On Sunday, December 03, 2006, Israelis and Palestinians threatened to throw out a truce that had ended five months of violence. International diplomats as well as Israel and the Palestinians have been working literally for decades to try to bring about a lasting peace in the Middle East. Clearly, it is a difficult task. Eleanor Roosevelt, who spent most of her adult life working for the cause of world peace, recognized the difficulty of getting people to overcome their differences. Although she knew that real peace required the cooperation of nations, she also believed that peace required the efforts of individuals. She wrote in 1947:
“Peace has to begin within each individual’s heart and has to be lived by each of us every day.”
If Eleanor Roosevelt were alive today, she might argue that, in trying to bring about peace in the Middle East, we have relied too much on diplomacy and complicated agreements and not enough on the cooperation of individual human beings.
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