From fighting to 'friending': negotiations between their leaders have stalled, but young Israelis and Palestinians are talking peace on Facebook.

• Author: Bronner, Ethan
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

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Moad Arqoub, a Palestinian graduate student, was surfing Facebook recently when he came across a page he found fascinating--Israelis, Palestinians, and other Arabs were talking about all kinds of things: the prospects of peace, of course, but also soccer, photography, and music.

"I joined immediately because right now, without a peace process and with Israelis and Palestinians physically separated, it is really important for us to be interacting without barriers," Arqoub said at an outdoor cafe in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

It's been more than a year since Israeli and Palestinian leaders last sat down to negotiate the territorial and security issues that have put their people at odds for more than six decades. With the Arab Spring revolts destabilizing the entire Middle East, interaction between Israelis and Palestinians, who are separated by tightly guarded border fences that Israel erected to protect against terrorist attacks, has been increasingly limited.

So young people on both sides have begun reaching out virtually, at Facebook.com/yalaYL. (Yala means "let's go" in Arabic and the YL stands for young leaders.)

Uri Savir, a former peace negotiator for Israel, created the Facebook page, which he says has been averaging 300,000 page views a month since it launched in May.

"Today we have no brave leaders on either side, so I am turning to a new generation, the Tahrir Square and Facebook generation," says Savir. "My goal is to have 100,000 people working on Yala on joint projects that will lock our leaders into making peace."

A Long, Bitter Conflict

Much of the tension between Israelis and Palestinians can be traced back to the end of World War II and the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were killed in Europe. In 1947, a year before British rule over Palestine was set to end, the United Nations proposed dividing the area into an Arab state and a Jewish state. The Jews accepted the partition plan; the Arabs rejected it and attacked the new state of Israel when British forces withdrew in 1948.

Two decades of hostilities between Israel and its Arab neighbors culminated in the 1967 Six-Day War, with Israel capturing the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, the Caza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria. *

The Oslo Accords, signed by Israeli and Palestinian leaders on the White House lawn in 1993 in the presence of President Bill Clinton, laid out the framework for a peace...