War and foreign enemies unite nations; it is the search for peace that divides them. Those who lead the transition from war to peace have always been the dishonorable prophets who have had to betray the national consensus in pursuit of peace. This could be said of Colombian President Santos. Pursuing the war against the FARC, rather than embarking on a divisive and uncertain peace process that ended with his approval ratings at an all-time low, would undoubtedly have been a more politically rewarding strategy. . Peace and his political decline came hand in hand. The leader who seeks peace will, all too often, have a divided nation and political system that threatens to derail his entire peace enterprise.

The Egyptian Anwar el Sadat was another of those “traitors.” Because a major problem in the Arab-Israeli conflict, as in many other intricate conflicts throughout history, has always been the leaders’ inability to carry out a peace policy not backed by the crippling national consensus. More often than not, leaders, instead of shaping it, act as hostages to the sociopolitical environment that produces such conflicts. Anwar el Sadat earned a privileged place in history when he fled from the comfortable prison of pseudo-solidarity and the hollow rhetoric of the Arab summits. He was a visionary far ahead of his time and the rest of the Arab world ended up isolating him. His assassination in 1981 at the hands of an Islamic fundamentalist was a reflection of how far he had departed from the consensus of the Egyptian people regarding their demonized image of the Jewish state. For El Sadat, staying within the heat of the inter-Arab consensus would have brought him more political satisfaction than in the short term.

Throughout our Camp David peace venture, Israelis never put party before country. Unlike Arafat and Netanyahu, Rabin, Barak and Olmert were willing to divide the nation and make peace at the cost of their political survival. Netanyahu’s long tenure was based on his obsession with never letting go of his political power base, even if it meant becoming the willing accomplice of a messianic settler community. With him, the lust for power prevailed over the search for peace. Unfortunately, while the power of his message to the nation was perhaps shortsighted, it was also politically compelling: had the political suicide of his predecessors in the name of peace brought Israel closer to achieving peace with the Palestinians? ? So why not leave things as they are?

Most of the peacekeepers have been forced to betray their political base. “In politics, you have to betray either the country or the electorate. I prefer to betray the electorate”, explained Charles de Gaulle, and it is a philosophy that he undoubtedly applied to his peace in Algeria. King Abdullah I of Jordan, Anwar el Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin paid for this “betrayal” with their lives. Nor could Ariel Sharon have brought about the most important measure against Israel’s obsession with settlements – the dismantling of the entire Israeli presence in Gaza – without betraying his constituency and, indeed, his own political biography. . It is about turning Machiavelli around. The author of The Prince praised the leaders who did not keep their word to respect the peace agreements. Making peace by risking the power that was held was, for Machiavelli, an unforgivable exercise in political naiveté. When it comes to Palestine, the Israeli right, which has held power for most of the fifty-four years since the 1967 war, would blindly second Machiavelli’s proposal.

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Israel’s quest for an “end of the conflict” with the Palestinians is an illusory aspiration. Any compromise, inevitably imperfect, would have provided the Palestinians, and the Israeli Jewish radicals, with multiple pretexts for harboring revisionist sentiments. In Arafat’s enigmatic mind, there was always room for conciliatory rhetoric when he addressed Western audiences and for jihadist vocabulary at home. Ending the conflict was a Western, liberal notion of peace that Arafat considered inadequate for the staggering scale of the dispute over narratives separating him from a Jewish state born in sin. It is very likely that both Palestinians and Jewish-Israeli fanatics would have seen the concessions on the holy goods in the same way that France saw the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine by Germany in 1870: as an irremediable and necessary evil that would have to be dealt with. review in the future. Furthermore, any solution to the conflict that Israel accepted would have required the Palestinians to compromise on the main motive of their cause, the refugee ethos. The Palestinian state would then be born in the midst of a significant crisis of legitimacy in the eyes of the Palestinians themselves.

In the case of internal conflicts – for example, Northern Ireland, Colombia, South Africa – and in that of an adjoining occupied territory – the West Bank – faltering state-building is the main, though not the only, threat to the prospects for an orderly post-conflict phase. Unlike the peace agreements between organized states, which focus above all on the delimitation of the borders – that of Israel and Egypt and that of Israel and Jordan, for example – the end of internal conflicts and the end of the occupation of a territory geographically contiguous to that of the occupier entails complex and prolonged tasks of building the State. Unfortunately, these tasks have never been a central element of the Palestinian national ethos. Torn between the irreconcilable strategies of the Islamism of Hamas in Gaza and the nationalism in secular theory of the PLO with its corrupt and incompetent Palestinian Authority, the Palestinian territories risk becoming a politically invertebrate state whose national dreams do not carried out would betray Israel’s illusion of ending the conflict.

Another threat that has to do with the resistance of divergent narratives. The clash of narratives is, in fact, an obstacle that is always more difficult to overcome than the tangible differences. This is precisely why in Colombia and Northern Ireland, and in many other peace processes, narratives were relegated to bilateral commissions and dealt with after the peace agreement was signed and the tangible issues relating to the sharing of the power, the evacuation of territories, disarmament, etc., resolved. In the case of Palestine, the narrative is at the center of the process and must be addressed and resolved here and now. The Israelis wanted an end to the conflict that was based almost entirely on resolving the problems created by the 1967 war. The Palestinians would not settle for anything that did not address 1948, that is, the core of the Palestinian national narrative. , here and now.

But the resilience of the narrative divide is such that it tends to persist beyond the formalities of the peace agreement. Many years after the Good Friday deal, tensions around flags, identities, politics and irreconcilable narratives still linger in Northern Ireland. The New Irish Republican Army, created by breakaway republicans, dreams of a return to the good old days of conflict. It counts in its favor with the fact that the fruits of peace still do not reach the Catholic community. There are still regions of the province where two thirds of the children of Catholic communities are born into poverty. Since the Good Friday agreement until today, all attempts to restore power sharing have failed due to ongoing deals between the Protestant Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Catholic Sinn Féin.