Is Peace Really Impossible?

Asharq Al-Awsat

13-05-2025

Circles sympathetic to the 'Al-Aqsa Flood' have pushed through a remarkable shift over the months since the operation was launched: in the place of combative triumphalist assurances of 'liberation' and 'victory,' there emerged an apologetic, servile tone: 'peace with Israel is impossible.' Common to both, however, is a repudiation of peace and of the notion that peace could ever be possible.
We should be under no illusions, achieving regional peace has indeed become extraordinarily difficult. One foundational difficulty, so to speak, is the Israeli hysteria around security - partly triggered by the Holocaust memory and partly by the sense that Israelis are an isolated minority in a vast Arab and Islamic world.
This disposition encourages only the worst of political choices: Israel suffers from an 'absolute security' complex that has grown out of this pathological obsession with security - and its 'absoluteness' makes the only acceptable peace a peace without any risk, and everything should be guaranteed from the outset. In other words, this notion amounts to a bulwark to peace, as any reconciliation between two hostile parties necessarily carries risks. Moreover, this disposition fosters fanaticism that could perhaps be accompanied by the conviction that perpetually weakening the other to keep its evil at bay is 'necessary.'
The historical slogan of 'liberating Palestine' has long heightened the hysteria around security in Israel. If it had seen the light of day, this slogan would have been enough, in itself, to achieve a monstrous genocide. The slogan found a new lease on life with the 'flood,' chants of 'from the river to the sea,' and the 'unity of fronts' theory, which was fodder for the flames of Israel's security hysteria and its sense of being an isolated minority, especially since the forces advocating for the 'unity of fronts' reject the idea that Israel has a legitimate right to exist.
On top of that, there is no comparison between Israel and the Palestinians' incentives to make peace. Israel would be the one to 'cede' occupied territory, which explains its stalling and evasion.
As for the Palestinians, who, on the one hand, have the moral high ground, but find themselves in a position of weakness on the other, they are called upon to do everything possible to pull Israel into the political process. It seems, however, that resistance to peace and sabotaging peace initiatives and plans have repeatedly stifled those efforts in their infancy. As a result, it became impossible to arrive at a stage in which we could wage a political battle that puts the Jewish state and its desire for peace before a real test.
Those who lived through the 1960s and 1970s will know that chants like 'No to a peaceful solution, no!' and 'No peace, no surrender!' roared through protests across the Levant more than any others, and equating 'reconciliation' with 'liquidation' was commonplace. Even Nasser himself was not spared accusations of betrayal after he seemed to be leaning toward reaching a settlement after 1967. Despite some leftist and liberal intellectuals' attempts to distinguish between 'Jews' and 'Zionists,' conflation remained dominant.
For decades now, Israel has been veering further and further right amid demographic shifts that weakened local advocacy for peace. Still, the biggest blow to the 'peace movement' was dealt by the terrorist attacks launched by Hamas and its sister organizations in the 1990s as part of their war on the Oslo Accords, finishing the job started by the settlers and religious fanatics who assassinated Rabin.
Despite the many instances of collusion from opposite sides, a peace deal was signed with Egypt in 1979 and another with Jordan in 1994. This peace, despite everything, has remained stable since. Once we add a few intermittent episodes, it becomes clear that peace is not impossible, and that the parties to the conflict are not inherently rigid actors eternally closed to any peace. One moment that reinforces this claim was the shift from Madrid (1991) when the Israelis refused to negotiate with the Palestinians as Palestinians, to Oslo (1993) when they reached a settlement with the PLO; another is Israel's decision to opt for unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000...
A current obstacle to peace - one that is not mentioned often - is that the manner of the defeats suffered by the forces fighting Israel depresses demand for peace. Since peace is, as a rule, underpinned by a relatively even playing field, Israel's overwhelming dominance strengthens its impulse to demand surrender.
For instance, the defeat Arabs suffered following 'Al-Aqsa Flood' has propelled the Israelis to the gates of Damascus. Decades earlier, Israel managed to inflict a thumping defeat on the three countries that had waged the 1967 war in just six days, and as a result, a 'war of attrition' was needed to initiate negotiations under Nasser, followed by the expulsion of the Soviet experts from Egypt under Sadat. But all Egypt's efforts and concessions proved insufficient to bring Israel to the negotiating table. And that is precisely the virtue of the 1973 October War: seen from a Sadatist angle, it was a war to invigorate politics and end all wars. It ended in a defeat that politics could absorb, not a defeat that removes the need for politics altogether, at least from the victor's point of view.
Today, it is difficult to discuss peace as Israel keeps the genocide going without regard for any sort of peace. But what else can we do? So long as this state of affairs does not change, striving to make progress on the path to peace is our only choice - a path that does not include wars like those of 1967 or 'Al-Aqsa Flood,' neither today nor tomorrow.