Between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, Netanyahu only conceives of one State, Israel. He fights Hamas, which also conceives of a single State in the same territory, but Islamic. And he rejects that there are two, one Israeli who already exists and another Palestinian, who only needs the lifting of Washington’s veto in the Security Council for it to be recognized and to be able to aspire to the administration of the territory assigned by the United Nations. From the river to the sea there is room for many things. Even an anti-Semitic idea if interpreted as the genocidal purpose of throwing the Jews into the sea, which is what Hamas wants. From Israel, the exclusive and exclusive ownership of such territory is inscribed in the programs of the Likud and the extremist parties of the Netanyahu Government. It is a strange case for the magnificent religious culture that discovered the value of the other and otherness that symmetry and reciprocity are prohibited for some, perhaps the majority.
Between the river and the sea, there is yet another option, as unlikely or more unlikely than all the others. It is what was advocated for a century by the most liberal and pacifist Zionism, which wanted to settle European Jews in this disputed land after a negotiation with the Arab inhabitants of that geographical space then under British administration. It had to be a secular, democratic and pluralist State for all, even with a European and federal vocation according to the superb and impracticable ideas of someone like Hannah Arendt.
The Hamas attack of October 7 and the Gaza war have brought these ideas to the fore again. They arise only when thinking about the end of the war and the reconstruction of the Strip. Should we tolerate the slaughter and destruction of Gaza, the expulsion of its inhabitants and then a new Israeli colonization? According to José María Aznar, the Palestinian State should not be recognized because it does not exist, when precisely it is necessary to recognize it because it does not exist, for it to exist and because Netanyahu prevents it from existing. It is both a premise for peace and an incentive to achieve it, rather than the final prize and result of the hitherto failed bilateral negotiation between Israelis and Palestinians. There is also a strategic reason in line with the best Zionism. Given the neighborhood, surely the Palestinian State is not enough to pacify the Middle East, but without a Palestinian State there is no way for Israel to achieve the security, the recognition of its borders and the peaceful integration in the region that it deserves.
Ehud Olmert, the former prime minister of Israel who has come closest to peace, has warned in the newspaper Haaretzon May 11 of the danger posed by an internationally isolated Israel. If the United Nations recognizes Palestine (‘God forbid!’ he exclaims in his article), the Palestinians will also see the borders prior to the Six-Day War (1967) recognized and Israel will lose the possibility of legalizing it in a negotiation bilateral part of the now occupied territories of the Golan, the West Bank, Gaza and, even more seriously, East Jerusalem. For there to be peace and security for all between the river and the sea, Palestine needs its own State, just as Israel already has one. To recognize this now is to call for weapons to be silenced and peace talks to be opened as soon as possible.
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