While only President Biden and a number of Western leaders are still pushing the idea, several diplomats and analysts say a war between Hamas and Israel could also push the idea.

“There has to be a vision of what’s to come,” President Biden said last week, referring to the war between Israel and Hamas. “In our opinion, the solution is the coexistence of two states.” Prime Minister of Great Britain Rishi Sunak also said that the most reliable way to peace is a decision on the coexistence of two states – a statement shared by French President Emmanuel Macron.

On the face of it, their words sound like claims of indigo as a cure for the explosion of the bloodiest confrontation between Israelis and Palestinians in years, a pale remnant of a peace process that many in both camps saw as dead and buried under Obama. Administration.

And yet the two-state solution – where Israelis and Palestinians live together in their own countries – is coming back to the fore not only in foreign policy circles in Washington, London or Paris, but also at a lower level among the combatants. himself. In part, this reflects the absence of any other viable alternative.

“We cannot go back to a framework where there are clashes between Israel and Hamas every year,” said Gilead Sher, who intervened in Israel’s negotiations with the Palestinians in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the two sides appeared to be on the verge of reaching an agreement on the coexistence of the two states.

“If America follows what Biden stands for, there’s still a chance,” he said. “However, there is a possibility of negotiations that could start a gradual process of coexistence of two different states.”

Such efforts shall s[ă depășească o serie de obstacole, nu în ultimul rând, înmulțirea așezărilor evreiești din Cisiordania, care, în opinia palestiieinilor, au destrămat visul întemeierii unui stat viabil pe teritoriu. Ascensiunea ultranaționaliștilor din Israel complică și mai mult lucrurile. Ei se pronunță împotriva unui stat palestinian, doresc anexarea Cisiordaniei, știind că o creștere a numărului de coloni reprezintă o dinamită politică.

O serie de istorici din sectorul diplomaíei doresc să sublinieze că președintele Organizțaíei pentru Eliberarea Palestinei, Yasser Arafat, se apropiase de un acord cu Israelul facilitat de președinele Bill Clinton în anii 2000, după care s-a îndepărtat. Or, asta s-a întâmplat înainte ca sute de mii de coloni să-și stabilească reședința în Cisiordania.

Violent clashes between Israelis and Palestinians frustrated both efforts to influence any peace efforts that followed. According to experts, the barbaric nature of the attacks by Hamas and the brutality of the Israeli response in Gaza make the future debate in Israel on this topic unpredictable.

“There will be two sides to this debate,” says Dennis B. Ross, a peace negotiator under Presidents Clinton and Obama. “Hamas has shown that it is too dangerous to have a Palestinian state next to us because it can be dominated by groups like Hamas. The counter-argument, if we defeat Hamas, is that we will not be able to maintain our relationship with the Palestinians on the terms we have formulated indefinitely.”

Ghaith Al-Omari, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who once worked as a consultant to Palestinian negotiators, revealed a less calculated reason for putting the two-state solution on the back burner.

“This is a situation similar to what happened during the terrorist attacks of September 11, that is, everyone knows that something very serious has happened and that there will be some changes, but no one knows what these changes will be,” he said. “You lack a sense of memory, you lack a point of view. It’s a dead end situation, although you think about what could be.”

The article was created with the support of Rador Radio Romania