A ray of light

In one of the courses I'm teaching this term we just concluded a unit on the Arab-Israeli conflict. It was a lively discussion--as it almost always is with this group of students--full of quite sharp divisions on some points, which is natural enough given the subject. As I wrote there,

... I feel myself rather bleak about the situation. Assuming events in Iraq and Iran do not precipitate a wider conflagration which will subsume the Arab-Palestinian conflict--at the moment this seems to me the most likely eventuality--then Israel will complete its security wall which will work for the most part in keeping suicide bombers out. Palestinians will have a sort of state which will have none of the attributes of political stability or economic viability and all of the ingredients needed for a descent into its own miniature miasma of inter-communal violence, lawlessness and misery.

In other words I really don't see much chance for a peaceful settlement as such. My guess is that sooner not later there will be peace of a sort because the belligerents will be physically separated as the Israelis withdraw unilaterally subsequent to which, actually, as we are seeing in Gaza now, in parallel with, the nascent Palestinian state will violently and irrevocably collapse. But reading this article, 'A plea for peace from a bereaved parent', written by a Palestinian father mourning his ten-year old daughter, dead with a rubber bullet in her brain, causes a small ray of light to penetrate my dark pessimism. 'From small acorns mighty oaks grow.' May it be so.