Word: intifadas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...first few months of the current intifada, it seemed possible to imagine the violence as an alarming interruption in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian peace process. But after eight months of bitter fighting that has left Israelis and Palestinians more intractably divided than ever, it appears that the peace process itself may have been a short-lived interim in an epic conflict...
...Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's political authority has derived, in large part, from his promise that the peace process would end Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza. But now that the intifada has eclipsed the peace process, his relevance is under threat. Already, a number of calls made by Arafat - under pressure from Washington - to curb Palestinian attacks have been ignored, even flouted, by his followers. Arafat may be politically unable to embrace a cease-fire if its terms make the sacrifices his intifada has demanded of ordinary Palestinians over the past eight months seem worthless. And while...
...have not only been ignored, they've been openly challenged. He may be reluctant to risk further diminishing his power by trying to rein in Palestinian militants in the absence of any tangible gains from the sacrifices ordinary Palestinians have been forced to make as a result of the intifada he initiated last October. So the Israelis have plenty of reason to ask just how the proposed cease-fire is going to stop Palestinian attacks...
...Both sides, then, may be more inclined to allow the conflict to simmer, in the hope that the process of attrition will wear down the other side. But that doesn't work for Israel's moderate Arab neighbors, for whom the ongoing intifada poses a domestic political crisis, nor for Washington, whose overriding concern is regional stability. And that may be what brought Peres to Washington this week. But while his discussions in Washington were over cease-fire terms - on the ground in Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza - nobody, right now, is talking seriously about peace...
...just in the ranks of his own movement that Arafat is facing an increasingly open challenge. Having roused the Palestinian street for an intifada that demanded they put their children and livelihoods on the line in the quest for a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, Arafat will struggle to persuade ordinary Palestinians that anything has been achieved that would warrant him calling off the uprising...