From out of the horror, a new opportunity

The Age/ Gilead Sher Dan Perry/29.1.2024

If Netanyahu put as much effort into working for peace as he does planning to kill all Palestinian women and children the world and Israel would be a much safer place – Mark

Almost four months into the Israel-Hamas conflict, many are asking what lasting peace between Israel and Palestine could look like. This series of opinion pieces from world-leading experts looks beyond the war and considers those ideas.

During the long years of Benjamin Netanyahu’s rule in Israel, the operative principle has been ‘‘managing the conflict’’ with the Palestinians, driven by the conviction that one need not resolve it. Now, that may be coming to an end.

Both Hamas and the Israeli hardright coalition that Netanyahu leads oppose a partition of the Holy Land, whose 15 million people are roughly equally divided between Arabs and Jews. Each believes their side would somehow control the single entity that results. Hamas would trample Jews, Christians and impious Muslims. Netanyahu and his messianic coalition partners think millions of Palestinians can be forever controlled by machinations. Hamas is a despicable terrorist evil and Netanyahu is misguided; they are the strangest of bedfellows.

Indeed, Netanyahu has pursued a policy of enabling Hamas to stay in charge in the Gaza Strip and approving the continued flow of Qatari funds to the group, as reporting from The New York Times showed, because he believed, correctly, that it would weaken the West Bankbased Palestinian Authority run by the more moderate Fatah group, and that this would ease pressure on Israel to resume a peace process. The rationale was that Israel can – while deepening the West Bank-Gaza divide – tolerate the periodic mini-wars whenever Hamas becomes too persistent with rocket fire because its Iron Dome interceptors were successful in shooting most of the rockets out of the sky.

That concept collapsed on October 7, as thousands of terrorists busted through the Gaza border fence and for many hours rampaged through Israeli communities, massacring entire families, raping and looting, and ultimately killing more than 1200 people while dragging more than 200 others – including infants and Holocaust survivors – back to Gaza as hostages.

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