Israel's Future Tied to Land for Peace--not War

Jeffrey Sachs is a Columbia economist who in the early 1990’s was a key advisor to the Russian government. More recently, Sachs has called for massive aid to Africa, a strategy attacked here. Now, Sachs is criticizing both Israel and U.S. policy toward Israel. He believes that since the Six-Day War of 1967, there has been one realistic possibility for peace: Israel's return to its pre-1967 borders.

Instead, Sachs maintains:

• religious Israeli settlers and hard-line Israeli nationalists pushed Israel into a disastrous policy of creating and expanding settlements on Arab lands in the West Bank.

• even when the US or Israel have tabled peace offers, they have included convoluted ways to sustain the West Bank settlements and large settler populations.

• Islamic militants killed Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian peacemaker, while a Jewish militant killed Yitzhak Rabin, the would-be Israeli peacemaker. Violent extremists on both sides have ratcheted up their actions whenever the majority succeeded in getting closer to peace.