Editor,

The condition of mutually enforcing bottom-up social development movements and enabling top-down laws, policies and treaties, assist ever more people and groups in coming together to achieve the change they seek.

It should be clear that if peace is to exist among humanity, it is reflected in local circumstances and local conditions. After all, we as people directly experience the degrees of peace in society, and we affect its presence by our individual and group behaviour.

For peace to thrive at the communal level, an age-old paradox needs to be reconciled, namely that the interests of both individuals and groups are not antagonistic, where one is achieved at the expense of the other, but instead are interwoven and satisfied through participatory planning methods and project implementation.

Can Israelis and Palestinians meet and together express what they must, acknowledge what they must and advance human development that enables not only Palestinian political but also economic independence?

Can neighbours who are not in conflict but nevertheless are not in communication meet together in a meaningful way to forge an action plan and thereby advance their local development?

True peace—the kind that steers our present and future and that responds to our hearts’ calling—therefore lies in the hands of all of us since its fruition requires actions at every societal level but which support local community control of projects intended to benefit them.

Moreover, and encouragingly, the goal of world peace can be operationalised, can have a budget, can have training workshops and has commenced. It now only requires a global rallying to support popular participation in the development that will change the lives of individuals and communities.

Dr. Yossef Ben-Meir,President of High Atlas Foundation, Morocco