اقرأ باللغة العربية During his recent address to the UN General Assembly in New York, President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi set his official text aside for a moment and began to speak in Egyptian colloquial Arabic, addressing the Palestinian and Israeli people. The gist of his words in his brief departure from his formal speech was that there was now a major opportunity available for peace between the Palestinians and Israelis. The Palestinians should seize this opportunity by preserving their unity, and the Israelis should rally around their leadership when it begins to move down the path of peace, because neither the security of Israel and the Israeli people nor the security of the Palestinian people can ever be achieved until the two sides live together in peace, he said. The framework for peace is well known. It is founded on the two-state solution based on the borders of 5 June 1967 and calling for the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with its capital in East Jerusalem. These principles are incorporated into the Arab Peace Initiative that promises Israel recognition, security and normalisation with the Arab states in exchange for the Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. President Al-Sisi could have asked his aides to formulate these remarks in classical Arabic and include them in his prepared speech. But he chose to extemporise in Egyptian colloquial so as to convey his message more directly and to underscore his heartfelt convictions. It was in this spirit that he also spoke of the “fantastic” experience of the nearly 40-year-old Egyptian-Israeli peace. In Arab political circles there has been little discussion of the Egyptian and Jordanian peace experiences with Israel because both Cairo and Amman regard this peace as incomplete without the Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories in Palestine and the Syrian Golan Heights. Perhaps this incompleteness is what has led Egypt and Jordan, along with other Arab countries, to ceaselessly press for a just and comprehensive peace in the Middle East. While the Arab Peace Initiative, originally proposed by Saudi Arabia, outlines a general and historic framework for a just and lasting solution, Egypt and Jordan have been indefatigable in their efforts to promote this through all available bilateral and multilateral channels. What now gives renewed hope of an opportunity to achieve peace is that the storm that has been sweeping this region since the beginning of this decade has begun to lose momentum. The storm had exposed the fragility of the security of many countries in the region and the security of the region as a whole. This reality has galvanised international and regional powers into joining forces in order to resolve the current crises in the region. However, this cannot be achieved without settling the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian cause that is at its heart. Two factors help make the opportunity ripe. The first is that Hamas has taken a step that has essentially entailed its acceptance of the two-state solution. This was recently followed by another step that should usher in reunification with the Palestinian Authority (PA), the resumption of the Palestinian government's duties and functions in Gaza, and the holding of Palestinian presidential and parliamentary elections. Naturally, the “devil lurks in the details,” and it is of critical importance who ultimately controls “security” in Gaza. That said, as long as good faith prevails and in view of the current state of the Palestinian cause, the PA's return to Gaza should be complete and final. The second factor is that US President Donald Trump has sufficient resolve and determination to broker an agreement that will set his name down in the annals of historic achievements. Of course, the improved circumstances and the available opportunity should not blind us to the hurdles that need to be overcome. However, no opportunity becomes reality without the necessary work to promote it and protect it from adverse surprises, especially those coming from the domestic policies of the two sides. The greatest impediment to peace is the current composition of the Israeli government, which does not accept the two-state solution. One of the means it uses to express this is through diplomatic actions that waste time and manoeuvre for more concessions. The other impediment is that Palestinian general elections, at least according to recent opinion polls, would result in a victory for Hamas and its leader Ismail Haniyeh. No matter how strongly public opinion favours democracy, such an outcome would render the peace process impossible. Both obstacles can be approached by directly addressing the Israeli people, as President Al-Sisi did in his UN speech, and in the spirit of which King Hamad bin Eissa Al-Khalifa announced that he would allow those Bahraini citizens who wished to do so to visit Israel. Such messages may pave the way for a different type of government in Israel, one capable of handling the notion of peace and its requirements, most notably the need to withdraw from the Occupied Territories. In like manner, Israel should also make gestures. In particular, it should release Palestinian political prisoners and above all Marwan Al-Barghouti, which would generate more favourable conditions to enable the Palestinian government to deal credibly with the peace process. Al-Barghouti is not just a popular Palestinian figure celebrated for his fervent dedication to the advocacy of Palestinian rights, but he is also one of the heroes of peace who have worked towards this end officially in the framework of the Oslo Accords and unofficially through grassroots and civil society organisations. The road to an agreement between the Arab states and Israel will not be smooth. But it will not be impossible either as long as the courses of action are well prepared and the steps clearly laid out. It will also be important to learn from previous experience: if this allowed for the establishment of the first-ever Palestinian Authority on Palestinian territory, it also allowed for diverse extremists and fanatics on both sides to undermine and destroy the peace process. The Israeli ultra-right and Palestinian extremism have obstructed the process through political demagoguery and violence. They have done everything in their power to keep things mired as they are. Overcoming such obstacles begins with a ceasefire agreement of sufficiently long duration to allow for negotiations. The Palestinian cause is 70 years old. The Israeli occupation of Palestinian land is 50 years old. There should be no problem in according sufficient time for negotiations to recuperate the land and establish a state. The Palestinians have taken several important steps towards the creation of a state. However, they still need to reach a national consensus over the fact that states are not built merely through the end of foreign occupation. States must monopolise the legitimate means of recourse to violence, and they need to possess national economies. In the Palestinian case, the first problem can be solved if all resistance organisations transform themselves into political parties that compete on the basis of platforms of how to manage the nascent Palestinian state, its relations with the world, and its relations with its neighbours, among which is Israel in which there are 1.6 million Palestinians. The second can be solved by strengthening that state's infrastructure through the constructions of an airport and seaport in Gaza and, in accordance with the provisions of the Oslo and subsequent Accords, by resuming construction of the Gaza-West Bank Corridor so as to integrate the two wings of the Palestinian state. Such issues should be the substance of the forthcoming negotiations, which will test the intentions of the parties concerned and let us know if there is now a real opportunity for peace. The writer is chairman of the board, CEO and director of the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies.
