As the war in the Middle East faced another round of deadly escalation, the international negotiator Nomi Bar-Yaacov called on all sides in the conflict to stop and consider how “we got here.”
An Israeli citizen and associate fellow at the London-based think tank Chatham House, she didn’t hesitate to give her own answer.
“At the heart of this lies the right of the Palestinians to self-determination and to statehood,” Ms. Bar-Yaacov said, leading off a sometimes-edgy 40-minute panel discussion on the Middle East at the Athens Democracy Forum last week.
In recent days, the heightened confrontation between Israel and Iran has exacerbated fears in the region and globally about an even larger and more dangerous conflict.
And yet, the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict was what started the current war, just as it has other Middle East wars before it. And most of the panelists agreed that the most feasible path to peace would be the two-state solution that has been on and off the table since Israel was created.
“Nobody in 76 years has come up with a better idea,” said Roger Cohen, Paris bureau chief of The New York Times, who has reported frequently from the region.
But how to get the warring parties to this — or any consensus — is a challenge that has become more and more daunting ever since Hamas militants crossed the border from the Gaza Strip and went on a murderous rampage in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. That event, followed by Israel’s war in Gaza, its assassination of Hezbollah and Hamas leaders and its incursion into southern Lebanon, has only deepened the suffering on both sides of the conflict.
“It is very difficult when you are dealing with two traumatized peoples competing over their trauma,” said Steven Erlanger, the European diplomatic correspondent at The Times, who moderated the panel.
To get on a road toward a just and lasting peace, Israeli and Palestinian societies both need to prepare their people, and change their leaders, Ms. Bar-Yaacov said.
“After the horrors and unimaginable events of Oct. 7, it is very, very difficult for Israelis to understand how a Palestinian state will make them more secure,” she said. “Because if Israel is not convinced that a Palestinian state is in Israel’s national security interests, then we are going to have more and more cycles of war.”
But Ms. Bar-Yaacov also noted that neither the current government of Israel nor the current Palestinian leaders were capable of finding a peaceful solution to the conflict.
Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, a Kuwaiti American journalist of Palestinian descent, argued vehemently that the occupation and “dehumanization” of the Palestinians needed to be addressed now, before any two-state solution.
“Without accountability, peace is not possible,” he said. “Oppressed people, robbed of their human rights and dignity, will always resist. History teaches us this. The obscene impunity Israel enjoys” (he paused for applause from the audience) “makes all of us less safe.”
Mr. Shihab-Eldin argued that if Israel were to survive, it would have to change.
“The truth is Israel is not a democracy,” he said. “It has a right to exist but it does not have a right to exist the way it is existing.”
The United States, Israel’s major military and strategic ally, is to blame for not doing more to control Israel both in war and in peace, and specifically for not putting a stop to Jewish settlements on the West Bank, Ms. Bar-Yaacov said.
“We need to point out that the U.S. allowed settlements to expand and vetoed numerous [United Nations] resolutions that could have built trust,” she said. “I point to the United States because I point to states that consider themselves a role model.”
Mabel Lu Miao, secretary general of the Center for China and Globalization, noted that the powerlessness of U.N. resolutions on successive Middle East crises had undermined perceptions of democracy among many U.N. members. She proposed that China, a major trading partner for many countries in the Middle East, including Israel, could still play a role as a neutral mediator in the region.
Mr. Shihab-Eldin was more forceful in placing blame on the United States. “Let me be honest, and address the elephant in the room,” he said. “Without meaningful pressure from the United States on Israel, it is practically impossible to imagine a conversation about a cease-fire let alone peace.”
Mr. Cohen agreed that the United States and its allies had been unable to stem the violence that has spread from Gaza to Lebanon and now to Iran.
This is because other states were powerless to contain the “reverberations of the Oct. 7 attack,” he said. “The reverberations were too strong.”
Mr. Cohen, who reported on the immediate aftermath of the Hamas rampage, said the event had reawakened “a fundamental trauma” among Israelis and Jews around the world.
“In the post-Holocaust era, Jews tried relying on the kindness of strangers,” he said. “They are not going to do it again. Six million was enough. They will fight for their survival.”
“It is very important to understand the psychology, history and the different narratives” on both sides, Ms. Bar-Yaacov said. “You need to study, and understand, and respect. Both societies are deeply traumatized, and both societies feel very insecure.”
“Israelis and Palestinians have not reached that point where they are prepared to make the difficult, painful decision” to move toward peaceful coexistence, Mr. Cohen said.
“Compromise is painful.”
The post Seeking the Road to Peace in the Middle East appeared first on New York Times.
