OPINION: Imagining a new beginning for the Middle East

Today, as the remaining 48 hostages come home, the world holds its breath. It should be a day of joy and it is, at least for a moment. But joy, like everything else in this story, is complicated. It arrives hand in hand with grief.

Because even as we see faces return from the darkness, we also see the faces of those who never will. Every person stepping out of the tunnels still breathing is a miracle. Every absence that follows is an open wound.

And so I find myself asking: what if we could draw a line under everything that has happened up to this point in the history of the Middle East?

Every massacre, every occupation, every terror attack, every broken promise, all acknowledged, all remembered, but no longer allowed to dictate the future.

In this imagined world, we would deal only with the reality of today.

The reality is that Israel exists and is not going anywhere. That Jerusalem is its political and spiritual capital, as much a fact as it is a flashpoint. That the 1967 borders are not a peace plan, but a memory, six decades and a dozen failed negotiations removed from the present tense.

And the reality, too, that five million Palestinians live between Gaza and the West Bank. They are not going anywhere either. They require and deserve, both practically as well as morally, a state of their own. And if such a state is ever to exist, it must include, not exclude, those who have at one point or another been members of proscribed terrorist organisations. Whether Hamas, Fatah, or Islamic Jihad, too many have been drawn into the machinery of violence for purity tests to work.

Peace will require the unthinkable: that those who once fought, even committed acts of atrocity, be given the chance to build.

The unthinkable reset
What would it take for the world and for us to start again? To wipe the slate clean, not of history itself, but of its power to imprison us?

It would mean that every voice willing to acknowledge the other side’s right to exist is heard. That every leader, from every corner of ideology, has a seat at the table, provided they do one simple, impossible thing:
Renounce hate. Renounce violence. Acknowledge the other’s right to self-determination, to statehood, to peace.

Even a member of Hamas, with blood, literally and figuratively on his hands, would have the opportunity to step forward, to say: I reject death as policy, I choose life as purpose. And in doing so, to earn a voice in the future governance of a Palestinian state.

Likewise, an Itamar Ben-Gvir or Bezalel Smotrich, or any of their far-right disciples, would face the same choice: Renounce hate and be included. Refuse and be exiled from power.

One strike, and you’re out. No exceptions. No excuses.

The anchor and the ocean
The past is an anchor. It holds us steady, yes, but it also drags us down. The bravery required to cut it loose, to float free into uncharted waters, is almost unimaginable.

Even as I write these words, I know it’s probably beyond me.

Because every time I try to think about peace, anger and sadness come rushing in.

They’ve been my constant companions these past two years, useful ones, too. They’ve kept me sharp, kept me writing, kept me fighting back against the rising tide of antisemitism and lies.

I told myself I was in control of them. That I could summon them when needed, then set them aside when the time came to choose hope.

But maybe I was wrong. Maybe they’ve always been in control of me. Maybe they’ve been the ones holding the pen and now as I try to shake them off, they remain, poking and prodding, provoking and I acknowledge the comfort they bring.

The hardest question
So this, perhaps, is not a political essay at all. It’s a confession. An admission that I don’t yet have the strength to do what I’m asking others to do.

Because how do you forgive the unforgivable? How do you look at the faces of those who murdered, raped, and kidnapped your people and imagine them sitting in a chamber of peace, holding a legitimate vote? How do you not want to see them suffer?

And the hurdle to putting aside that anger and sadness will be even higher this week, and in the ones that follow.

As we see our hostages return, there will be moments of relief and celebration, but they will quickly give way to the memory of all those who never came home, and to the stories of the treatment even the survivors endured.

For Palestinians returning to what remains of their homes in Gaza, the same cruel symmetry will play out: the first glimmer of joy at the end of war will soon give way to grief, grief for their dead, for the rubble that was once their community, for the children who will grow up among ghosts.

The feelings are not equivalent, but they are mutually paralysing. Each side bound by loss, each drowning in a sea of pain so deep that hope can barely breathe.

And yet, if suffering is all we want, then suffering is all we will ever have.

The line in the sand
It has now been two years since 7 October, two years since the worst pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust. And just two weeks ago, two Jews were murdered outside a synagogue in Manchester, mowed down and stabbed on the holiest day of our calendar.

We are told to believe these events are connected only by hate. But perhaps they are also connected by what hate fears most: the possibility of renewal.

The men who attacked that synagogue chose Yom Kippur because they wanted to silence us. And Hamas chose hostages because they wanted to break us. But here we are, still standing, still speaking, still human enough to cry at the sight of someone else’s family member coming home.

And yet even now, as those who have actually suffered, Israelis and Palestinians alike, take the first fragile steps toward rebuilding, the performative, cosplaying, banner carrying virtue signallers are still marching in London. They chant to “globalise the intifada,” for “Palestine to be free, from the river to the sea”, what they call for is the destruction of the only Jewish state. Their banners are soaked not in solidarity, but in spite.

It is exactly this kind of explicit hate, this dehumanising theatre performed thousands of miles away, that ensures the conflict endures.

We have to pray that their provocation falls on deaf ears, that those with actual skin in the game, those whose lives, families, and futures are truly bound to this land, refuse to be led by the hate of people who have turned the Palestinian cause into an excuse to delegitimise Israel itself.

So this week, and every week after, we must do the opposite of what hate demands.

We must speak louder. Dream harder. And imagine the unthinkable.

Because if we cannot imagine peace, we will never build it. And if we cannot forgive, even in theory, then hate wins forever.

Maybe the line in the sand isn’t political at all. Maybe it’s spiritual. Maybe it starts with us.

Show me those people. Please, show me them.

And give me the strength to lay down anger and sadness, so that I might one day stand among them.