The Peace Imbroglio ...
... and Canada experiences the return of an odious Nazi practice
A few weeks ago I promised to shed more light on what my thoughts were around a peaceful settlement between Israel and its Palestinian adversaries. That is the subject of a much longer analysis, but the news this week sheds some more light on how incredibly difficult a journey to peace is. Again, peace does not arise out of a sudden feeling of, ‘let’s stop doing this, no more fighting, there must be better ways’ or at the end of an extremely bloody war both parties agree that ‘enough is enough’. No, the complicated conflicts that we hope to resolve are often driven by larger global movements. Look at how Israel’s creation was the result of the outcome of two world wars and how the Oslo agreements of the nineties came about after the Soviet Union collapsed, Saddam Hussein was defeated and the US became the dominant player in the Middle East. For peace to materialize you need tectonic shifts.
But you also need real enthusiasm on the ground and if it is not there it requires political leaders to try and pull people along. That is what Rabin did in the 1990s leading up to the Oslo accords. It was a risky move and it cost him his life. Even he was pulled and pushed along by senior diplomats who actually did the work of negotiating a complicated and controversial deal.
As of today it is hard to see how the global conditions and the feelings on the ground are fertile enough for a peace agreement. In the bigger scheme of things we are actually witnessing a deterioration: Iran has grown stronger and more determined over the years and is now backed up by a Russia and China who were minor regional players in the Middle East thirty years ago. And none of them is interested in peace, on the contrary they are aligning their respective and disruptive agendas: the more distraction the Middle East creates for the US, the better.
And at the ground level there is zero interest in laying down arms and scope out a better future. The Palestinians were polled on the conflict and the results were staggering, large majorities actually favoured the Hamas attack:
The full results are here. There you will also find that Hamas’s popularity as a political force remains pretty robust and that Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority - the ones Biden thinks should takeover Gaza - score in the 7-10% range when it comes to popularity. And a majority favours the one party that seeks Israel’s total destruction. It is fair to say there is no publicly supported partner for peace on the Palestinian side as of today, none.
On the Israeli side things are equally clear. The trauma of October 7th pushed any sort of arrangement understandably further away than ever. No interest. Any Israeli political leader will carefully steer away from any internationally forced negotiations that could lead to a two-state solution. The Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Tzipi Hotovely, made it clear in an interview this week that such an idea is dead. The interviewer kept coming back at her in his dogmatic insistence that ‘peace’ equals ‘two-state’ and you got to respect Hotovely for being clear and dispel this now outdated notion. She is well trained after many TV appearances in Britain where the interviewers routinely try to push her into a corner.
So a peace deal is far out of sight, at least for now. A more definitive settlement can only emerge once the global political climate is ripe enough to enable the parties to make meaningful moves. But then each party must have the leaders with the legitimacy to be accepted by their own as well as their opponents to be given the trust to put a lasting settlement in place.
On all of these fronts we are further away from this than at any point in time in the last forty years. The mindless repeat of the ‘two-state solution’ by western politicians, diplomats and journalists does nothing to reconcile the warring parties, it only highlights how far away we are from any realistic trajectory for a truce.
Boycotts and Buycotts
An alarming thing happened this week in Canada. The protests in front of the Indigo bookstores are intensifying, targeting the Jewish owner Heather Reisman as she apparently is using her stores to ‘support genocide’. There was a lot I expected coming to Canada many years ago, but not in my wildest dreams did I expect to see the Nazi’s ‘kauf nich bei Juden’ campaign re-emerging in a Vancouver suburb like Burnaby. There is now a call to support Indigo through a #BUYCOTTIndigo campaign.
Talking about Reisman and her business, here is some interesting background on the journey of the bookstores, her retirement and how her replacement as CEO lasted only briefly: Reisman at seventy-five is back at the helm. Selling books and gifts in shopping malls is a tough business these days and the Indigo journey is actually an instructive business case. I love to buy books but always end up at Amazon, but maybe I will use the holidays support Indigo. Let’s hope there are no Hamas supporters around to prevent me from doing that.
A poignant article that speaks to the immense challenges of finding peace moving forward.
Data from the well-executed polling indicates little to no hope for a viable peace. The only reason WB Arabs poll higher for Hamas is because they have yet to feel the true wrath of the IDF upon them and still believe that Hamas is the answer to their prayers. They are NOT.
As history teaches, in the early 1940's Germany and Japan were committed to total war. Only after both were unequivocally decimated and understood they’d lost the war was an opportunity created for the peace. Through deprogramming of their despicable ideologies, the people learned and realized there is a better way to live their lives in peaceful co-existence with their neighbours. I’m not sure this is the solution with the Pals. If ever they can get over their Jihadi ideologies? But likely the only solution if they can't.
If poll data says Hamas is the Pal's favoured leader at this time and Hamas is sworn to Israel’s destruction then the answer is clear. The most despicable war crimes imaginable were committed on Israeli civilians (Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist) on October 7th. Israel could have decimated Gaza on October 8th but didn't. The question remains as to what is the solution.
The status quo is not viable and the kleptocratic and incapable PA is not popular or trusted by anyone. Furthermore, the PA, Hamas, and UNWRA have inculcated an entire generation of Palestinian children with demonic hate for Israel in particular and Jewish people in general. We're witnessing the manifestations of their hateful teachings.
The only solution that does not invoke the history of WW2 is for a skilled representative of and for the Palestinians to emerge and gain trust and popularity. On both sides. A very tall order indeed.