The plan calls for an “interfaith dialogue process” to change mindsets by emphasizing the benefits of peace. This is a commitment to a grassroots approach to conflict resolution, recognizing that true peace, and the push for political leaders to take risks for peace, requires a bottom-up approach to support that peace process. And it implicitly acknowledges that the 20 years of intermittent armed conflict since the Israeli disengagement from Gaza are not proof that Palestinians and Israelis can never live side by side in peace, but rather evidence that building walls and cutting off contact between the two sides benefits neither. The paradox of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that for over 75 years the world has been unsuccessfully seeking a way to reconcile the interests of both peoples peacefully, while the answer has been staring us straight in the face.

Over the last 75 years, Israelis and Palestinians have been participants in one of the world’s largest and longest running social science experiments. The question: under what conditions can two people with competing claims on a land, best coexist? Group A, constituting about two million Palestinians,........

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