If you were hoping to read an optimistic column, stop right now.
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Through calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, voices suggest that once the deaths have been counted, it will be necessary to outline some sort of plan for the future.
Impossible
In theory, any fair and lasting settlement requires the coexistence of two States.
No offense to those blinded by their passions, the Jews have the right to their State and their security.
The Palestinians too.
When two peoples love the same land, each has excellent historical arguments to make, and they are unwilling or unable to coexist within the same state, the only solution remaining is to divide that land in two.
We’re not getting out.
- Listen to Joseph Facal’s column via QUB radio :
To create two states, you must meet at least three conditions: a political will to achieve it, favorably disposed public opinion, and conditions on the ground which are not insurmountable obstacles.
Let’s take the last point.
A Palestinian state would be made up of Gaza, the West Bank, part of Jerusalem, and probably small pieces of territory resulting from an exchange.
There are already 465,000 Israelis established in the West Bank.
If they went to establish themselves in the heart of such a hostile territory, it is because they are the most radical. They have no, absolutely no intention of moving.
The political will on both sides is not there either.
The Netanyahu government sees a Palestinian state as a mortal and permanent danger, and within his coalition, the most radical want on the contrary to expand the size of Israel.
The opposition parties were also disillusioned. In any case, Israeli proportional voting makes coalition governments with factions opposed to compromise inevitable.
And how can we negotiate with Hamas, which does not want two states, aims for the complete destruction of Israel, and largely does not care about the Palestinians?
For him, they only serve to complicate Israeli military operations and provide dramatic images to the international media.
The Palestinians are also irremediably divided, to the point of having killed each other, between Hamas and Fatah which controls the West Bank, old, corrupt, without legitimacy, rejected by its own, clinging to power through intimidation.
Furthermore, both in Israel and in Palestinian society, the percentage of people who believe in the two-state solution has been in free fall for years. The page seems to have been turned.
AFP
Who?
Finally, international mediators are needed.
Biden, if he is re-elected, will have neither the desire nor the energy to invest. If Trump is elected, we forget about it.
China, Europe, Russia do not have sufficient influence in this region.
Arab countries have much more pressing internal problems, starting with their own extremists.
Iran is fueling the fire, aiming for long-term global Islamization.
Turn this around from all sides and as you wish, the best we can hope for will be lulls interspersed with outbreaks of violence.