Day after day, Israel makes increasingly clear that it has no intention to make peace. It does not want a comprehensive and just peace, nor is it willing to take modest preliminary steps that could build the mutual trust necessary for more meaningful progress.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s government seems intent on creating more walls and fences, rejecting the idea of building bridges in principle. It opposes the bridges that the late Yugoslav writer Ivo Andric tells us, in his remarkable novel “The Bridge on the Drina”, “were built by God with the wings of angels so that men can reach out to one another.” Bridges facilitate communication and open the door to peace, while walls reinforce isolation and sow the seeds of hatred, war, and division.
Israel shut its doors to the Arab ministerial delegation formed after the Arab-Islamic summit. The delegation had planned to visit Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah a few days ago, but Israel saw the visit as an endorsement of the idea of establishing a Palestinian state, which the Israeli prime minister’s circle, especially Defense Minister Katz and the rest of the far-right bloc, believe will inevitably engender terrorism.
Per international law, Israel, as an occupying force, does not have the right to prevent the delegation. The move reflects the Israeli government's hubris and contempt for both divine principles and human laws.
Israel has a knack for issuing statements that are detached from reality. One official, for example, said that “the meeting that the delegation had been scheduled to hold was provocative because its theme would have been the establishment of a Palestinian state. Israel, which controls all access to the West Bank, will not cooperate with any such step that threatens its security.”
Indeed, in the minds of Netanyahu’s ministers, justice that could lead to peace is off the table. Was it not Katz himself who recently spoke of extending Israel’s sovereignty as a Jewish state in the West Bank? He said this just one day after announcing the legalization of 22 settlement outposts - a move that will radically change both the geography and demography of Palestinian territory.
Israel is determined to maintain this approach: steadily and deliberately suffocating the West Bank financially, carving up its territory, making things as difficult as possible for the Palestinians living there, and moving its plan for the Judaization of Jerusalem further as it strives to erase the city’s character and history.
Is Israel afraid of peace and precluding it through violence? Israel’s actions are showing that Tel Aviv is trapped in a ghetto - not in the abstract moral or spiritual sense; it is in a physical ghetto. The government has announced its intention to build a 425-kilometer wall between Israel, Jordan, and the West Bank. This project, which is expected to take three years, legally requires the approval of the Palestinian Authority, the governing body of these territories. Both settlement expansion and this separation wall point to Israel’s real desire: to isolate itself, not just from the Palestinians, but from the Arab world as a whole.
Astonishingly, Israel has yet to recognize that it is trying to turn the clock back 2,000 years, to a time when high walls encircled Jerusalem. Even then, however, these walls offered neither safety nor security under Roman rule.
Israel’s isolation is deepening. Indeed, the last fig leaves have fallen. The Arab world proposed the Arab Peace Initiative in 2002, and it has kept the offer on the table since. Israel’s failure to engage is a genuine missed opportunity. Although there have been efforts, since then, at achieving peace in the region supported by the US, Netanyahu’s government seems determined to shut them down and bury every dream of normalization with Arab nations.
The Arab ministerial delegation came out as the winner, and Israel lost out. Day by day, it grows increasingly isolated diplomatically, especially as the suffering in Gaza becomes the modern world’s mark of shame: hunger, mass murder, and displacement. Against this backdrop, every effort to de-escalate the situation and ensure a ceasefire seems futile.
In the United States, Israel is undeniably losing the support of a large segment of the global public, which has woken up to its horrors and inhumanity. On the level of governance, it seems that the Trump administration now believes that partnership with the Arab states will be just as significant as its ties to Tel Aviv.
Meanwhile, the European Union has announced that it would assess trade with Israel. The United Kingdom has frozen talks on expanding its bilateral free trade agreement with the Jewish state, and both Germany and France have threatened to take swift measures if the humanitarian crisis in Gaza continues.
One could ask: Why does Tel Aviv ignore the world’s threats? Simply put, because all of this, for now, remains mere moral outrage; no tangible measures have been taken, but it seems they may not be far off. Israel does not understand peace and does not appear to be awaiting its arrival. How much longer will Israel live in fear?
