Commentary

Even before last fall's reboot of the peace process, Israeli and Palestinian headlines recycled variations on the theme, "What will happen when the talks fail?" Official spokespersons dutifully countered with optimistic clichés. But as the process drags along, on-the-ground skepticism remains.

West Bank Christian Daher Nasser expresses a widespread grassroots opinion: Governments don’t make peace, people do. Though surrounding Israeli settlements threaten to confiscate his family's land, he has invited Orthodox Jews from those same settlements for tea and sponsored soccer games between Palestinian and Israeli children. A stone at the farm’s entrance bears the painted slogan, "We refuse to be enemies," even though Israelis have bulldozed hundreds of his olive trees. His response? Plant hundreds more.

But can isolated acts of nonviolence create lasting peace? After an East Jerusalem screening of the documentary film Budrus, one of the producers, Rula Salameh, acknowledged that localized successes of Palestinian nonviolence have yet to coalesce into a comprehensive, disciplined movement. Though demonstrations have been successful at altering the path of the Israeli "separation barrier," sometimes organizers cannot prevent youths from throwing stones. Salameh and others confirm that many older Palestinians who've "paid the price" for participating in past violence admit that such methods harmed all sides, and that nonviolence is a better way.

Back in the Clinton era, Congress and regulators shredded many of the ground rules that had been keeping our financial system working safely since the Great Depression. The people making the big money (and creating the toxic assets) set themselves and their cronies up as the "experts" and told the rest of us not to worry our pretty little heads about it.

The crash of 2008 made it painfully clear it was time to stop letting Wall Street make up the rules. Last June, Congress passed, and President Obama signed into law, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. In addition to creating the much-needed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the act contains reforms that can head off future crashes. But, to put that law into action, various agencies have to write ground-level regulations and definitions.

How these rules get written can make Dodd-Frank either an effective, strong law or—if Wall Street’s swarm of lobbyists gets its way—a washed-out shell. "The number of people that have come in requesting to be exempt from the law, or to have the law delayed, has literally shocked me," a Commodity Futures Trading Commission official told Bloomberg News.

If the love of money is the root of all evil, let's just say the devil is trying to get into the details.