Not war, but a two-state solution

The Arab-Israeli volcano in West Asia or the Middle East as it is more commonly referred to, has erupted once again with its furious lava devastating the unfortunate holy land of the area.

The blame game goes on – and the burning question of who started it – will go back to the Balfour Declaration of 1917 during the era of Western colonialism that led to the creation of the state of Israel without a solution for the ejected Palestinian people.

The immediate escalation is the surprise land, sea and air coordinated attacks on Israel by Hamas, the non-state actor. The offensive is payback time for state-sponsored terrorism by Israel against the Palestinian people, say Hamas. The scale of the military onslaught by Hamas is what had drawn international attention – not the long-suffering lives of those in occupied Palestine.

For Sri Lanka, taking sides is a difficult proposition. It has abandoned its once unwavering support for the Palestinian cause which even saw the closure of the Israeli embassy in 1970 only to invite them back to help in the defeat of the LTTE.

Furthermore, on the one hand, Sri Lanka has faced the scourge of terrorism by non-state actors and on the other, been itself accused of state terrorism in defeating such nonstate actors in terrorist activity.

The ongoing war in Israel and Palestine is slowly expanding to the rest of West Asia and this is not good news for Sri Lanka and its workers in the region. Wars in the region in recent years from Kuwait to Iraq, then the pandemic, resulted in hits on the Sri Lankan economy. There is also the ominous possibility of disruption to oil supplies for the world unless the conflict is contained.

There is no answer to this decades-long conflict other than the two-state solution as the state of Israel is a fait accompli and the ousted Palestinians need a sovereign state for themselves.