Hesitance emboldens charlatans

THE world has looked on transfixed this week as tensions between Israel and Palestine have escalated, teetering perilously close to all-out war, rockets raining down from both sides as the body count steadily mounts.

War, with all its attendant bloodshed, upheaval and misery, has long been a staple of the Middle East, but scenes this week of Israeli forces attacking one of Islam’s holiest sites, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, during the penultimate week of the faith’s holiest month, Ramadaan, beggars belief.

It was a deliberately provocative attack, even within the broader context of the deeply unfair, cynical and cruel dispossession of Arab families in East Jerusalem.

It is incredibly triggering for a country such as South Africa, for whom the wounds of apartheid are still to heal.

There should not be any equivocation on a matter such as this. But there has been – and this is the root of the current problem.

It is too easy to look at what happened before or what happened after the attacks on the mosque, as if the attacks were somehow subsumed by the greater, enduring crisis.

Instead, there seems to have been a particular cynicism underlining these attacks, directly linked to the political instability within Israel after the recent general elections, which failed to produce an outright winner, and the precarious personal circumstances of Benjamin Netanyahu, who is about to be criminally tried.

The world has to act, not just because hesitance emboldens the charlatans and rogues on all sides who thrive on this chaos, but also because every time the fragile peace is rent asunder, the consequences are bloodier and far worse.

One day, they will be catastrophic.

Stop the equivocation.

The only solution is a two-state solution – but for that to be work, Palestine must be properly free.

For that to happen, the world has to step up and speak as one.