“I have no other solution,” he retorted. I had just asked him whether he still believed in the coexistence of Israel and a future Palestine, and this former Palestinian minister, a veteran of peace talks, quickly brought the discussion to a close, annoyed that such questions could still be asked.
He was there last Friday at the event on the two-state solution organised by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs because we must hammer home, come hell or high water, bombs or missiles, that peace necessarily requires mutual recognition of Palestine and Israel – because otherwise what else?
The Palestinians will throw the Israelis into the sea?
The Israelis expel the Palestinians to Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan?
One of these two peoples massacres the other to the last man in what would indeed be genocide?
Fortunately, none of these scenarios is credible. All would be abhorrent, and whilst the idea of a binational state may seem appealing, it is simply unrealistic, since the Palestinians are just as committed to a nation state as the Israelis.
The two-state solution is the only one. There is no other, and this is the primary reason why it is resurfacing today, far too slowly but surely. Hamas had thought it had torpedoed it with 7 October. The Israeli right and far right had hoped to make people forget even the possibility of it by crushing Gaza under bombs and terrorising the West Bank, but nothing worked.
This solution, which so few people were still willing to believe in just a short while ago, is now bringing together new Israeli and Palestinian peace activists. With France leading the way, more and more states are putting it back on the agenda, and the second reason why we are witnessing this rebirth of a utopia today is that barbarism has led only to a dead end.
The massacre orchestrated by Hamas has given neither strength nor momentum to the Palestinian national movement. Quite the contrary: it has plunged hundreds of thousands of families into the despair of unspeakable horror. And on the other side, what is the outcome for Benjamin Netanyahu?
He had believed he could use 7 October to eliminate Hamas once and for all, regain control of Gaza, defeat Iran’s allies and topple its regime; yet Hamas and Hezbollah have survived even though they were weakened. This war, which Donald Trump had believed he could win with a single strike, has not brought down the Iranian regime, and Israel’s international image has been severely tarnished.
Benjamin Netanyahu has not proved a better strategist than Hamas, and what can Israel now do with the forgotten Gazans, stripped of everything, in a field of ruins overrun by rats? Could he really turn them into maids and lifeguards on Donald Trump’s Riviera? The answer is obvious. And what can the Israeli far-right terrorists do with the West Bank farmers they so desperately wish to drive from their lands?
They haven’t the faintest idea, and so, with blood on their hands, the false shepherds of these two peoples have nothing left to offer them. They are now nothing more than a bankrupt community, whilst the Israeli and Palestinian elections in the coming months will bring new leaders to power who will have to face the failure of extremism and seek a way out by soon attempting to reopen the paths to peace.
Israelis and Palestinians, the men and women of good will whom France has just brought together under the slogan ‘Two peoples, two states, one future’ are today but a handful of utopians, but realism is on their side. It is they who must be encouraged. It is they who must be granted international support, and first and foremost European support, because Europe is Israel’s leading trading partner and the Palestinian Authority’s main financial backer.
Photo: Musa Alzanoun @Pexels
