Deadly Israeli raid in Jenin in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian rockets fired at Israel from the Gaza Strip, Israeli retaliatory bombing raids, terrorist attack near a synagogue in an Israeli colonial territory in the eastern part of Jerusalem captured in 1967: returned within two days This conflict returned to its worst hours with the deaths of nine Palestinians and seven Israelis.
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The current escalation will only surprise those who insist on denying the reality of a deadly spiral. The extent of the violence has been worrying for weeks. In the occupied West Bank, the past 12 months have been the deadliest for Palestinians since the end of the second intifada in 2005. This dramatic assessment came before the rise to power of the right-most coalition in Israel’s history, headed by a far-right leader , a member of a formerly banned party, who entrusted the security portfolio.
In the face of this eruption of violence, calls for calm from foreign capitals, from Washington to Paris, are ringing out, no doubt because of their own emptiness. Because they are always accompanied by the invocation of the two-state solution, which they believe is the only one capable of one day putting an end to this apparent violence endless. Unfortunately, the possibility of a viable Palestine has long since evaporated, for lack of a modicum of trust, of which the two protagonists are now incapable, and for lack of a halt to the tirelessly gorging Israeli colonization of the West Bank on territory that should have constituted a Palestinian state.
Camp in denial
Nothing today is able to sustain the slightest hope. First in Israel, where society is divided on virtually everything but the Palestinian issue, and where prospects vacillate between maintaining an unstable status quo and outright annexing entire parts of the West Bank. Within the Palestinian Authority, the founding of the state is being robbed of its raison d’être. She is embodied by Mahmoud Abbas, 87, more powerless and discredited than ever among a people that see every day the slightest political horizon disappearing and in which the temptation to take up arms is gaining strength.
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Western supporters of the late peace process, who chose to camp in denial, can gauge the significance of their indifference by the new Israeli coalition’s determination to uphold “an exclusive and inalienable right over all parts of the Land of Israel.” , which in his view includes the occupied West Bank, and to encourage settlement there. The Arab regimes, which have spectacularly normalized their relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords without caring a second about the fate of the Palestinians, have also fueled the illusion of this status quo.
The latter will guarantee catastrophe as long as the connection between the occupation and the violence remains unrecognized, rather than being completely obscured by the inherently legitimate denunciation of the Palestinians’ resort to terrorism. Expected Monday and Tuesday in the region, United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken will have to take the measure of the impasse. If he sticks to the well-worn antiphons, his visit will be just another missed opportunity to break away from it.
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