Article published in Le Monde dated 31 December 2008 

  • Michel Tubiana, Honorary President, French League of Human Rights (LDH, France).
  • Patrick Baudouin, Honorary President of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH).

Hundreds of deaths, wounded patients filling the Gaza hospitals, words and more words floating over the media waves and in pictures. Whether they damn, annoy, justify, condemn, call for vengeance or reason, all these poor words fly off in the ill-blowing winds of inertia that have been reigning for decades.

The truce was broken, so it was said. Temporary interruption of a hot war. Those were the six months during which Gaza was surviving, with the existence of its inhabitants buried in tunnels that purvey what is needed for both life and death. Return to the raw reality. We can detest Hamas and its blatant refusal to accept the very existence of the State of Israel, we can and we should also reject violence on all sides against civilians. In short, we can denounce the spiralling violence once again, and start carefully pinpointing where responsibility lies or curse the negotiators of tomorrow.

In the meantime, the violence goes on, openly and viciously like in the last few days when it stifles a population that is already imprisoned. We are overcome by shame because none of this was unforeseeable and we know the remedies to this disease that is invading this region of the world and unbridling passions everywhere else. Are we so hesitant, so void of common sense to let things go on this way?

In the European Union, we have just shown support for the Israeli authorities by granting them a preferred status. And to keep our conscience clear, we will pay a few hundred million euros for the Palestinians to rebuild what the occupiers will have destroyed and then make other investments endlessly and, actually, without anything to show for it. As if peace, or war, depended on money paid to hide powerlessness. Yes, no conflict has had such an obvious solution: the Taba negotiations, the Geneva initiatives plus proposals for peace made by the Arab Leagues. Nearly everything has already be written, and the maps just need fine-tuning. But for peace to exist not only on paper, the fallacious equilibrium must be corrected. The aim of Israeli politics is no longer just to secure the safety of the State. This requirement is unquestionably legitimate and is constantly present in the thoughts of these people and their leaders. But no "reason of security" can justify taking over Palestinian lands and water, and refusing to let the West Bank and Gaza develop. Hamas is no longer anything but a convenient alibi. For a long time already, the security discourse hides, barely veils, a desire to expand and convince the Palestinians to go away. Beyond ethics that forbid depriving people of their existence, we find the issue of the permanent existence of Israel.

Either Israel recognises the existence of a fully sovereign Palestinian state, installed on the total area of the West Bank and Gaza or the security of Israel will not last longer than its military might, whose relative power started to show during the war with Lebanon. Are the women and men who have made this state an advanced post of the western world aware of what the future holds? Do they realise that each person who dies in Gaza means a little more hate against the rest of a world that is gauged according to the extent of its lies and double talk?

Do they realise that this war enables Arab regimes to keep their people in the grip of dictatorship and to reject all democratic progress? There is no use in lamenting, even less of turning the belligerents into die-hard fanatics while we have the means to end this conflict. And the European Union to start with. The EU applies agreements of the past. The EU should change its policy and stop treating Israel as a preferred partner. This is the only way to make the Israeli government understand that it is a state like other states, with rights, but also with responsibilities. Then and then alone, perhaps, the international community will find the political resources needed to ensure application of the right of all people to live in peace, within recognised secure borders. This also applies to the Palestinians.