Violence, rockets, sirens, strikes. Shared fear. Israeli shelters, gutted buildings in Gaza. Dead, on both sides. Concerned statements from abroad calling for de-escalation. The usual words of the Israeli-Palestinian drama advance in close ranks. Each actor finds his role, without certainty of the next day, without any long-term plan, without any other recourse admitted than the deadly force, while waiting for a future return to precarious calm, inevitably precarious.
A “perfect storm”, in English, designates an aggregate of meteorological circumstances which leads to an extraordinary event. No one knows at this moment whether it will take place. But the amount of rockets fired Tuesday, May 11, with utter cynicism, by Palestinian armed factions in Gaza, and clashes between Jews and Arabs in several Israeli cities have had no precedent for twenty years.
The current cycle in the Middle East is a scathing reminder to reality. A reality that many countries – in particular Joe Biden’s United States – had chosen to despise, out of calculation or weariness, as one seeks to get rid of an antique store.
But a seemingly insoluble conflict is not necessarily dissolvable. Over the decades, Palestinians have been stripped of their political rights, of their freedom of movement, of their land. The recent expropriations by settlers in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem are just one episode in a policy.
A small pile of ashes
The dream of a Palestinian state has faded, and the hopes raised by the Oslo accords (1993) are in a small pile of ashes. The political issue has been replaced by that of living conditions, turning Palestinians into needy, demoralized and divided. Yet every time they protest, throw stones, fire rockets, the Israelis seem surprised at their lack of docility.
It is too quickly forgetting the notion of dignity, which Hamas and Islamic Jihad instrumentalize, by linking their fight to Jerusalem. The Esplanade des Mosques (Temple Mount for Jews), in the occupied old city, is the most sensitive place in the Middle East. The Al-Aqsa Mosque remains the beating heart of Palestinian identity. His photos and posters adorn almost every Arab salon in East Jerusalem. A place of worship and socialization, Al-Aqsa gathers, while everything else takes water. You have to be unconscious or an arsonist to ignore it.
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