A Palestinian girl attends a soccer match near the West Bank city of Ramallah. (Haytham Othman, Maan Images)

There is no shortage of thorny problems needing solutions in the Middle East but few get the attention they deserve. The Arab-Israeli conflict understandably grabs most headlines, even though the attention is usually slanted and the reports are designed to generate sympathy for one side, Israel. When the interest deigns digging deeper into the condition of some of the victims, it is usually just another way to condescendingly blame the latter for bringing this unto themselves and for preferring to hate their enemy over loving their children. Sometimes reports go as far as decrying the state of, say, human rights in the Arab world. This allows for a necessary reprimand of Arab regimes in general, but also provides another rationale for why Arabs should really concentrate on their own development and leave Israel in peace, letting bygones be bygones.

It would be foolish to claim that the Arab-Israel conflict does not, directly or indirectly, influence decisions that ultimately affect the wellbeing of people. Until it is resolved in a just and comprehensive manner, life cannot improve for the people involved in it, and no amount of spin is going to change the fact that this is the most basic of existential issues.

The problem is that this is not the only problem or the only reason why the region has the potential to get a lot worse. Politicians, academics and media pundits have gotten accustomed to generalizations, rehashing the same old story lines and following preset terminology and language. Because of this short-sightedness, they are failing to see when Israel is wrong, failing to understand how its security is best served by resolving these issues and failing to recognize that issues much more important than Israel's security will be the headaches of the future.

The region stands at the edge of an existential precipice. It has a huge young population running out of options for education, employment or economic security, often denied the most basic of infrastructure (in terms of health, sanitation, water, transport, etc.) and turning increasingly to religiosity and idleness (a dangerous combination) with nothing better to do than watch a multitude of mind-numbing or indoctrinating satellite television channels. Still, political myopia continues to point to "progress" in the area and to frame the stakes in terms of what the US is trying to peddle. This month, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice informed the audience of Al-Arabiya television that the Bush administration had helped, among other things, to bring democracy to Iraq, sovereignty to Lebanon and women's liberation to Kuwait. Rice did not mention the appalling situation of Palestinians under siege, a condition that seems to have become a norm, or the human rights violations, to put it mildly, by several of its strongest allies (including the Saudi and Egyptian regimes).

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