Palestine: any room for hope?

The new American peace plan for the Middle East is a slap in the face of the Palestinians, an insult to international law and a return to the framework of the Balfour Declaration, but in a much more offensive and assertive manner. It’s the peace of the looters. The peace of those who have battered their adversary, and who keep on beating him up so they can take away the only thing he was still holding on to: hope. History will remember it as the time when the most powerful nation in the world torpedoed the foundations of international law with the tacit consent of the world. But once this is said and done, what is left? Once the defeated have nothing but tears to shed, how can they still fend for themselves?

The surreal scene last week when Donald Trump announced his famous "deal of the century" alongside Benjamin Netanyahu, could actually have been comical. Everything about it was grotesque, beginning with the American president’s speech, to that of his Israeli ally, ending with the applause of an audience won over by this union of evangelists and ultra Zionists. But if neither the Palestinians nor their supporters were in the mood to laugh at this spectacle, it is because the plan hurts where it is the most painful. It does not institute a new reality, but merely confirms one which has been imposed by force. By doing so, this plan will put to end a decades-long illusion that very few believed in, but that no one dared to question, for lack of a better alternative aimed at preserving some type of status quo.

More than 25 years later, the Trump plan has at the very least the merit of telling the truth, if not stating the obvious. Oslo is dead. The two-state solution -as it was presented at the time- is equally so. Just like the 2002 Arab peace initiative, which promised the Palestinians strong and united diplomatic support. The Israeli colonization, the war in Iraq, the Arab Spring, the war in Syria, the Iranian nuclear issue among others, have all gone down this road. Once the spearhead of the Palestinian cause - which they have used at the service of their own interests and about which they were unable to reach agreement among themselves -, the Arabs have now chosen to forsake Palestine. Their populations are creating their own revolutions. The regimes in place are too busy preserving their power, and too focused on the Iranian threat, to again fight for a cause they perceive as hopeless. The oldest and leading Arab powers are in recovery mode, while the new ones are afraid to experience the same fate. They are all so scared of disappearing from the political scene, - fully aware that their survival depends in part on their relationship with Washington-, that the Palestinian cause seems very insignificant at this point.

Surely, some of the Arab countries continue to hold to their attachment to the two-state solution on the basis of the 1967 borders, and with East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine. But it would be safe to bet that even these countries -at least those which carry some weight in the regional arena-, are somehow hoping that the Palestinians will accept this new reality.

Fight again? But with whom and why? The Palestinian Authority is an old man on life support, unable to reinvent itself, and more importantly, unwilling to give way to a youth with whom it has lost all credibility. Hamas is more worried about preserving its grip on Gaza than about fighting Israel. The military route has shown all its limitations as a result of the growing inequality of power between Palestinians and Israelis. The diplomatic route is deadlocked, again because of Israeli’s superior strength in this area, and most especially because the Palestinians have no real friends on the international stage.

The two-state solution is dead, and intellectual circles, just like some Palestinian youth, are increasingly campaigning for a fight in favor of a one-state solution in which all residents have similar rights. They are denouncing the apartheid situation imposed on the Palestinians by Israeli colonization in the occupied territories, and believe that strong international pressure, as in the case of South Africa, could put an end to it. As tempting as it may look on paper, this alternative could have the primary effect of fostering a new illusion: that Israel, which perceives itself as the world’s sole Jewish state, and which even adopted a law in July 2018 that reaffirms it, may one day accept to renounce this attribution, one that is at the heart and core of Zionist thought. It seems all the more utopian due to the fact that Israel has been validating itself for years, and has been doing everything possible to remind the Israeli Arabs (the Palestinians who remained there in 1948) that they are not part of the nation’s body. If the Israelis are not ready to give up the West Bank, what can lead today to believe that they would be ready to give up what they consider as the most important issue, the sole and exclusive Jewish identity of their state?

If so, is there any room left for hope? Hope that the Palestinian youth will create their own revolution? Hope that the Arab world will be able to support this cause for the right reasons? Hope that the rest of the world will finally open their eyes to this injustice, and that the dynamics will be reversed thanks to pressures both internal and external? "It is not yet forbidden to think when you are down on your knees", wrote the novelist Dominique Edde in a "Letter to Alain Finkelkraut" published in L'Orient-Le Jour. Nor is it forbidden to hope.

(This article was originally published in French in L'Orient-Le Jour on the 1rst of February)