modern, restored, State of Israel declared its independence.   And this independence was actually achieved, despite the loss of one third of all Jews in the Holocaust, despite the violent opposition of the Arab states, and even despite the sabotage of the Mandatory power, Britain, that had been entrusted by the League of Nations with responsibility for facilitating the building of the Jewish National Home. And sixty years later, the tiny nation of Israel has developed into a regional power with a modern economy and major achievements in the arts and sciences.  All this has been accomplished in spite of the multiple wars for survival forced on Israel, the continued active hostility of many nations, as well as the appeasement of Israel’s enemies by much of the Western world and even by Israel’s own misguided leaders.

Surely, if the Jewish people have been able to accomplish this much almost entirely on their own, how much more can be achieved by the combined efforts of Jews, Arabs, Muslims, and people of good will in the Western countries and throughout the world!

Established attitudes and entrenched interests typically resist change - all the more so in the Middle East, where murderous hatreds and an irreconcilable sense of extreme grievance now prevail. But we can respond to this hatred by persistence in telling the truth without fear or favor towards either side, and by promoting a "win-win" solution for both sides. We are in a battle of ideas, and while we do not have power on our side, we do have the better idea. There is already growing evidence in the responses that we have been receiving that many people will support our efforts if we but stand up and lead with confidence. We will never know what progress can be achieved unless we try. We must resist the attitude of defeatism.

Theodore Herzl stated in the foreword to his revolutionary book The Jewish State, "If you will it, then it is no legend." Some years later, another leading Jewish statesman, Chaim Weizmann, is said to have remarked, "The impossible always takes a little longer." Let us be inspired by their examples.