Peace in the Middle East: A Marketing Proposal

NY PR-style

I think we would have a very rapid peaceful resolution of the war between Israel and Palestine. I think the solution lies in marketing.

Taking a page from Gandhi I think the Palestinians need to appeal to the world's sympathy over the Israeli hard-line Zionists.

Specifically, I think the Palestinians should wear yellow Stars of David and I think they should tattoo themselves with serial numbers.

Then I think they should just sit or lie peacefully in the middle of all the roads into the West Bank and Gaza Strip and draw those little white chalk outlines around themselves and blank ones that represent the losses the Palestinians have lost over the years.

They should invite all the world's cameras and just be patient. They should stop the violence for it doesn't play well in the western markets and that is where they need minds to change. The violence only appeals to the Arab and the hard-line Zionist camps.

The point of the Star of David and the serial number tattoos is to point out that the Palestinians are living an apartheid existence in scraps of land behind fences with little hope. With the demeaning working permits and tracking of Palestinian males it is similar to any of the previous mass-tracking and corralling of human beings.

Some might be offended by the self-use of Nazi techniques to draw attention to the Palestinian side of the problem. But I think it is necessary to avoid further bloodshed. The 1993 Oslo accords that the Palestinians turned down were flawed in that they still allowed the Israelis to practice horizontal aquifer draining that aggressively destroys the Palestinians from being able to practice sustainable agriculture as well as did not do enough to curb the issue of the invasive settlements.

Most people do not realize that the Oslo accords were flawed, in fact many people do not know that the Clinton administration and the Israelis discussed the Oslo accords and negotiated between each other in secret for 9 months, and then gave Arafat just 8 days to accept or reject — no negotiation allowed.

So I think it will take the strongest of all possible non-violent, peaceful protests for the Palestinians to get enough leverage and power for them to negotiate a two-state solution that they can live with for the long term.

What do you think?