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The fragile efforts to put in place a ceasefire in Gaza come at a time of enormous change in the region, from the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria to Lebanon’s new political horizon.
For more than a year, the war has sidelined those working towards peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Many are veterans of what was called Track II dialogue, closely shadowing the primary talks between officials and the protagonists of the conflict. Others are deeply involved in principles of reconciliation or have community links. They are varied cohorts: experienced mediators, grass-roots activists, businessmen, psychologists, faith leaders and former diplomats.
Hundreds of blueprints and models to build bridges, ward off extremists and overcome trauma have emerged over decades bearing the hope that a way could be paved for two states living side by side.
But they were all thrown into a new reality after the October 7 Hamas-led attacks and the ensuing war in Gaza, forging new paradigms as the existing paths to peace collapsed.
The National met some of these peacemakers in the UK, who have soldiered on when peace seems impossible.
Sidelined in conflict
The international community’s top diplomats have been at work seeking a resolution to the Gaza conflict, making calls for a process that would lead to a two-state solution.
The latest high-level dialogue to have emerged is provided by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian political leader Nasser Al Qudwa, who toured Europe together last year calling for a ceasefire deal, a unified Palestinian state and land swaps.
A return to 1967 borders would include a land swap – so that some of the most important Jewish settlements in the West Bank are transferred to Israel, in exchange for territory in Israel.
Mr Olmert had been involved in peace talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, in which an Israeli withdrawal from most of the occupied West Bank was discussed in 2007 but the process ended with the Gaza war of 2008 and Mr Olmert’s subsequent resignation.
Mr Al Qudwa, who is former Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) chairman Yasser Arafat’s nephew and a former foreign minister for the Palestinian Authority, has in recent years defied Mr Abbas and called for change in Palestinian leadership, supporting Marwan Barghouti.
For now, officials and diplomats are expected to use a sustained ceasefire to concentrate on the immediate reconstruction needs of Gaza and how to support the Palestinian Authority. Direct contacts between governments are likely to dominate diplomacy. A US attempt to mediate Saudi Arabia’s normalisation with Israel is high on the list. Israel has many allies in the region, since the Abraham Accords in 2020 which led to normalisation with the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, as well as earlier peace agreements with Jordan and Egypt.
After Oslo
At the heart of the challenge is finding an arrangement that both sides feel they can live with. A rapidly growing peace movement in Israel, called A Land For All, which envisions a confederal model of two states sharing one homeland. It is co-headed by the West Bank-based Rula Hardal and Israeli May Pundak, whose father Ron was one of the architects of the Oslo Accords, interim agreements signed by Israel and the PLO in the Norwegian capital in 1993.
A UK chapter of the group is now growing, after London meetings featuring local activists in November. Ms Hardal outlined the initiative’s five principles at one of those meetings. These include the “mutual right” that Palestinians and Jews have to claim the homeland as theirs, while living as citizens of two separate states.
Both peoples would need to recognise, at the national level, the suffering of the other: the Holocaust for the Jews and the Nakbad for the Palestinians. Practical proposals for dealing with the Jewish settlements and the right of return for Palestinians were also discussed.
Ms Hardal said she encourages Palestinians to “take ownership of their indigeneity” to the land, to “reconcile with the coloniser”, when speaking at the Haaretz Conference in London.
Experts agree that having two states is the only way to achieve lasting peace. But some Israeli historians believe one state with equal rights for all is inevitable in the long term, due to the continuous rejection of a Palestinian state by some Israeli politicians.
A prominent proponent of this is Prof Avi Shlaim, of the University of Oxford, who argues that Israel's opposition to Palestinian independence has turned the two-state solution into "an illusion".
Prof Shlaim grew up in Baghdad's once-prominent Jewish community before being forced to leave to Israel, and wrote about the integration of Jews in the Arab world in a recent memoir.
It is part of a wider debate on co-existence happening across the region, where there have historically been many religions living side by side. Today, minorities in the Middle East are fragile and face an uncertain future.
Yet the memory of Jews living in the Arab world is still potent for two states to co-exist, according to conflict resolution expert Oliver McTernan. "The fear and anxiety, and the mishandling of the situation has created an illusion that the two peoples can't live together," he told The National.
Cycles of violence
Another challenge is overcoming the trauma that breeds cycles of violence. Conflict resolution expert Gabrielle Rifkind, founder of the Oxford Process, has worked for more than three decades on the Israel-Palestine issue from a psychological and political perspective.
“War hardens people’s minds and people take more extreme positions,” she told The National from her home in London. "It is the traumatic impact of the suffering and sacrifice which makes it harder to compromise."
The roots of Israel and its “hard” security ethos not only stem clashes over the territorial control but is also informed by the Holocaust. “Israel with its traumatic history where it was founded after the terrible trauma of the Holocaust, where six million Jews went passively to the gas chambers, said ‘never again will this happen',” said Ms Rifkind. “As a consequence of this, it has become a hyper-militarised society. “When a society is so militarised, the weaker actors – that is the non-state actors – use every method possible to create an asymmetrical backlash. You get the rise of groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, who are in part a response to Israel’s militarised approach."
One way out of the cycle is giving people a clear and tangible vision of the future – but the political will to do so on both sides was needed. “You’ve got to have a long term horizon in place and you’ve got to have a leadership that’s looking for the way out,” she said.
Likewise, Palestinian society, torn apart by the recent war, will need to be rebuilt “from within”, according to Mr McTernan, who leads the conflict resolution consultancy Forward Thinking.
“The voice of Gaza has to be listened to, there can be no ready-made plan from elsewhere,” he said. “Gaza is probably the most educated population, and talented and resilient population I know. There are people well capable of reconstructing Gaza’s society. It’s not reconstructing buildings or roads, but it's actually the whole fabric of the society."
Uniting Palestinians
Long-standing political divisions in the Palestinian territories have also obstructed peace. “One can't talk about peace-making unless you've got some kind of unifying among the Palestinians, because otherwise they'll sabotage each other,” Ms Rifkind said.
She supports a government of unity for Palestine under an international protectorate, which would serve to help rebuild and govern Gaza, but also prepare it for peace.
She highlights the importance of a uniting figure in Palestinian politics, and said she has been speaking to Mr Barghouti’s son Arab, who lives in the West Bank, and is in regular contact with his father.
Mr Barghouti could unite factions within Palestinian politics to bring about a government of unity and has also spoken of his support for two states. “He's got the respect that he probably could unite Hamas and Fatah, and that will need to happen because I don't think Hamas is going away”.
“Some will call him the new Mandela and others will say he's got blood on his hands. I would say everybody has got blood on their hands,” Ms Rifkind said.
The last elections to be held in the Palestinian territories were in 2006, when residents in Gaza elected Hamas as their leaders.
The result of those elections was rejected by the international community at the time, prompting a civil war between Hamas and Fatah the following year. Proposals for Hamas to appoint technocratic politicians in its stead were also rejected at the time by the EU.
Mr McTernan has spent more than 20 years working in conflict resolution in the Middle East. Recently he has organised meetings in Egypt with Palestinians who fled Gaza.
Mr McTernan looks back on 2006 as the start of the bumpy road that led to the war. “In 2006, we had a real opportunity. The Palestinian people spoke and they gave a government that could have been a government of national unity,” he told The National.
“The international community, having promoted elections and having promoted a Palestinian constitution, decided to totally ignore them because they didn’t like the outcome of the elections."
Diaspora reeling
There are also questions of the role played by Jews in the diaspora, particularly those who want to see a more conciliatory face from Israel that has all but been submerged by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's long stint at the centre of the political stage.
Outside of Israel, much of the support for a two-state solution comes from the Jewish community, who want to see the Jewish state thrive but fear the continuing occupation is unsustainable and has a direct impact on Jewish identity and values.
Among them is Hannah Weisfeld, who thought the growing voice of British Jews against occupation would matter to the Israeli government when she co-founded Yachad, a UK organisation calling for a long-term resolution to the conflict, 10 years ago.
Yachad worked to mobilise British Jews against Israeli occupation, illegal settlements and to support a two-state solution. They took British Jews to the West Bank and to the southern border of Israel, and worked with Israeli peace-building organisations and committed Israeli politicians.
“The whole idea was if you could mobilise enough Jews outside of Israel to be vocal enough about how we felt about occupation … and what that was doing to Jewish identity, at some point the Israeli government will say 'we’re going to pay attention to them',” she told The National.
But six years in, she was forced to change tack. “It became clear that the Israeli government couldn't care less what Jews outside of Israel think about what the Israeli government does,” she said. Their latest campaign is a call for the UK to sanction Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who are also two far-right, illegal settlers in the occupied West Bank.
Jewish support in the UK for a two-state solution is dwindling, as a result of the October 7 attacks. Only 54 per cent agreed that a two-state solution is the only way Israel will achieve peace with its neighbours, compared to 77 per cent who did so in 2010, according to a recent survey by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research.
Though Yachad’s support base had grown in some communities, others had moved away from them, seeking more radical measures. “It grows in some places and shrinks in others. It’s not linear at all,” Ms Weisfeld said. “We’re in the business of long-term political change. For some people wanting to get involved in direct action … it’s not fast paced enough.”
Hours after the hostage and ceasefire deal was announced, Yachad accused Israel’s far-right politicians and Hamas of deliberately prolonging the war, and called for a change in leadership, building on the momentum of the truce to achieve a lasting solution.
“This war has been led by extremists who simply do not care for the well-being of civilians and the same people who have fought this war can’t be the ones to lead Israel and Palestine into a better future,” it wrote.
