Sep 10 The Middle East-Getting Ready to Fail Again?

The Middle Peace Talks begin again!Ho Hum seems to be the headline it is getting here in Washington. Time magazine comes out with a daisy chain  Star of David cover with the provocation-”Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace.” and its sister, Newsweek is a little less obvious with a picture of Netanyahu Senior with his Prime Minister son, and the heading, “The Unlikely Peacemaker-Netanyahu says he’ll ‘surprise the critics and skeptics,’ Really?”One would expect a cool assessment of the chances this time round, but why the mocking? the scorn almost!  George Will and Charles Krauthammer seem to be tag teaming for Israel this past month, using every column inch they get in the Washington Post to tell us that only one side is virtuous and genuine and when talks fail, be sure to know who to blame.  Palestinian commentators are doing the same for their side, laying the grounds for Abbas to withdraw if Israel  dares to lift the settlement moratorium. No one is even imagining what success might look like or what difference it might make.These are all the telltale  signs of a diseased story system, where the players have only learned to tell stories of the problems, not the possibilities.  They would rather reinvent failure then become the heroes for peace.  And the media critics are salivating with the prospect of another doomed peace initiative, writing them off before they are even on.  Talk about a story getting way too ahead of itself.It reminds me of when I was a kid,  watching a fierce rubgy international between Wales and Australia where one of the Welsh forwards was sent off early for punching his Aussie opponent and breaking his jaw. He was sent home to Cardiff in disgrace and when reporters asked him why he did it, he simply said,’Well, You know these Australians.  I decided to retaliate first!”If the history of peace negotiations since Oslo are littered with failed attempts, and this new series of negotiations are seen as one more chapter in the same sorry saga, then we are condemning it to the dustbin of history before anything has had a chance to begin.  As negotiator Senator Mitchell likes to point out, the Northern Ireland negotiations took 800 days of failure to get to that one day of breakthrough.So, as peace talks continue next week in the region, we need to innoculate ourselves from this “predictable story of failure” and restory it to mean, you only fail when you try, so someone is clearly trying, and as Newt Gingrich was fond of quoting, “Try again. Fail again.  Fail better.” There is a generation of young Palestinian and Israelis out there who will not forgive failure, because its they whose  future is most in jeopardy.