The question – from Gaza to Pristina – is whether peace arrives top down or bottom up, whether it's ordinary folk or diplomatic men in suits who do the business. And from an island of strife 45 long years ago is the beginning of a surprising answer. Can we find friendship and understanding between warring communities? Perhaps we can.

The presidents of Greek and Turkish Cyprus met again top down last week. It was the 19th encounter of this negotiating round, and the third stuck in argument over property rights to the land seized when the Turkish army invaded. These talks remain the best chance of settlement since inter-communal life first soured a decade before Ankara sent in its troops; but they lumber on. Finish as promised by Christmas 2008, chaps? Make that autumn 2009. You're still hopeful because the ordinary people want to draw a line under tragedy. But need it ever have come to this?

Martin Packard (Commander RN, retired) never believed in the inevitability of Cyprus partition. Through the first six months of 1964, for the British army and then for the UN, he led a tiny trouble-shooting team – a Greek, a Turk, two Brits – who believed that a countryside of split, frightened villages could live in harmony again. He drank endless coffees with village chiefs, he sorted out disputes, he liaised with both sets of Cypriot leaders who, in turn, liaised with each other through him.

And everyone knew he made a difference. Why else did the Foreign Office and the US state department contrive to send him home and close down his operation? “Very impressive, but you've got it all wrong, son,” one of the high priests of US foreign policy, George Ball, told him. “Hasn't anyone here told you that our objective here is partition, not reintegration?” The west didn't mind a divided Cyprus on Nato's eastern flank. The men at the very top were playing their own Bismarckian board games.

Packard has documented the story of those turbulent six months in a passionate new book, Getting It Wrong. But don't get too bogged down in the might-have-beens. The crux here is the way the straight-shooters sorted out trouble, face to face. The point is how – bottom-up – they made so many hopeful waves that the suits had to shut them down. Contact, communion, community, care.

Just look around today and wonder where those verities went, for lines are still being drawn on state department maps. Can Serbs and Albanians live together in Kosovo? Pass the pencil. Can Palestinians and Israelis coexist? Pass the cement mixer. The fundamental assumption, time and again, is that separation works. Keep two sides apart by building a wall – and you've taken the hard work out of the problem. Now we can let the diplomats loose...

But that's self-deluding. Distance and isolation equal indifference. The people of Gaza didn't have to live in southern Israel through the years of rocket attacks. The people of Israel clearly lacked all empathy for the retribution their army heaped on Gaza. Take a loyalty oath to despair. Once you assume that coexistence is impossible, life settles back into fearful enclaves – and fleeting hope arrives only from Washington.

Terrorism delivers beleaguerment. But let's be clear-headed. Israel, left to ineffectual chancelleries and retributive devices, makes no progress. Kosovo remains a disaster waiting to happen again. Peacekeepers merely freeze attitudes, they do not facilitate change.

The killing sprees in Cyprus didn't mean the island had to fall apart. That was ordained from afar. And if Cyprus somehow comes together again, that won't be because Barack Obama is dispatching more envoys. It will be because Cypriots on both sides demand it.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service