The recent atrocities and terrorist attacks by Hamas shows that there are two Palestinian realities.
On the one hand, there are the militant fanatic religiously-driven Palestinians, misled by forces of evil like Iran, which cannot accept the existence of Israel.
Then, there are the peace-loving, normal families of Palestinians, some displaced by the 1948 creation of Israel to spend 75 years in exile, living in miserable camps in Jordan, Lebanon and other places, and those Palestinians who remained in what became Israel, living side by side with Israelis, and those in the Gaza strip or in the West Bank.
These latter Palestinians, who number in the millions, do not share the views of Hamas or the Lebanese Hezbollah but only long for the recognition and enforcement of UN Resolution 242 of 1967 that set out the borders of what was meant to be a two-state sharing of territory.
The yearning of these millions of innocent Palestinians has not been listened to enough by the leaders of the western world and by the members of the United Nations for over 75 years.
Now, because of the continued occupation by Israel of large tracts of land that, according to the UN resolution, should be part of the future State of Palestine, as well as the establishment of settlements within those territories, millions of refugee Palestinians and the millions of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians living in an ever-smaller territory, are facing the risk of an even worse fate, namely, extermination or exile.
The atrocities and war crimes of Hamas are to be condemned. But waging an all-out war, that includes ethnic cleansing and genocide of innocent Palestinians, is not the answer.
Unfortunately, many Western countries are tainted by the guilt of the Holocaust and continue to support Israel’s disproportionate response to the Hamas terrorist attacks.
A ground war in Gaza, for example, will have disastrous consequences, leading to many more innocent Palestinian lives being lost and many others displaced.
It looks like the ground invasion of Gaza – without doubt an overreaction – has been postponed for now, under pressure of the world powers. However, it has to be stopped in its tracks.
The United Nations Security Council should order an immediate ceasefire, place a peacekeeping force between the Israeli army and the Palestinians along the borders defined in Resolution 242 and, in exchange for all the hostages and the complete cessation of bombing and raids, declare the State of Palestine.
The UN Security Council should declare the State of Palestine- John Vassallo
The 75-year-old political conflict cannot be resolved by negotiations between Israel and Palestine. The solution has to be imposed upon Israel and the Palestinians from the outside and it has to be imposed now.
One way to impose a solution by the world powers would be to define once more the demarcation lines of Resolution 242, to remove the 500,000 plus Israelis from the settlements in the West Bank, divide Jerusalem between the two sides and to place an army of UN blue berets along the new borders for a 20-year period.
Recognising the State of Palestine along those borders would also mean that the Palestinians would have enough space to create a viable sustainable country, instead of living in a prison guarded by their occupiers and without real access to the outside world.
Investment funds from the US and the EU to Palestine should be increased to equal the aid received by Israel. Containment of both sides would be the task of the blue berets from across the entire world under the auspices of the UN.
The Palestinians themselves would rid the world of Hamas and distance themselves from Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel would also curtail the power of their extreme right who are clamouring for mass killings of Palestinians in revenge for the brutal murders of 1,600 of their own.
It has been whispered that the secret service and military intelligence of Israel were not taken by surprise at all by the Hamas terrorist attacks. Did they know it was coming and let it happen, sacrificing their own citizens in order to have a cause to exterminate the Palestinians and expel them once more from Gaza?
If that is true, the sympathy of the world would change from one for Israel to one against them. I hope that this conspiracy theory is false for the sake of a fair treatment of Israel, providing Israel itself allows for a fair treatment of the innocent Palestinians.
John Vassallo is a former ambassador to the EU.