In July, revolutions are commemorated across the Arab region and the world. It looks like October will mark the anniversaries of war, starting with the war of 6 October 1973, which cleared the way for a long road of peace-making. In contrast, 7 October proved the gateway to two years of war, so vicious it has stunned humanity and shocked analysts.
Yet the bird’s-eye view of history, which sees eras and epochs rather than months and years, tells us that wars and the human suffering they inflict do eventually end. The examples are many: the Hundred Years’ War, the Thirty Years’ War after that, the wars of colonial expansion from the 18th through the 19th centuries, and the wars of independence that followed. The generation that experienced World War I had thought it would never end. After it did, humanity was plunged into World War II, which ended tragically with the first – and, hopefully, the last – use of nuclear arms. The Korean War ended, as did the Vietnam War, as well as two wars in Afghanistan, first with the Soviet Union, then with the US.
In all these cases, the end of hostilities did not mean peace was achieved. Rather, there came a truce and a period of calm, sufficient for everyone to catch their breath and try to change conditions. Sometimes, close relations – even alliances – emerged between former wartime adversaries, as though to confirm the Egyptian proverb: “True love only comes after enmity!”
However, there is one war that defies the laws of history and refuses to end and reach peace: the Arab-Israeli – sometimes called the Palestinian-Israeli – war.
It keeps dragging on, through the end of the 20th century and a quarter of the 21st. During that period, a Cold War erupted and eventually drew to a close and the steadfastness and resilience of colonised peoples culminated in national independence. Palestine alone remains occupied – in whole or in part – and wholly deprived of control over its fate. What has ended is one dimension of the Arab-Israeli conflict: treaties brought peace between Israel on the one hand and Egypt and Jordan on the other, and in both cases, the peace has been described as cold. The so-called Abraham Accords signed between four Arab countries and Israel did not bring about warmth either. In fact, not long afterwards, one of the signatories – Sudan – descended into civil war.
Whether openly or beneath the surface, the Palestinian-Israeli war persists. Even when the opportunity arose in the mid-1990s, with the establishment of the first-ever Palestinian national authority, international summits and global conferences did little to change the situation.
Life settled into two types of war: either grassroots intifadas – whether peaceful, as in the 1980s, or armed, as in the first decade of this century – or overt Gaza wars. The latter have been numbered, with the one that erupted in October 2023 being the fifth. No one had imagined it would last two years, the prospect of a truce continuing to elude it. What became increasingly possible and eventually played out was that a partial war in Gaza would spiral into a regional war engulfing the Levant, the Gulf, the Red Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean.
No resolution is in sight for the current war, whether at the bilateral level between Palestinians and Jews, or the regional level, involving the Arabs, Persians and Turks, which, by extension, would naturally involve the US and, hence, the UK and NATO. Many minds have been at a loss as to why this conflict has been so intractable. But Yitzhak Rabin put his finger on one reason the day after he signed the Oslo Accords. Addressing Israelis, he said: “When we came to this land, there were others here: people and a nation.”
The knot in which that territory is caught remains inextricably bound, with Jews on one side invoking the Promised Land and Muslims on the other seeing it as an Islamic trust. Since arriving in the Holy Land, Israelis have never been able to understand that peace is required for the Jewish dream to take root and flourish.
On the other hand, the Palestinian national liberation movement never understood that its role was to establish the Palestinian state and that states need the building of institutions and identity. One of the essential conditions for statehood is a unified leadership – not 14 armed factions, each taking crucial decisions on war and peace unilaterally, nor a leadership that spent half of its life chasing unity in Cairo, Algeria, Mecca, and Ankara, as well as in Moscow and Beijing.
We are now at the threshold of a peace project that opened with a flood of recognitions of the Palestinian state before it met the conditions for statehood. As with all such historical cycles, the push for peace has put both sides to the test. According to opinion polls, both Israelis and Palestinians failed. The project falls short of Israeli expansionist dreams and of Palestinian aspirations for independence and self-determination.
Questions of war and peace demand a deep reflection on history.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 9 October, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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