The fundamental task of reconciliation in the Middle East

Few events are more welcome than a ceasefire, even when the ceasefire has come far more slowly than it could and should have done. What now needs to be achieved in Gaza and in the wider Middle East is a task far larger than the also difficult task of sustaining the ceasefire in the short term.

It is the task of finding structures, agreements and a resulting prosperity and security sufficient to reconcile Palestinians, Arabs, Iranians and other communities with the permanent, peaceful and productive presence of Israel, and vice versa.

The pressure that America finally imposed on both Israel and the Hamas militia can be credited with achieving the ceasefire almost exactly two years after Hamas began this war with its deadly attack on Israel.

That belated pressure, in turn, arose thanks to Israel’s foolish decision to try to kill Hamas leaders meeting in Doha, the capital of the Gulf state of Qatar, on September 9th. That attack spurred the Arab states to put pressure on Donald Trump to persuade Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire.

Amid all the detail in the 20-point peace plan that America has designed, one element stands out as being more important than all others. It is the planned presence in the intended peacekeeping, or “stabilization,” force to be sent to Gaza of forces from the Arab states and the implied acceptance of a role in rebuilding and reorganizing Gaza for the governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the other Gulf states.

Alongside the tragic memory of the estimated 67,000 Palestinian deaths during this conflict, the 1,200 Israelis who were killed on October 7, 2023, and the 250 hostages who were taken, many of whom died (the last 20 alive have now been released), one other important fact needs to be recalled.

This is that the major diplomatic event that was canceled as a result of Hamas’s atrocity two years ago was the planned joining by Saudi Arabia, the most powerful of the Gulf states, in the so-called Abraham Accords with Israel, which had previously been signed in 2020 by Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

That initiative, which was begun during the first Trump administration and then continued under Joe Biden, signified the acceptance by the political leaderships of the major Arab states of Israel’s permanence and their desire to achieve greater economic integration between Israel and the Gulf. Hamas and its paymasters in Iran undoubtedly hoped to bring that process to a halt.

The two years of war that followed have achieved three main things, beyond the death and destruction.

They have re-established Israel as the region’s most powerful military force, while confirming that Israel’s deterrent power depends critically on support from America and Europe.

The war has done severe damage to Iran’s military and political influence in the region, thanks to the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities and to the degrading of its proxies of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran is still there and still harbors hostile views, and its regime is unchanged, but its weakness has been exposed.

Finally, these two years of devastation and brutality have produced a serious erosion in international support for Israel, most importantly in public opinion in its closest ally, the United States.

Now, while all those involved start to try to turn the American-led peace plan into some sort of reality, one fundamental point needs to be borne in mind, one that is too often overlooked by Europeans and Americans.

This is that Israel represents the last, but also most recently established, European colony in the Middle East. Moreover it is a colony of settlers that, like previous European settlements in North America and Australasia, has depended for its security on dominating and pacifying the indigenous peoples that it has displaced and whose land it has occupied.

The fact that from a European and American point of view Israel is a necessary and justified colony, with deep historical and religious antecedents, does not alter this fundamental point.

Great progress has been made, from the Camp David Accords of 1978 between Israel and Egypt, through the Oslo Accords of 1993 between Israel and the Palestinians, and most recently the Abraham Accords with the Gulf States, toward reconciling the regional powers to the permanence of this settler state. But that progress remains fragile, and the strategy of pacification of the Palestinians has surely gone well beyond its limits.

The key question now is not whether Hamas agrees to some form of disarmament, nor is it whether Israel withdraws its forces to the agreed lines within Gaza, important though those moves will be as confidence-building measures.

Instead, it is whether the future governance of Gaza and of the other Palestinian lands in the West Bank can be built in a way that can be shaped by, and owned by, Palestinians and their Arab supporters themselves, or whether it becomes just another phase of colonial government, shaped and owned by outsiders.

This is because, as Israel knows very well, whatever Hamas may agree to now about peace and disarmament, the anger and bitterness that has been built up within Palestinians during this war virtually guarantee that rebellion and violence will eventually occur again, unless the future comes to look a lot better than the past.

For Israel, being a tiny fortress state surrounded by hostile rebels cannot be the future that most Israelis want to see for their own children and grandchildren.

The promising parts of the structures envisaged by the American peace plan are the involvement of the Arab states and the refusal to rule out the establishment of a sovereign independent Palestine.

The less promising part is the fact that the initial body being set up to oversee this plan, to be chaired by Trump and with the leading involvement of Britain’s former prime minister, Tony Blair, looks very much like an old-fashioned colonial administration, with Palestinian participation kept to a minimum.

Some will argue that this is an unavoidable first step, given the lack of trust between Israel and the Palestinians. That may be true, but it will still be crucial to move quickly to a much less colonial form of governance.

Blair’s most important task, given his own central role in designing this plan, will be to find a path towards a more autonomous, more participatory, more sustainable form of governance sufficiently rapidly to avoid violence from recurring, whether in Gaza or in the West Bank.

The crucial voices in this process will again be the Gulf states. They have stated that they cannot support any agreement that does not include a viable route toward an independent Palestinian state, a route which until now Israel has rejected. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and the others now need to show that they mean it.

Bill Emmott is a former longtime editor in chief of The Economist. This piece, the English original of an article published in Italian by La Stampa, first appeared in his Substack newsletter, Bill Emmott’s Global View.