The phone rang and it was the poet friend telling me that he was quitting chemotherapy. It would be the last conversation. At one point in the conversation about how he was experiencing the end of his life, he concluded: "Everything is in the IliadHumankind endlessly demonstrates that it learns neither from fury nor from compassion. It was a Saturday morning, the sun was shining, and I was cutting the dead leaves of an aspidistra, a humble, slender plant that demands no attention and whose name he had taught me.
Two years ago, the day, the day fell upon free young people enjoying themselves at a festival and families facing their holiday. That terrorist act set in motion a savage operation against an entire people with the aim of drowning them in blood, ravaging them, and wiping them off the earth. Minister Benjamin Netanyahu begins a slow, partial withdrawal. This is good news, but it is extraordinarily fragile. With a real and solid political architecture that we have never had until now, we will be able to prevent the truce from failing. It is a necessary pact that, without guarantees that do not yet exist today, could remain a mere pause before the next war. Compliance with the conditions will require time, the will of the parties, and observers with deterrent capacity. Netanyahu is the main obstacle to consolidating peace, because his military and diplomatic decisions respond more to internal calculations than to a national Israeli strategy. The agreement is profoundly asymmetrical: Hamas must fulfill immediate obligations, while Israel retains the ability to halt and reverse its commitments. If not, the reservoir of hatred is now so enormous that it will return to violence. The phases of withdrawal, liberation, and reconstruction must be clearly defined and irreversible.
Finally, the external guarantors (the US, EU, Egypt, and Qatar) will have to assume their responsibility as active mediators, not passive observers. The agreement reached is a beginning of peace, but it is not yet peace, and now comes the most difficult part, since a two-state solution is practically impossible despite international recognition. It will require the reconversion of two peoples today exhausted by violence and consumed by hatred.
