If you were hoping to read an optimistic column, stop now.
• Also read: Israel-Hamas conflict: Canada calls for a ceasefire
• Also read: UN General Assembly calls for “humanitarian ceasefire” in Gaza
With calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, there are voices suggesting that once the dead are counted, it will be necessary to draw up a plan for the future.
Impossible
In theory, any fair and lasting solution requires the coexistence of two states.
No offense to those blinded by their passions, Jews have the right to their state and their security.
Also the Palestinians.
When two peoples love the same country, both can make excellent historical arguments, and they are unwilling or unable to live together within the same state, the only solution is to divide that country into two parts.
We can't get out.
- Listen to Joseph Facal's column on QUB radio :
To create two states, at least three conditions must be met: the political will to achieve it, favorable public opinion, and local conditions that do not present insurmountable obstacles.
Let's take the last point.
A Palestinian state would consist of Gaza, the West Bank, part of Jerusalem and probably small territories resulting from an exchange.
There are already 465,000 Israelis living in the West Bank.
If they have settled in the heart of such a hostile territory, it is because they are the most radical. They have no intention of moving at all.
There is also no political will on both sides.
The Netanyahu government sees a Palestinian state as a deadly and permanent threat, and within his coalition the most radical forces, on the contrary, want to increase the size of Israel.
The opposition parties were also disillusioned. In any case, Israel's proportional representation system makes coalition governments with anti-compromise factions inevitable.
And how can we negotiate with Hamas, which does not want two states, seeks 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.
Palestinians are also irredeemably divided, to the point of mutual killings, between Hamas and Fatah, which controls the West Bank, old, corrupt, lacking legitimacy, rejected by its own ranks and clinging to power through intimidation.
Furthermore, in both Israel and Palestinian society, the proportion of people who believe in the two-state solution has been in free fall for years. The tide appears to have been turned.
AFP
WHO?
Finally, international mediators are needed.
If Biden is re-elected, he will have neither the desire nor the energy to invest. If Trump gets elected, we'll forget it.
China, Europe and Russia do not have sufficient influence in this region.
Arab countries have much more pressing internal problems, starting with their own extremists.
Iran is stoking the fire and seeking long-term global Islamization.
Turn the matter around from all sides, and as you wish, the best we wish for will be periods of calm punctuated by outbreaks of violence.