Friday, November 15, 2013

A Time of Hope

Before I start writing again about current events which I find truly disturbing I wanted to post something different, something from a time a decade ago when I had real hope. It was a time when many of us saw a brighter future for Israel, for the Arabs, for the Middle East, for the whole world. The Oslo Accords, now generally regarded as a failure, made us believe that peace, real peace, was possible. We could talk openly with Arabs about it and find common ground in our shared hope. It was a different time and, in many ways, it was a better time.

This video is the late Ofra Haza singing a song written especially for the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, where Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and then Foreign Minister Shimon Peres received their prizes. This is from the actual ceremony:



Both Yitzhak Rabin and Ofra Haza are long gone. So is the hope of those days. I hope I live to see that kind of hope again, but sadly it probably won't ever be because of a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs.