Peace? Freedom?

Eminently achievable. With some qualification. Chiefly, offering unrestrained assurances of the same to one's antagonists. The Palestinians have the freedom to achieve peace for themselves, and with it stability and the conditions by which they may finally embark on the intermediate steps leading to statehood. That freedom was always theirs to use. It was spurned.

Their grievance at their storied victimhood always stood in the way of accepting reality.

Reality is the presence of the State of Israel. Reality was the initial opportunity to claim and to make for themselves the conditions by which they could establish their own recognized state, alongside that of Israel. Reality was the choice, instead, to enlarge the presence of their grievance, to rely on the international community's conscience to provide them, as refugees in their own land, with the wherewithal for existence.

Provisioning Palestinians with a generous stipend by which they were enabled to build civil structures, their homes, their places of worship, their schools and their hospitals. Pride in self-sufficiency? Victimhood and grievance simply took and continues to take, primacy. Their pride is in their suffering, their victimhood, the wrongs done them.

Their pride continues to demand sacrifices for Israel to make, to counter hurt feelings and outraged demands of compensatory regret.

In exchange the Palestinians embrace their tribal culture of having been wronged, and the intention to extract their revenge. A revenge that has taken many guises, not the least of which is the face turned to the international community of a wronged and victimized, vulnerably helpless population of refugees. Contrasted with their inner face of militant aggression against their 'occupier'.

The occupier-by-default would like nothing better than to sue for peace too long in the making, and too costly in human lives on both sides. The occupier should pledge to view its neighbours as equals in a near geography of mutually-agreed sharing. The grievers should pledge themselves to turning their dedicated faces of violent strife toward those of acceptance of reality.

Free will on each side should be exercised in the attainment of peace and security. Each should recognize the need of the other, and each should submit to the necessity of good faith and a dedication to the future availments of each. How much do the Palestinians yearn for peace? Enough to demand of their leaders that the time for bitter enmity has expired? Enough to denounce the violence of voice and intent?

Is each side prepared to counter the strident efforts of the fanatics' dedication to ongoing warfare for the opportunity to meet in an equal court of discourse and respect? From each there is a distinct lack of fundamental willingness to trust. Perhaps it is within the communities where trust can be found. And perhaps it is absent only among the leaderships on each side.

One thing; institutionalized fear, suspicion and hatred emanates from one side only. It is the Palestinians who have allowed themselves to be manipulated into the belief that their neighbours are intent on destroying their futures, and themselves alongside the future for their children. Israel has no such deliberate protocol of investing its people with fear and hatred.

The population of Israel fears those whose dedication to violence has wrought atrocities within their cities. The Palestinians fear those whose need to protect their population has caused them to be socially brutalized through the affronts to human dignity exemplified by physical partitions and check-points.

Is there the will to become neighbours in trust? With the will comes the way.