External forces prolonging conflict in Israel-Palestine and Ukraine-Russia

The conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is not new. You can trace it from biblical times or beyond; only the dynamics vary with time.

Looking at history, some say it’s a brother versus brother war, considering the origin of the two people in conflict and the land they occupied since Old Testament times. The famous and infamous figures we read about in the scriptures and preach about in our churches and on public platforms are their ancestors, and so are we all as generations of those people.

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The Israelis and the Palestinians share much in common but differ markedly politically. As “brothers” and “sisters” with the same ancestry, save for insisting on discriminating against each other based on who exactly is one’s father and mother and other small ways, their conflict would have been resolved a very long time ago.

That’s if they were bold enough to sit down and look each other in the eye and say, “We are brothers; let’s stop this”.

Wars in the world happen and continue because there are external forces that perpetuate them. Those forces would have had their own political interests.

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The war in Ukraine continues because some external forces don’t want it to end without them achieving their own goals, even if Ukraine itself would have liked to negotiate peace with its neighbour. It’s no longer in Ukraine’s hands but in somebody else’s, or what analysts and journalists now call a “proxy war”.

Similarly, even if Israel and Palestine were to think about making peace and living alongside each other as “two states that recognise and respect each other’s sovereignty solution”, as long as the external forces believe that their hegemonic interests are not achieved, peace won’t happen in the area.

You can argue until the cows come home; that’s the bottom line. If the world wanted to bring the two sides to the negotiating table to enable them to smoke a peace pipe, that is possible.

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Both Israel and Palestine might have their own historical reasons to want to continue to fight, but as long as the big powers’ interests are yet to be fulfilled, peace will be relegated to the back burner because it’s not important to them but their agendas.

I disagree with any notion that peace must not be given a chance. All conflicts ought to be resolved peacefully, not by perpetual supplying lethal arms to the warring sides to continue destroying each other.

A former broadcast journalist-cum-lawyer colleague, Vuyani Green, in our occasional social media debates, kept on asking me who was the aggressor in the Ukrainian war. My answer was always simple: “It doesn’t matter because the aggressor is obvious.”

I based that on the fact that there will always be an aggressor, but I believe that conflict can be resolved peacefully, regardless of who attacked first in any war.

An example is closer to home – here in South Africa, where after fighting since colonial times when Europeans invaded the Cape shores and moved inland with guns blazing and after the Berlin Conference of 1884/85 and rivers of blood were seen on the continent, South Africans of all races were able to sit down around the table to talk peace.

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Out of that, we produced among the best constitutions in the world, and peace was achieved, even if it’s not perfect. It is relevant that South Africa, working with the rest of Africa, opted to work for peace in Ukraine and elsewhere despite its efforts being criticised by the enemies of peace.

The bloody wars between Hamas and Israel and in Ukraine could end if the world wanted them to end – but they don’t. The attainment of peace in the Middle East and Ukraine does not depend on the liking of the two parties in conflict but on the world determined to pull together for peace, not war.