Trying to understand the Arab-Israeli conflict is like a rubix cube. You’d spend some time, occasionally hours trying to figure out how to get all those colors lined up. Finally, when you finally have one of the sides with the same colors, you’d realize you have many more to go, even though we know how the puzzle will end, with each of the colors matched up on their side properly. The same could be said about the conflict: We know the solution (two states for two peoples) and we know that we have sometimes matched up the sides, only to realize we didn’t solve the puzzle (Oslo Accords, the 2000 failed talks at Camp David).

            Today, we again talk about the peace process. Then, like clockwork, the media decides to focus on other things in the seeming hopes of deriding the goal of peace. When I got my magazines to read this past weekend, the cover of Time magazine caught my attention.

   I thought this doesn’t make sense. Israel, the country where it is written in the it’s declaration of independence that Israel extends “our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness?” Israel, the country which, despite wars in 1956, 1967, and 1973, always asked their neighbors for peace, only to read the Khartoum Resolution announce its famous three no’s: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it? Israel, the country which was able to achieve peace with Egypt and Jordan, that Israel does not want peace?

           After I read the article, Karl Vick makes more of an argument that Israel has been pursuing peace and that ISRAEL HAS A RIGHT TO BE SKEPTICAL considering the previous attempts for peace, chiefly the 2000 Camp David talks where Israel offered everything Palestinian leadership demanded, but left the negotiations without even a counter offer. The crux of the article was that Karl cited a statistic that peace in the Middle East was 5^th on a list of concerns Israelis have while Israeli Arabs have peace as first on their list. Does Karl think that Israeli’s should be walking around their entire existence thinking about peace? This will be a shock to Karl but Israelis, like everyone else, worry about other issues such as the economy, crime, poverty, and national security (all of those came ahead of peace in the poll Karl cites in the article). It makes sense that Israeli Arabs make it first on their list because they don’t want to be isolated from their fellow Arabs because they opted to be Israeli citizens.

           If there is anything we can learn from Karl’s article and the decision by the editors to make it the cover story with the wording they choose, is that they were more interested in selling a few more magazines for the shock value than writing an actual article. Hopefully, the news industry decides to print stories that could help contribute to the peace process instead of trying to derail it.