Palestinian lives matter... and Jewish lives matter, too

As always when the permanent tension in which Palestinians and Jews live rises to the level of war, the world buries equidistance and once again divides into staunch supporters of one side or the other. It is easy to be labelled anti-Semitic or Islamophobic if those on either side see the slightest hint of sympathy or understanding for the reasons of the supposed enemy.

We are going through the umpteenth episode of this dichotomy of hatred as a result of the new Israel Defence Forces (IDF) offensive against the Gaza Strip. In this conflict, there is always an anniversary or a commemoration, which contributes to further dramatising the epic of the confrontation. On this occasion, the explosion of riots at the Esplanade of the Mosques in Jerusalem, coinciding with the end of Ramadan, and now the memory of the Nakba (literally, Catastrophe) for the eviction of the Palestinians after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, serve as justifications for Palestinian victimhood and the massive firing of missiles from Gaza into Israeli territory.

How many Palestinians have to die for their lives to matter, asked an Al Jazeera correspondent in the US, alluding to the anti-racist movement that has spread worldwide in the US under the fortunate slogan of Black Lives Matter. A mantra that excites and moves in such a way that it is rare not to align oneself against its supposed and widespread antithesis, the guilty white supremacism. 
In symmetrical parallelism, how many Jews must perish before their right to live and develop within secure and guaranteed borders is accepted? The immense tragedy of the Holocaust laid the foundation for that right. Since then, Israel and the Jewish people as a whole have striven, and succeeded, to prevent their home on earth from being swept away by those who portray them as usurpers. Only a few days ago, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Israel a "terrorist state that wants to take over Jerusalem". This is coming from someone who seems to dream of re-establishing the Ottoman Empire, the same empire that subjugated the entire Middle East for 400 years by force.

Since the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, disproportion has been the keynote of that and successive confrontations. However, it seems to be forgotten who was then at a manifest demographic and military disadvantage from the outset. The Palestinian Nakba began with the rejection of the United Nations agreement establishing the existence of two states. Since then, successive wars have had the same goal: to undo the state of Israel and drive the Jews into the sea or into a new, unwanted and secular diaspora.

This lack of recognition of the international legality of their origin and the legitimacy of their stay in the very land they inhabited until their expulsion by the Roman Empire left Israel no other choice but to defend itself. That over the course of time it has achieved overwhelming military superiority is the logical consequence of living under the constant threat of being wiped off the map at the slightest opportunity. And that it has the unwavering backing of the United States, whether the current administration is Republican or Democrat, is the result of both global geopolitics and internal power relations in a superpower in which hundreds of indigenous communities, rooted in every corner of the planet, are vying to project their influence. The Jewish lobby in the United States does the same, only more successfully, than the Armenian, Croatian or Italian lobbies.

The Jewish-Palestinian war has been going on for 73 years without it having been possible to consolidate permanent agreements on peaceful coexistence. The last and undoubtedly the most sincere was the one signed in Cairo on 4 May 1995 by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, establishing the implementation of Palestinian autonomy. This institutional architecture was ultimately frustrated, mainly due to the internal confrontation between the Palestinian factions of Fatah and Hamas, which monopolised absolute power in Gaza and openly became a satellite of the Iranian regime. The thousands of missiles and explosive drones launched from the Strip have been assembled and mobilised through the network of tunnels dug into the subsoil of this variegated and inhospitable spit of land. This is Gaza's "underground", a network that Israel's Operation "Guardians of the Walls" has bombed with ferocity and in which dozens of Hamas' armed wing leaders have presumably also perished.

It would seem logical for Jews and Palestinians to assume that they are doomed to understand each other. But this logic seems to be moving further and further away from the scenario of probable and, above all, viable solutions. Analyses abound which, after dissecting all the angles, conclude that there is no other way out than to establish two states. If this were to be done, it would be necessary to use the geometry of ruler and bevel, so typical of the 19th century, to draw their borders, given the current reality that has turned the West Bank into a conglomerate of Bantustans.

The biggest problem, however, would come from the lack of unity of the international community, which would be responsible for guaranteeing the hypothetical agreement, given that, in addition to the Middle East, it disputes its growing and bitter differences in many other hotspot regions of the planet.