Among the most serious of the many destructive effects of the ongoing war on Palestine is that it may set back the search for a solution to the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict for years to come. Despite five Arab-Israeli wars, a plethora of UN resolutions and numerous international peace proposals since 1967, nothing has succeeded in producing a solution acceptable to all sides. Today, the situation is no nearer to being resolved than in the 76 years of Israel’s existence in the Middle East.
And yet finding a future way forward out of this morass is an urgent necessity, no less than that of ending the current war itself. One might even say, as other observers have done, it was this very absence of an agreed way forward that precipitated the current war.1 Since 1967 Israel has occupied and increasingly colonized the West Bank, and since 2007 it has subjected Gaza to a draconian siege. Five decades later, this situation had taken on a terrifying permanence which no-one was willing to challenge. It was clearly unrealistic to expect the Palestinians to go on enduring a status quo that stopped them leading normal lives, denied them basic freedoms, and kept them fragmented and encircled under Israel’s military control.
