Thursday, February 17, 2011

Winds of Change

I have not posted anything in a while. I have been instead watching the forces for change stand still for many many months. Peace negotiations going no where. Pre-conditions about no pre conditions. Settlement issues vs whether Iran was indeed the most important consideration "this month" for what is truly needed for peace in the region.

But through it all there has been this feeling of having seen and heard it all before. Different actors and different scripts perhaps, but the players and the stalemate at the end has always been the same.

But there are beginning to be changes in the wind. Old vestiges of the status quo from the Indus to the Atlantic are changing the dynamics of the Middle East. The need for millions of people to be able to stand up and express their opinions, to hope for a better life, to be valued as human beings, to wish for a better future for their sons and daughters. This has swept the region like a dust storm from the desert. And no one has not felt its power.

Yet something even more unusual has come with this desire to live in dignity and prosperity. That is the desire to see others share in that same freedom. Perhaps not tomorrow, nor next week, nor even a year from now will all of this come to pass. But it has started. There is no turning back to what was before.

What has started in Tunisia, spread to Egypt, flickered in Libya and elsewhere will slowly gain fulfilment. And it will be the Arab in the street who wants to also see their fellow Arab live the promise of a full life everywhere, irregardless of the individual national will of their respective leadership.

It is not only the Palestinians who will benefit from this, but perhaps the people of all the Arab world. And the Muslim world.

This new way of thinking also will, I believe, begin to blur those long held dividing prejudices of country men and tribal loyalties. The boundaries that once separated peoples in search of jobs, educations and religious freedoms will also begin to fade away.

Thus the concept of a Hashemite Kingdom of Wadis Arabia, uniting peoples from all over the region is more within the realm of reality than it would have been just six weeks ago.

The idea of Jordanians, Palestinians, Saudis, Syrians, Druze, Christians, Egyptians, Lebanese and Iraqis sharing not just an area of land, but an ideal of how one should live among their fellow Arabs and Muslims to find self worth, prosperity, education, cultural fulfilment and the promise of a better life for their families and their descendants is no longer a fantasy stimulate debate, but a true ideal that not only can work, but should be given the chance to work.