FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions

Question: How can you achieve your PAIR Initiative considering all the obstacles?

We received many comments from those reading the PAIR Initiative. Most comments are favorable and encouraging, and they are very much appreciated. Others who liked the concept were ambivalent because they feared that it could not be achieved. A frequent reason for ambivalence argues that the Arabs, and the other countries, will never agree. This is a serious concern of many people and could inhibit their willingness to actively support our program. This concern was touched on briefly in the PAIR Initiative but it clearly needs to be addressed more fully at this time.

This response is in two parts - namely the general difficulty in introducing any positive changes in society and the more intense specific difficulty in introducing any societal change that would benefit the Jewish People.

1. General difficulty in introducing positive changes in society: 
Some critics of our plan accurately cite some of the obstacles that will confront its implementation as if that proves it is impossible of attainment and stating that argument ends the discussion. That argument ignores history which shows that determination and persistence has, time and again, overcome strong opposition. One example out of many is the woman’s suffrage movement in America. A century ago women were denied the right to vote. This obvious injustice against all women, black and white, rich and poor, was deeply entrenched in our society. An excerpt from an internet search on women’s suffrage: “Although Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton devoted 50 years to the woman's suffrage movement, neither lived to see women gain the right to vote. But their work and that of many other suffragists contributed to the ultimate passage of the 19th amendment in 1920.” The struggle of the suffragettes was long and bitter and required well over fifty years of intense effort - even in a nation as relatively enlightened as America.

2. Specific difficulty in introducing any societal change that would benefit the Jewish People:
Achieving equal human rights is difficult enough, but achieving equal human rights for Jews is even more difficult, as history shows. But just as difficulties for Jews is usually greater than for non-Jews the achievements, despite the increased obstacles, is the more remarkable. We need to be reminded of something that we already know but sometimes forget - and that is the achievement, in recent times, by the Zionist movement begun by Theodore Herzl.

For two millennia Jews were a dispersed, persecuted, vulnerable, minority, with no army and no country. In 1897 Theodore Herzl, a journalist with limited resources, launched a movement to re-establish a Jewish State in the biblical homeland of the Jewish People, and after an absence of nearly 2,000 years. An ‘impossible’ feat never before accomplished in recorded history. Fifty-one years later in 1948 the modern, restored, State of Israel declared independence. This despite the loss of one third of all Jews in the Holocaust, despite the opposition of the Arab countries (who were receiving multiple sovereignties as a gift from the western powers) and the sabotage of the western nations including that of England and America. And fifty years later the tiny nation of Israel has developed into a regional power with a modern economy and major achievements in the arts and sciences. And all this despite multiple wars for survival, and the active opposition of many nations and even the internal sabotage by the fanatic Jewish fifth column on the extreme political left.

Established attitudes and entrenched interests typically resist change - all the more in the Middle East when intensified by murderous hatred and an irreconcilable sense of extreme grievance. It is our obligation and our right to tell the truth without fear or favor towards either side and to propose a win-win solution. If the other side refuses then the onus is theirs, not ours. We are in a battle of ideas and we have the better ideas. There is already growing evidence in the responses we are receiving that many people will support our efforts if we but stand up and lead with confidence. We will never know what progress can be achieved unless we try. We must resist the attitude of defeatism, and expressions of ghetto mentality, existing in much of the Jewish community. That attitude is certainly not part of the Jewish religion.