Is it surprising peace hopes are so low?
RARELY IN recent memory has peace been so distant a prospect for Israelis and Palestinians. This conflict has been one of the world’s most complicated because it represents a long list of issues that generations have failed to solve.
That list includes — but is by no means limited to — the status of Jerusalem, which both sides claim as their capital city; the futures of Israel’s settlements in the West Bank and the Palestinian refugees; and Israel’s security concerns. There are plenty of others. There were times when we had good reason to believe these intractable issues could at least be discussed by the two politicians — the Israeli Prime Minister and the Palestinian Authority (PA) President — that the international community agrees represent the two sides.
But this core of the conflict is now smothered by further layers of complication.
One comes in the form of the PA’s Mahmoud Abbas, whose claim to represent the Palestinian people is weaker than it has ever been. He is becoming sidelined by the international community. The United States under Donald Trump has ignored his protests to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and drastically cut funding to the PA, and there are persistent, unverified reports that leaders of other Arab countries are turning away from him too, keen as they are for support against a resurgent Iran.
What is more, Mr Abbas does not even control all of the territory that would make up a future Palestine.
His Fatah faction lost its hold of the Gaza Strip to Hamas more than a decade ago and the two sides continue to clash — often violently. Mr Abbas, who still controls salaries for civil servants and other public payments in the territory, has pointedly refused to implement a Hamas-Fatah agreement brokered by Egypt last winter until Hamas agrees to disarm.
That introduces another layer of complication: Hamas’s war on Israel, which has claimed hundreds of lives this year alone. Along with Islamic Jihad it has lobbed hundreds of rockets over the border into southern Israel, alongside balloons and kites carrying open flames that have set alight dozens of fields. Israel responded with heavy mortar fire and air strikes.
The two sides would never negotiate directly, of course — Hamas remains resolved on Israel’s destruction — and indirect talks, again brokered by Egypt, produced shaky ceasefire deals that have so far only held for a few days at a time.
It is little wonder that the “Palestinian-Israeli Pulse”, a respected survey of people living in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, found only a minority of Israeli Jews and Palestinians — 43 per cent — now support a two-state solution to the generations-old conflict.
It was a drop of three percentage points from the last survey in December 2017 and, according to the authors of the poll, the lowest level of support in almost two decades of joint surveys.