Young bloggers in the Middle East are talking to the ‘enemy,’ and possibly sowing the seeds of reform.

The New Arab Conversation

Bombs don’t discriminate between combatants and children. This sad fact became an inconvenient one last summer for Israel, which had maintained that its bombing of Lebanon was solely an attack on Hezbollah, the Shiite militia that had kidnapped two Israeli soldiers and menaced the Jewish state’s northern border. To an anxious Lebanese population who’d seen most of their country’s south reduced to a parking lot, Israel’s persistent message — We are doing this for your own good — rang increasingly hollow.

By the beginning of August, the French and American ambassadors to the United Nations had finally hammered out a cease-fire resolution. But as the Security Council prepared to vote, the Lebanese government and the Arab League declared that the agreement was too favorable to Israel. A tense and edgy delegation arrived in New York on August 8 to plead the Arab case.

http://www.cjr.org/feature/the_new_arab_conversation.php