There are sure signs that amid the continuing violence and bloodshed that moves are being made by both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to get back on the track of peace and settlement. Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz will hold talks with Palestinian officials next week. Higher up, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has also extended his hand, offering talks with his Palestinian counterpart Ahmed Qorei once he has consolidated his position. The announcements came after the Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon said hard-line security policies were backfiring. Indeed, the mission of civilian repression has deeply affected the Israeli military. Army morale has never been so low. Nothing it has done to defeat the intifada has worked.

In this atmosphere of discontent has emerged what is perhaps the best illustration of how the two sides can work together to achieve something positive. The Geneva agreement, an alternative to the US-led road map, was reached by prominent Palestinian and Israeli political and intellectual figures outside official channels. That two groups of Arabs and Israelis could get together and hammer out an agreement of this sort has delivered a powerful blow to the many spurious claims of the Israeli right. True, the agreement is not without shortcomings. The most salient is its failure to make explicit reference to the Palestinian right of return.

Perhaps its major strength is its symbolic value at a time when the agenda on the Palestinian-Israeli track has been commandeered by an extremist right-wing government in Israel that enjoys the unmitigated support of an equally conservative administration in the US. What it tells public opinion in Israel and the West is that, contrary to the claims of the Likud government, there is a Palestinian peace partner to talk to. It also conveys the message that the Israeli government’s campaign of death and destruction against the Palestinian people will never bring peace and security to the Israeli people, and that any aspiration can only be realized through the creation of an independent Palestinian state on all Palestinian territory occupied by Israel in 1967.

The momentum for change is slowly swinging toward peace. For example, Sharon, the Israeli Haaretz maintains, “has sufficient political strength and public support to carry out a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.” Palestinians, too, are keen on a negotiated truce: A recent poll showed 85 percent favored a mutual cessation of hostilities.

But in the absence of a negotiated settlement, 75 percent of Palestinians support suicide attacks inside Israel and even more back attacks on Jewish settlements. And should Sharon not withdraw, Haaretz says, he would “condemn all Gazans, Israelis and Palestinians alike, to ever more blood, pain, hatred and despair.”