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When a De Klerk is Needed More than a Mandela
President Donald Trump has thrown a curved-ball into the longstanding debate about how to achieve a settlement in the conflict between Palestine and Israel with his proposal of a ‘Gaza Riviera’ and the eviction of Palestinians to Egypt and Lebanon. His proposal has temporarily expunged the likelihood of a two-state solution, which has been the basis of US policy in the region for decades. Until now, any vision of a Palestinian state living alongside Israel has included Gaza and the West Bank.
Setting aside the considerable legal and moral issues inherent in such a proposal along with the political unrest it would create among Arab states if carried out, it reflects the waning support in both Palestine and Israel for a two-state solution and the increasing radicalisation of the debate on both sides towards a one-state alternative ‘from the river to the sea’, but for these two extremist poles, one Jewish dominated, the other Muslim. Such polarisation has widened especially after the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 that killed 1,200 people, which led to an Israeli retaliation in Gaza that has reportedly claimed the lives of 47,000 combatants and civilians.
This has been in spite of – and perhaps because of – considerable diplomatic efforts to reach a settlement. In the serial failures to accept a deal, the Palestinians have proven their own worst enemy. Is there any prospect now for a two-state solution?
In South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) likes to equate its moral cause with that of the Palestinians, with Yasser Arafat as a Mandela-like figure astride the world stage. But to get to a different, better tomorrow, the Palestinians need a De Klerk more than they need a Mandela, a person willing to make compromises to achieve a solution, which no Palestinian leader has hitherto been willing to do.
Between 1991, at the start of the peace process in Madrid, and the failure of prime minister Ehud Olmert’s offer to Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority widely also known by the kunya Abu Mazen, in Annapolis in 2008, the search for a lasting two-state solution between Palestine and Israel had what former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak describes as a ‘tailwind, a Zeitgeist for peace’.
This process ran aground after repeated attempts to make concessions to the Palestinians resulted in a repetitive response of ‘we’ll get back to you’ and they never did. Perhaps the Israeli negotiating style didn’t help, given that the Palestinians don’t have the hurry of an election cycle to consider.
The tailwind was eventually notes Barak ‘dissipated by the passing of time’ when the lack of success ‘created a counter movement’ as did ‘accumulated disappointments and the drift into the Arab Spring along with the emergence of Iran as a counterweight.’
Even though all Israeli prime ministers since Yitzhak Rabin including Barak, Peres, Olmert and even Sharon and (before 2014) Netanyahu pursued peace (albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm) premised on disengagement from the occupied territories and a two-state solution, the extent of time commitment may not have been enough.
Barak’s Chief of Staff and Chief Negotiator Gilead Sher notes that Israel has committed only ‘around three years in the last 34 to intensive negotiations. Yet we have multilayered, multi-issue problems to resolve, relating to religion, topography, geography, demography, psychology, culture and people. To resolve all of these you need more time and stamina, and a mindset to go with this. But most politicians are … driven by the need to achieve something within their political term.’
But there is no doubt that the Israelis, from his perspective, took the peace process seriously. ‘We had just a month to decide on the Clinton Parameters,’ Sher recalls of the presentation of the final document on 23 December 2000, ‘before the President left office . We had an 18-hour cabinet meeting under Barak. But Arafat did not respond – he said “Yes, but …. “ which in all practical purposes was a “no”. Yet the Clinton Parameters would serve still as a cornerstone for any future agreement between Palestine and Israel.’
Under these Parameters, Israeli settlements were to be dismantled to create a Palestinian state. This would have encompassed 100% of the Gaza Strip and 97% of the West Bank, though territories would be transferred from Israel in exchange for the land the Palestinians conceded in the West Bank. The Palestinian state would have included the Arab sections of Jerusalem, which would serve as its capital, while the Jewish sections of the city would have remained Israel’s capital. This split would have granted shared sovereignty over al-Haram al-Sharif (which Jews call the Temple Mount). Israelis would have retained control over the Western Wall and its surrounding area.
A corridor was to be created between Palestinian lands – in President Clinton’s words, ‘permanent safe passage’ – making the two bits of the new Palestinian state contiguous. Finally, Palestinian refugees would be able to choose to return without restrictions to the new state of Palestine, to return to the state of Israel with restrictions (within a family-reunification scheme), to resettle in a third country, and/or to receive financial compensation.
The Clinton Parameters remains the best offer made to the Palestinians by Israel. The Taba Talks ended similarly. And the same, he says, happened with Annapolis, where despite the 34 tete-a-tete meetings between Olmert and Abu Mazen and more than 300 meetings in all, ‘Abu Mazen did what he does best when he reaches a crossroads, which is to do nothing. There is an asymmetry,’ notes Sher, ‘in the willingness to make concessions.’
Olmert, who followed Barak as prime minister, went even further than his predecessor in making concessions, especially over Jerusalem. Olmert was Israeli prime minister between 2006 to 2009, serving before that as a cabinet minister from 1988-92 and 2003-06 before his career was engulfed by corruption charges dating from his decade as Mayor of Jerusalem.
‘I begged him [Abu Mazen] to accept the deal,’ says Olmert. ‘I said that you will never get a better deal. Let’s change history together. But he said “I will think about it” and never came back to me. We have many good reasons to be pissed off. At a crucial time, Palestinians failed to respond. Then, over the last 15 years,’ Olmert notes, ‘we did everything to ignore them.’
Tzipi Livni was Olmert’s Foreign Minister and later served the Government of Netanyahu as its Chief Negotiator. ‘Frankly,’ she admits, ‘since 2000, the Palestinians missed the opportunity, and couldn’t say “yes”. Abu Mazen never said “no”, but he never said “yes”.
‘In 2000, we thought that Arafat could not make compromises because he didn’t have the support of the Arab world. The negotiations in 2007 involved the Arab world with the presence of ambassadors. But it didn’t help. In Annapolis the idea was to have a detailed proposal allowing for trade-offs within and between issues. When Olmert produced the map and said “sign here” I thought that we may have given away too much. While the Palestinians understood the need to address issues, [Abu Mazen] just couldn’t do it.
‘When in 2014 Netanyahu said “yes” to the plan put forward by John Kerry, Abu Mazen did not give an answer. He explained that he was waiting for a smaller, petit plan. I said that you have a plan for a state with the 1967 borders offered by a right-wing government, why do you not say yes? This way he would at least have deniability. He said that he did not know that Netanyahu agreed; and he thought that the US would simply pocket his consent. The same thing happened with Olmert. Now the problem is that [Abu Mazen] is too old to make a deal. While he can give his people victories through the ICC, ICJ or through demonstrations against Israel, there is little more. Now a gulf has been created.’
The Oxford-educated historian Shlomo Ben-Ami served as Barak’s foreign minister. His obvious respect for some of his Palestinian negotiating counterparts repeats itself throughout the conversation. He, for instance, says that he would not have accepted Camp David if he was Arafat, but would have accepted the much better offer on the table shortly thereafter in the Clinton Parameters. ‘Arafat was shrewd: he turned down Camp David, launched the Intifada, and got a better deal, but then he failed to accept it.’
Ben-Ami identifies two dilemmas which continue to bedevil the creation of two states. The first is the ‘link between Israeli domestic and foreign policy towards the Palestinians. You can only go as far as your political system will accept – as you will break your neck and lose power. This happened to Rabin, Barak and Olmert since they went beyond what their polity could accept. I used to personally say this to Arafat. If you go beyond, you will remain empty-handed. He was so incognisant to these political concerns. He turned down the Clinton Parameters believing haughtily that he would get a better deal with George W Bush who turned out, as his mother put it, to be the first Jewish president of America.
‘Arafat was a leader of consensus – he had to reconcile a whole amalgam of organisations. He knew that peace with Israel would be a divisive enterprise in which he would run the risk of civil war. He thought that the best way to avoid this was to push for more concessions, and in the process pushed the whole thing over the precipice.’
The second aspect, or dilemma, identified by Ben-Ami, who was born in Tangier, Morrocco, is the ‘tension between the positive and negative ethos’ of state building. Zionism before 1948 had a positive ethos. They wanted the territorial space to give an answer to the traditional Jewish sphere, in which they could unleash the energies of the Jewish people, what Ben Gurion said “using science to create what nature has denied us”.’ This, he says, explains why ‘the Zionists accepted any proposal about land in the 1947 or later proposals, since there was a positive ethos. The size of the land was not important; what was important was what you were going to build the land itself. In this way it was more about restitution than constitution.
‘If Arafat had a positive ethos,’ he notes, ‘the extent of the land would not matter. For 40 years he was the rockstar of international relations, greater than life itself. This was a man who spoke with a gun on his hip at the United Nations in 1974. When, in 1988, Reagan denied him a visa to attend the UN General Assembly, the UN went to Geneva to hear Arafat. Now, take this figure, add it to the tragedy of the Palestinian people and ask why he would want to be the president of a Palestinian mini-state of 5000 square kilometres, sandwiched between Israel and Jordan, countries that hated the idea of Palestine? He was not interested in governance, or education. He was a mythical figure, which is why only Jerusalem and the Temple Mount gave meaning to his life, explaining his saying: “If they gave me Jerusalem, I would give them everything”. He saw peace as the hosting of Friday prayers on Temple Mounts of all Arab leaders, who hated him, which would be the apex of his career, as the Custodian of Islam.
Other negotiators found a similar experience, even though there was a perverted logic to Arafat’s obduracy. As Arafat responded to the Israeli plan to build a railway in the West Bank as a means of improving transport and people’s lives, ‘I know what you are trying to do. You are trying to improve Palestinian lives, and make the world fall asleep to our concerns’.
In this way, Palestinian political bodies are a liberation movement not a state-building exercise.
As the conflict has ground on, others have occupied the political space that might have been dominated by the peace-makers.
Israelis are as famous for their internal divisions as they are their ingenuity and fortitude in building a state out of a strip of desert. It is said jokingly that the problem with Israel that ‘one third work, one third pay taxes, and one third fight in the army. But the problem is that its all the same one third.’ There is a clash between the ethos and practices of the Israeli start-up nation, the dynamic high-tech country, and the shift rightward in Israeli politics, itself a product of domestic religious extremism and Palestinian recalcitrance, has questioned the commitment to democracy in the face of a single-state outcome, where Jews might one day conceivably be the minority in an Israeli state.
Livni speaks of Israel now possessing ‘two national GPS’s: one as a secure nation-state for Jews, which is not fundamentally about land, but is based around a set of values. This is Ben-Ami’s ‘positive ethos’, in terms of the use of nationalism to build capacity.
‘The other GPS is about the historic land of Israel and the rights of the Jewish people across this territory. Nation-building is in this case about beliefs not values.’ In this version, settlements are a metaphor for the state of Israel and this biblical connection.
This polarisation has translated into political turmoil in Israel, a growing unease among voters (and taxpayers) of the role of the ultra-Orthodox Haredi population, today comprising 15% of Israel’s ten million people, but fast-growing with around 60% under the age of 20. Currently the Haredi are exempt from military service, despite shortages in military personnel, which has translated into political tensions. More than two-thirds of Israelis polled are against the Haredi exemption from military service.
Such domestic tensions have implications for the nature of a peace deal. Livni tells a story against herself in her negotiations with Saeb Erekat, Arafat’s Chief Negotiator. ‘I had a confrontation with him about the awful Palestinian textbooks which I said did not project the existence of the state of Israel. His answer was: “I will. But please give me the map of Israel and I will put it in my textbooks”.’ The influence of the religious right is practically expressed in the settlements on ‘the wrong side’ of the 1967 borders, what Israeli negotiators have agreed is Palestinian territory. It also finds expression in the rightward tilt of Israeli politics, where the radical views of those Palestinians who want to rule the ‘river to the sea’ (the Jordan to the Mediterranean) which is a metaphor for the elimination of the state of Israel, is matched by Israeli radicals who talk in terms of occupation and moving the Palestinian population. The political sensitivities of the latter group, coupled with a sense of trauma and insecurity along with Biblical vengeance, which fuelled the brutality of the Israeli response in Gaza after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023.
And on the Palestinian side, a nihilism pervades. The failure to grab offers of peace has exposed other limits, not least the belief that if you accept the premise of the existence of the state of Israel, that you betray Allah. For this group, the destruction of the state of Israel is about improving devotion to Islam. This search for meaning can only be compounded by the endemic corruption and nepotism that defines the Palestinian Authority. According to a recent survey, 36% of Palestinians polled said they prefer Hamas to Fatah (21%). Satisfaction with the performance of Abu Mazen as president stands at 18%, and dissatisfaction with 81%. In a poll conducted in September 2004 by the Palestinian Institute for Policy and Survey Research, 90% of West Bankers and 75% of Gazans demanded the resignation of the president.
This reflects a core problem: the two sides comprise traumatised people whose narratives depend on the continuation of conflict, where victimhood is central to the narrative. This explains the colonial label used by the Palestinians, despite the 3500 years of Jewish connection with the land. The Palestinians do not have an alternative to this narrative, and yet the peace process depends on them so doing. Israel on the other hand was born out of a history of insecurity and constant failure in trusting security to others, of which the 7 October is a vivid and recent reminder.
From the day after the adoption of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine on 29 November 1947 dividing the territory into an Arab state, a Jewish state, and a Special International Regime encompassing the cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem and 1973, Israel fought five wars with Egypt: the war of independence (for Israelis) or al-Nakba (‘catastrophe’ for the Palestinians) which produced the declaration of the State of Israel in May 1948 and ended with the 1949 armistice and establishment of the ‘Green Line’, 1956, 1967 (or al- Naksa, the ‘setback), the war of attrition which followed, and finally October 1973.
‘The fundamental problem,’ says Yaakov Amidror, a retired general who later served as Israel’s national security advisor, ‘is that the Palestinians have never accepted the legitimate right of Israel to exist as a state in the Middle East. They are willing to deal with it as a fact, but not as a legitimate entity. It is,’ he says drawing an historical analogy, ‘like the treaty of al-Hudaybiya signed by Mohammed with Mecca when he was weak, to bring about a temporary peace. Compromise was only a tactic.’ He draws a distinction between finding an end to conflicts around interests – which can be negotiated and traded – and values ‘in which annihilation or exhaustion are the only options for change’.
‘The points of departure for negotiations for Israelis and Palestinians are in different historical time zones,’ says Asher Susser, Professor Emeritus of Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University. ‘Israelis set out from 1967, while the Palestinians start from 1948. Thus, from the Israeli point of view, the negotiations are about the future of the West Bank and Gaza whereas the Palestinians come to the table with a powerful sense of grievance that begins with 1948. The unwillingness of the Palestinians to compromise over any territory in the West Bank and Gaza and the demand that Israel withdraw to the 1967 boundaries is seen by Israelis as inflexible. But for Palestinians it was a major compromise.’ He points out that the inter-state conflict between Israel and Egypt (or Syria) differs fundamentally from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Between Israel and the neighbouring Arab states, there are only 1967 issues, that is, the return of their territory occupied in 1967. ‘But with the Palestinians there are two files, 1967 and 1948 (refugees) which gives rise to questions about Israel's existence as the nation-state of the Jews and not just its expansion in 1967.’
Underlying this are the ‘presently unbridgeable’ national narratives of Israelis and Palestinians. For Israelis and Jews in general, says Professor Susser, who came to Israel from his native South Africa in 1965, ‘the foundation of Israel in 1948 was the epitome of historical justice for the downtrodden of the earth; for the Palestinians it was the epitome of historical injustice, defeat, dispersal, and the loss of their homeland, the very essence of the Palestinian national narrative and the core of Palestinian identity.’
‘The challenge,’ summarises Tzipi Livni, who has served in eight different cabinet positions including that of deputy prime minister, ‘is in the pendant that Arabs and Israelis wear around their necks, which is in the shape of the land of Israel. But for the Arabs, it represents their land, and for the Israelis theirs.’ Instead of the concept of a state as a place of security, governance and opportunity, it has become synonymous with land. ‘There is a danger,’ she adds, ‘that Israelis think they can replace Hamas with another Israeli regime.’ In this way, there is little difference between a radical, racial Hamas which wishes to push the Israelis into the sea, and a right-wing Israeli regime with the same view about Palestinians through occupation and expulsion. And the Palestinian Authority is, in this polarising context, like the Israeli moderate centre attempting to manage the conflict.
In this environment, disagreements about land and refugees are simply symptoms of a deeper malaise.
This will be many in the ANC, perhaps even a majority, who would see victory for the Palestinians through their own struggle, as a victory against colonialism and oppression. For them, victory would be about seizing control of the land and consigning Israel to the dustbin of states as a failed experiment. This much is wishful thinking in many respects, not least the notion that Palestine should be free, since there has never been a Palestinian state. It is a misnomer of history, too, to see Jews through the prism of colonialism, since they have been kicking about those parts for 3500 years.
But this does help to explain South Africa’s case against Israel at the ICJ, though there were likely other considerations and consequences. ‘By accusing Israel and of genocide in Gaza, when it is not, it has undermined the domestic criticism of the government at home in Israel,’ says Gilad Kariv, a pro-peace Member of the Knesset. South Africa has simultaneously undermined the prospects for any mediating role it might have played drawing on the experience of its own negotiated experience; that is, if it actually preferred such a negotiated outcome.
The answer as how victory could be reached may lie in the Camp David process which produced the peace between Egypt and Israel with the sponsorship of the United States.
‘In very low times,’ says Gilead Sher, ‘when you are in the midst of a bloody conflict with little hope for a different future, you never know when will be the opportunity for change. Then, once it happens and it over, you look back and say, how come I didn’t think of that.
Sher was a tank commander in the 1973 war. ‘I lost three classmates in the ‘73 war. When the war started we had 103 tanks. After 24 hours we had 26 serviceable tanks. I fought for three consecutive weeks until we crossed the canal and arrived at the point of 101km. I would never imagine that four years later, after Israel had lost more than 2600 people, that the president of the roughest and biggest enemy would arrive in Israel, and that I would be applauding him on the sidewalk and that two years later peace would come. I believe that conflicts are doomed to be resolved.’
The government of Golda Meir might have missed the signals of military preparedness that produced the Yom Kippur of October 1973. But she and subsequent leaders, including the right-wing Menachem Begin, ‘got it’, in the sense that they understood the imperative to maintain Israel, birthed as it was out of the Holocaust, as a safe haven for Jews. The significance of the peace agreement in 1978, following the Yom Kippur War, was that Israelis were able to feel more secure, for the first time, by ceding territory. ‘The peace with Egypt is one of the greatest historical achievements in the 20th century,’ reflects Olmert. ‘Begin did something very few leaders could do – a 180-degree turnaround.’
The success of the Camp David process in making peace between Israel and Egypt illustrates the dangers of caricature. The May 1977 election of Begin, a founder of the Zionist underground organisation Irgun Zvai Leumi—seen as terrorists by several international actors, including the British who had been subjected to terrorist bombings by Irgun—had been viewed with disquiet in Washington, fearing his annexation of the West Bank. Irgun’s symbol depicted, after all, the two sides of the Jordan River as the intended Jewish homeland.
While Begin might have been portrayed as right-wing, anti-democratic, and even by some as fascist, in the process it was overlooked that he had for years in opposition kept the government honest. He had lost most of his family to the Nazis in his hometown of Brest, now in Belarus. A humble man, living in Israel in a modest basement flat, he had spent time in a Soviet prison for his Zionist beliefs and had served in the Free Polish Anders army with which he arrived in Palestine in 1942. His Irgun organisation had conducted numerous acts of terrorism against the British (notably the King David Hotel bombing of 1946) and against Arab civilians (including the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948). Yet, in Begin’s own words, he yearned and prayed for peace. As he said before the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony on receiving the award with Sadat in 1978, 'No more war. No more bloodshed. We shall negotiate and reach agreement.’
The role of the United States in political normalisation remains critical. And whereas improved regional relations was the objective of the peace exercise in 1977, today regional ties, notably those with Saudi Arabia, may well be the conduit for a Israel-Palestine deal.
The Egyptian-Israeli peace also highlighted the reward for boldness. Sadat’s November 1977 visit to Israel broke a taboo, for instance, but was a necessary gesture. As the Egyptian leader observed, Egypt would achieve its ends ‘Through negotiation around the table rather than starting wars, we have enough.’ There was a recognition, too, that the visit was the start, not the end of a peace process. It also illustrated the importance of not making one issue (the Sinai in this instance) hostage to another (Palestine).
It exemplified the limits of translating military success – or in this instance, the perception of military success – into an enduring political outcome. While Sadat was honoured in Egypt as the Batal al-Ubur, the ‘hero of the crossing’ of the Suez Canal, in practice the war ended far from achieving its intended result of kicking Israel out of the Sinai. Before Camp David, all Sadat’s Egypt had been able to negotiate with Israel was a 1975 interim arrangement, which only provided for potential withdrawal from Sinai by Israel and the reopening of the Suez Canal.
The Arab Israeli MP Mansour Abbas has identified several factors that have influenced the (lack of) progress in negotiations. One is leadership. ‘I have discovered that if you always want to satisfy your voters, you will never be able to take the right decisions,’ he says, ‘for Israelis or Palestinians.’
Overall, peace processes are very tough on leaders and their beliefs. But leaders are elected to make tough decisions, not to form their next coalition. Thus, says Abbas, sounding a little like Margaret Thatcher, ‘you have to make a compromise, accept the other, look to the future, and not stay stuck in the past.’ ‘Consensus’, wrote the former British prime minister, was ‘The process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead.’
In this regard, some Israelis think alike.
Dan Meridor was part of Barak’s Camp David negotiating team. The peace with Egypt reminds him of the premium of leadership: 'Leadership is not doing what your voters like, this is easy. This is being led by the voters. Leading the people means taking them what you think is right, convincing them it is right.’
Victory requires setting out a clear end goal against which you can be measured. The challenge is then to possess the personal courage and strategic vision to make concessions to that end. Meridor said that on meeting FW de Klerk that the South African leader had one piece of advice for him: ‘Cut a deal as soon as you can.’
Tony Blair has written that in every ‘successful country, there will have been a turning point, a moment when they moved ahead, developed, liberated potential and expanded.’ For the former British prime minister, ‘Leaders have the courage not to go with the flow. They speak up when others stay silent. They act when others hesitate. They take the risk, not because they fail to identify it as risk but because they believe a higher purpose means the risk should be taken. They’re prepared to say what needs to be said, including to their own supporters.’ A leader is someone who can find the resources, he writes, to ‘keep going even when it looks like defeat is as plausible an outcome as victory; to retreat tactically, but never strategically. This is leadership. And to realise that giving people what they want is not the goal of leadership.’ Otherwise, Blair adds, ‘the leader is just a follower.’
Leadership in this context will demand Palestinians giving up the conflict as a means to achieve their aims, and to stop investing in violence and start focusing on building a state. The liberal world, for its part, will need to stop allowing the Palestinians to play both sides off against the middle in accepting the call ‘from the river to the sea’. And Israel will have to wean itself off a similar notion, but for Jews, and stop believing in Hamas as an asset, if only for rotten domestic considerations.
‘If you had asked most Israelis in 1974 if there would be a peace with Egypt that lasted for half a century, they would have said it was not possible,’ says Gilad Kariv. A member of the Knesset representing the Democrats and previously the Labour Party, he was speaking on the margins of the weekly gatherings in central Tel Aviv loudly protesting for the release of the 240 Israeli hostages taken by Hamas during the attacks of 7 October. Kariv’s left-of-centre politics aligns with many in the crowd. There is little doubting the anger of the crowd towards the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Banners shouting ‘Guilty’, ‘Resign’, ‘The Head is Responsible’, ‘Election Now’, ‘Dismissal Now’, and ‘No Absolution’ were hung on the barriers, carried on sticks, and laid out on the road. Red caps emblazoned with ‘Stop the F**king War’ punctuated the milling crowd, while stickers were handed out, flags draped and flown, trade done in merch and bagels, and hooters blasted amidst speeches from the hostages’ relatives and chants calling ‘now, now, now’. Kariv says, like his former Knesset colleague Mossi Raz, that ‘what is required to get out of this situation is leadership – and that is lacking’. Such leadership requires an end goal around which a plan can be created and compromises made.
Whereas Israelis require a Mandela to be gracious and generous in victory, counter to their preferred narrative, Palestinians need a De Klerk to get them there.
‘De Klerk was a man of history,’ says Olmert, a man of positive history. He deserved a lot of praise. He made the historic concession that no-one believed was possible, just as Mandela made an historic contribution of the highest order afterwards for South Africa not becoming an arena of retribution.’ Or as Livni puts it, in making concessions, the Palestinians will lose on some issues, ‘but their people will lose more if there is no peace.’
While Trump’s proposed Gaza Riviera is unlikely to be the answer, a new way has to be found to find traction to the only solution that both provides Palestinians and Israelis with security and a state. For if there is no peace, as the former head of Mossad Efraim Halevy dishearteningly observes: ‘In the end there will be no end.’
This article also appeared on the Daily Friend
