Time to shout stop over Israel-Palestine
Deaglán de Bréadún
It’s not enough for the international community to wring its hands and weep crocodile tears over the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza. It’s time to get serious about brokering a solution before this problem develops into a wider conflict that could bring the entire world order crashing around our ears.
The two-state solution seems like a reasonable aspiration. Even George W. Bush committed himself to it but clearly felt unable to take any serious steps to bring it about. Maybe Barack Obama will be different although I have a nagging suspicion he’s just praying to every god he knows that the current crisis will have fizzled out by the time he takes the oath of office on January 20th.
It’s time the ordinary people started to put the heat on the politicians. The type of sentiment displayed against the war in Iraq back in 2003 needs to be revived with the aim of securing a permanent resolution. If just a small proportion of the thought and emotion currently devoted to climate change were diverted to the Middle East we might be getting somewhere.
The Israeli Government says it is committed to the two-state solution. Ambassador to Ireland Zion Evrony wrote as follows in a piece for The Irish Times last week:
While confronting Hamas, Israel continues to believe in the two-state solution: two states living side by side in peace and security, the state of Israel as the homeland for the Jewish people, and a future Palestinian state as the homeland for the Palestinian people. To achieve this goal, Israel remains committed to the negotiations that have been going on with the Palestinian Authority.
To read the Ambassador’s article in full, click here. For a contrary view, which expresses severe doubt about the Israeli commitment to this formula, read Jennifer Loewenstein’s recent contribution to the Counterpunch website. Click here to read this impassioned piece of writing (you need to scroll down a bit to get to her article which is called, “If Hamas did not exist”). If Loewenstein is right then we’re in even more trouble than I thought.
Deaglán de Bréadún, Political Correspondent
