AL QUDS: From Tel Aviv to the Gaza Strip, the mood these days is full of gloom as two peoples contemplate the future with anger, fear, uncertainty.

Israelis and Palestinians say that the fight-negotiate-fight scenario has gone on for 54 years and that nothing seems to have changed. But everything has changed.

Last month, the Arab League met in Beirut, Lebanon. It accepted a Saudi Arabian peace plan and turned the three no’s into three yes’s.

Even though the league put the onus on Israel, such an offering, designed on an exchange of land for peace, would have been heretical in the Arab world a generation ago.

“What’s different this time around is that for the first time in 50 years, there is a solution - almost everyone accepts two states, Israel and Palestine, side by side - and that is a vast difference,” said Judith Kipper, a Middle East specialist associated with the Council on Foreign Relations and the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC.

Most Israelis think Arafat is the same man who in 1982 said, “War is the only way.”

And most Palestinians think Sharon is the same man who in 1985 said the only thing Palestinians would get in exchange for peace was peace - but not one Israeli concession and not one inch of Israeli land.

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, in his address to the Israeli Knesset during his historic trip to Al Quds in 1977, said the biggest obstacle to peace was “the psychological barrier” of fear and distrust.

His presence in Israel took a giant step in breaking down that barrier, particularly among Israelis.

There are a few people who look through the gloom to see what Moshe Amirav calls “an unprecedented opportunity for resolving the Middle East conflict.”

It involves risk in exchange for potential reward, and for Israel, Amirav says, concessions that would mean abandoning some of the 140 Jewish settlements that house more than 100,000 Israelis and are at the heart of Israel’s insecurity and the Palestinians’ discontent —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times.