In last week's column, we looked at why the only alternative to the destructive spiral into which the Middle East is sinking before our eyes, with incalculable international repercussions, is the establishment of a Palestinian state, which would be Israel's best guarantee of security. Naturally, such a prospect is vehemently rejected by war-mongers on both sides, who prefer to maintain the deadly illusion of the possibility of defeat for their enemy.

This illusion is, undoubtedly, the main obstacle to peace today. It fuels a cycle of ever more atrocious violence, with each side claiming to act only in "retaliation" to the violence of the other. On the contrary, historical experience shows that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, far from being a zero-sum game in which one side's gains are matched by the other's losses, can only be resolved by reconciling the national aspirations of both peoples.

Israel has long refused any form of negotiation with the "terrorists" of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), hunted down across the globe and accused of "shedding Jewish blood". Israeli governments, both left and right, then claimed they could settle the Palestinian question with Jordan alone, excluding any genuine Palestinian representative. This "Jordanian option" collapsed in 1988, as a result of the First Intifada, the pacifist uprising of Palestinians in the occupied territories in the name of the PLO. Yet in 1991, Likud prime minister Yitzhak Shamir insisted that the Palestinians should not have an independent delegation at the peace conference convened by the US in Madrid. Not only did these Palestinians sit in a Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, but they had to have no official ties with the PLO, be refugees or residents of the occupied territory of East Jerusalem. This Israeli diktat effectively condemned these initial talks to deadlock, forcing Yitzhak Rabin, Shamir's Labor successor, to open a secret channel for direct negotiations with the PLO in Norway in 1993.

The two "Oslo Accords," concluded in the space of a few months in 1993, concern mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO, and the establishment of a Palestinian Authority (PA) in the territories evacuated by Israel. While the second agreement has generated frustration and crises, due to the violence that has marked the relatively limited withdrawals of the Israeli army, at a time when colonization has continued, the first of these agreements must be preserved at all costs. Indeed, it forms the basis of a historic reconciliation between Israeli nationalism and Palestinian nationalism, of which the PLO has been recognized as the "sole, legitimate representative" since 1974. On the other hand, negotiations with the PA and its "government" can only lead to deadlock, since the PA is itself only the product of an agreement between Israel and the PLO. What's more, it is out of the question for Israel to agree to negotiate with Hamas, which has itself ruled out recognizing Israel at this stage.

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