A New opportunity for Israel-Palestine

With the announcement of the ceasefire promoted by Egypt, the exchange of missiles in Gaza and around Tel Aviv ceased and with it the Israeli-Palestinian issue was returned to ostracism, as it was shelved until the arrival of new waves of violence. However, the tensions generated by this brief but intense wave of attacks, which have left approximately 248 deaths on the Palestinian side and 12 on the Israeli side, have once again highlighted the obvious unviability of the 'status quo' in these territories.

Everything began in February with Mahmoud Abbas's hopeful announcement of legislative elections for the Palestinian Authority, which were eventually cancelled due to Israel's refusal to allow Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem to participate in them. From the Israeli point of view, this may seem contradictory, as one of the main demands made to the Palestinian authorities -including by the international community- for future negotiations about the conflict has been the democratisation of Palestinian institutions. It is also worth taking into account that the reputation of Yasser Arafat's successor had suffered after years of immobility on the national question and due to corruption. Political opportunism or not, what was presented as an opportunity for change and progress in the occupied territories ended up running aground. Nothing new.

At the same time, Israel held its fifth elections in two years after the break-up of the coalition Government and, once again, Netanyahu's Likud emerged victorious from the elections but without the necessary strength to form a government. Once again, the Knesset was faced with the figure of Netanyahu, considered by some to be the iron leader that a country like Israel needs for its survival in a hostile environment and considered by others to be a prime minister incapable of dealing with the Palestinian question, who benefits the most radical sectors of society in order to stay in power -such as the ultra-Orthodox and the colonists in the West Bank- and who is also being prosecuted for corruption, abuse of power and prevarication.

In this politically unstable climate both in Israel and in the occupied territories, the well-known Seikh Jarrah protests took place. What is particular about this event is not the fact that Israeli courts order evictions of Palestinian families in order to allow Jewish citizens to settle in these properties -as is a recurrent phenomenon in this conflict- but the fact that they took place during the end of Ramadan, and that, for the first time in a long time, the misnamed Israeli Arabs -all Palestinians, around 20% of Israel's population, who after the 1948 Nakba came under Israeli territory and possess Israeli citizenship- were part of these protests.

Thus, two conflicts emerged from Seikh Jarrah. On the one hand, riots spread throughout the historic part of the city of Jerusalem, which ended with the surprising intervention of Israeli security forces in the Esplanade of the Mosques, a place sacred to Islam and during the holy month of this religion.

It is enough to recall that the second uprising began with the visit of opposition leader Ariel Sharon to the site to understand the magnitude of the act and to qualify it as a provocation. Consequently, facing Jordan's inability to protect this holy site, Hamas did not waste the opportunity to set itself up as the protector of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and to capture the political space that Mahmoud Abbas had lost during all these years, beginning a military offensive against Israeli territory. Finally, the ensuing increase in violence and the ceasefire have left the political situation as it was before, even though the material damage and victims in Gaza have been considerable.

However, the most remarkable, in my opinion, of the events of the last few weeks are the clashes in those cities described as mixed, such as Lod, Jaffa and Ramle. In these, something that was thought to have been forgotten has been recovered: a unitary and national consciousness of the Palestinian people. In other words, after years of policies of separation and segregation, whose greatest exponent is the West Bank wall and the settlements, these protests have united Palestinians in Israel and those in the occupied territories in that they share, albeit at different levels, a common cause. What has happened in Gaza or Jerusalem has uplifted those Palestinians who, presumably, because they are Israeli citizens, have better conditions than their respective compatriots, but who, in reality, are still second-class citizens within the Jewish State.

But what lessons can we learn from this? First, we can conclude that there are currently no leaders -Palestinian or Israeli- capable of leading a so-called peace process. Netanyahu's possible disappearance from the Israeli political space opens a window for the centrist Lapid to take the government's leadership, but it should not be forgotten that the key to the Government is held by the ultra-right-winger of the Yamina party, Naftali Bennet, whose statements on the Palestinian question and the Arabs do not invite hope for significant changes. Regarding Palestine, in this case the Hamas-Palestinian Authority bipartisanship is keeping the Palestinian people divided and without a clear roadmap.

Secondly, the tensions within Israel between Palestinians and Jews have highlighted the fallacy of the democratic epopee embodied by the state of Israel. If Israel wants to think in terms of Western liberal democracy, the first step is to abandon the two-state logic and open the way to new alternatives. The degree of social, economic, and political interconnectedness between Jews and Palestinians reaches such levels that it invites us to think that the territory extending from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River should be shared rather than divided. Partition into two ethnically homogenous states does not offer sufficient guarantees of an eventual cessation of violence; indeed, it would entail massive population displacements and perpetuate existing policies of discrimination.

Therefore, the problem is not the presence of the Jewish people in Israel -whose opposition would fall within the parameters of anti-Semitism- but the Zionist movement's perennial refusal to recognise the exercise of the political rights of the Palestinian people, which is far from being anti-Zionism. It is not a question of opposing the existence of the State of Israel, but of its discriminatory policies. Therefore, now more than ever, the bi-national alternative based on the recognition of a series of basic rights for Palestinians, Jews and other communities such as the Druze is presented as the most viable alternative to decongest an apparently irresolvable conflict whose solution does not involve separation and confrontation. All that is needed now is political will and for the international community, Israelis and Palestinians alike, to put pressure on their leaders to begin serious negotiations with a view to a peaceful future.