NOTWe saw last week that the only alternative to the destructive spiral into which the Middle East is sinking before our eyes, with incalculable international repercussions, lies in the establishment of a Palestinian state which would be the best guarantee of security of Israel. Such a prospect is naturally virulently rejected by the warmongers of both camps who prefer to maintain the deadly illusion of the possibility of a defeat of the declared enemy. This illusion is undoubtedly the main obstacle to peace today, in that it fuels a cycle of ever more atrocious violence, with each side claiming to act only in ” reprisals » to the violence of the other. Historical experience demonstrates on the contrary that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, far from being a zero-sum game where the gains of one are staked on the losses of the other, can only be resolved through the reconciliation of aspirations. nationalities of the two peoples. To clarify such terrible issues, we will continue to pose, for each fundamental question of a possible settlement, the elements of an alternative of which only one term is retained.
Which Palestinian partner for peace with Israel?
Israel has long refused any form of negotiation with the “ terrorists » of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), hunted all over the world and accused of TO DO ” shed Jewish blood ». Israeli governments, from the left as well as the right, then claimed to be able to resolve the Palestinian question with Jordan alone, to the exclusion of any authentic Palestinian representative. Such a ” Jordanian option » collapsed in 1988, due to the first Intifada, this pacifist uprising, in the name of the PLO, of the Palestinian population of the occupied territories. Yitzhak Shamir, the Likud prime minister, nevertheless imposed, in 1991, that the Palestinians not have an independent delegation to the peace conference invited by the United States to Madrid. Not only were these Palestinians sitting within a Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, but they had to have no official ties to the PLO, not be refugees or reside in the occupied territory of East Jerusalem. This Israeli diktat effectively condemned these first talks to an impasse, forcing Yitzhak Rabin, Shamir’s Labor successor, to open a secret channel of direct negotiations with the PLO in 1993 in Norway.
Both ” Oslo Accords », concluded in a few months of 1993, relate, the first, to mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO, the second to the establishment of a Palestinian Authority (PA) on the territories evacuated by Israel. As much as this second agreement generated frustration and crises, due to the violence which punctuated the relatively limited withdrawals of the Israeli army, even as colonization continued, the first of these agreements must be preserved at all costs. It indeed constitutes the basis of a historic reconciliation between Israeli nationalism and Palestinian nationalism of which the PLO has been recognized since 1974 as the ” sole and legitimate representative “. On the other hand, the negotiations with the AP and its “ government » can only lead to a dead end since the PA itself is only the product of an agreement between Israel and the PLO. It is also impossible for Israel to agree to negotiate with Hamas, which has itself ruled out, at this stage, recognizing Israel. The only viable formula is therefore that which was sealed during the agreements of “ reconciliation » between the PLO and Hamas in 2011, 2014 and 2021: the Islamist movement accepts in advance, in the name of a “ national consensus », the fruit of negotiations between Israel and the PLO, negotiations which Prime Minister Netanyahu then emptied of all substance, thus playing into the hands of Hamas.
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