JERUSALEM -- How many times were you late for an important meeting, because you couldn't find a place to park your car? Or gave up the idea of going to the city center, for the same reason? And how about the horrible experience of waiting patiently for someone to pull out, only to have a fascist cut in and grab your precious parking space, and then you realize how quickly you turn from a civilized person into a bloodthirsty brute? Not to mention the worst of all: You park illegally and, after a wonderful evening at the restaurant, you find out at midnight that your car has been towed away.
Believing that life is short, and therefore shouldn't be spoiled by such miserable experiences, I have developed my own method of parking, which I call TPP: Think-Positive Parking.
The method is simple to use. It always works (for me, at least), and it saves you from all those gloomy parking scenarios mentioned before. The idea is that from the beginning of your trip, you start telling yourself: ''I'm going to find a parking space.'' You repeat that with conviction. You drive away the defeatist thoughts. You start imagining how your parking space will look like, and then, the miracle happens: Suddenly, in the most unthinkable place, there it is, waiting only for you, your one and only parking space -- legal, long enough to park without bruising the neighboring cars (or worse, yours), and within a minute's walk from your destination.
Why am I telling you all this? Because of the Middle East Peace Conference scheduled for November in Washington, D.C. Everybody keeps predicting that it is going to fail, and I'm afraid that unfortunately, this is exactly what is going to happen. For peace, like parking, works only if you think positive.
That Khaled Mashal, the Syrian-based leader of the Hamas, should tell CNN that the conference is doomed to fail, comes as no surprise. This Palestinian terrorist organization, which took over Gaza, objects to the idea of a peace conference with Israel in the first place. For these people, Israel, or ''the Zionist entity,'' as they call it, should be destroyed. Period. What is there to negotiate about? Ways of carrying it out?
The Saudis also seem pessimistic about the conference, and this, for a change, is strange. After all, they were the ones who have initiated a comprehensive peace plan, which was later adopted by the Arab League. But now, when the time has come to test their ideas around the negotiation table, they suddenly get cold feet. It's like Yasser Arafat in Camp David in 2000: He was offered the moon by President Clinton and then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and at the last moment rejected it. These people don't seem to be able to even take Yes for an answer.
The immediate parties involved are grumpy as well. The Palestinians accuse Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of looking only for a photo opportunity, without ever intending to give anything concrete. The Israelis claim that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, even if he is sincere, can't deliver anything with half of his people defying his legitimacy. Even the ever-optimistic American hosts sound a bit hollow. The pundits remind us that President Bush has failed to invest in the conference the kind of conviction and energy that his father had put into the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991; and, of course, the president's detractors claim that anything he touches in the Middle East is bound to fail anyway.
This is not the way to hold a peace conference. Like in parking, if you anticipate failure, be sure you're heading toward it. If instead, all the people involved had only listened to me, they would have long embraced my method. After all, TPP can easily stand for Think-Positive Peacemaking. Everybody, then, beginning with myself, should start thinking about this conference in positive terms.
I'm sure the conference will be a great success. I'm confident that once the former enemies meet, they will all stand up to the historic occasion. I have no doubt on my mind that they will overcome the differences. I'm certain that at the end of the day in November, there lies our long-awaited peace.
This article was first published in The Miami Herald on September 28, 2007.
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The opinions expressed herein are the author's own personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect those of the Israel Democracy Institute.