Israel-Palestine, can the peace process restart?
Courageous leadership that can guide the parties during the peace process and a long-term vision to ovecome the obstacles and dispel the pervasive skepticism, are the two prerequisites the emerged during the animated debate between Israelis and Palestinians at Palazzo Rondinini, the seat of the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI).
The need to relaunch negotiations to end the conflict in the Middle East was the focus of debate on “Israel and Palestine, can the peace process restart?”, which IAI and the Centro Italiano per la Pace in Medio Oriente (CIPMO) organized on April 10.
Opened by Pierfrancesco Sacco, head of the department of analysis, planning and historic-diplomatic documentation at the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the conference started out with an intervention by Janiki Cingoli, director of CIPMO, who considers US President Barack Obama’s recent visit to Israel an important step in rebuilding the relationship between the United States and Israel.
Nathalie Tocci, deputy director of IAI, presided over and moderated the meeting. Other participants included: Ayala Hasson, political-diplomatic analyst for Channel 1 of Israeli television; Sufyan Abu Zayda, former minister of the Palestinian National Authority, professor at the universities of Birzeit and Al-Quds and director of the Gaza Institute of Strategic and Political Studies; Mark A. Heller, Principal Research Associate at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), Tel Aviv; Saman Khouri, co-president of the Palestinian-Israeli Peace NGO Forum; Paola Caridi, journalist and writer, and Raffaella del Sarto, professor at the European University Institute in Florence and Johns Hopkins University in Bologna.
Hasson stated that it will take very courageous leaders to restart the peace process, as desired by Israeli citizens, thus improving the socio-political-economic conditions of both peoples. Zayda, on the other hand, pointed out what he considers an incorrect geopolitical conception: for him, we have to speak of “occupying people” and “people under occupation” and not about Israel and Palestine.
Heller was skeptical about a peace process that could remain incomplete and thus encourage objectives alternative to those pursued today. He emphasized the need to make an effort to conceive of a solution that satisfies all parties.
Khouri pointed to the difficulty of the international community in driving a negotiation that should lead to a two-state solution: Israel and Palestine, divided with each country secure within its own boundaries. The EU does not seem to be able to facilitate negotiations or to put pressure on the parties to respect the commitments taken on.
Caridi claimed that the prime necessity is to create a sense of cultural identity between the two peoples which is blurred by the continuous controversy about the allocation of the lands extending from the Mediterranean to Jordan. Israel’s lack of recognition of Palestine seems to be breaking down the hope, which emerged in 1993, of the implementation of a two-state solution. This was reiterated by Del Sarto, who considers the case of the Corpus Separatum of Jerusalem another obstacle to peace: the difficult division of a land that is shared by Israelis and Palestinians.
