The proposal on the agenda of the 66th session of the UN General Assembly that Palestine should be recognized as a state and therefore entitled to mem...

The two-state proposal is as old as the State of Israel itself and dates back to the 1947 UN partition plan. But today, the whole international community, including the Israeli government, agrees to this solution in principle, actually achieving it remains elusive. On the one hand, the Palestinians demand that Israel should return to pre-1967 borders, evacuate its settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and allow the repatriation of refugees; on the other, Israel keeps building settlements and security walls. It cannot be ignored that Israel is obsessed by terrorism – understandably, as Hamas, which has controlled the Gaza Strip since the evacuation of Israeli settlements ordered by Sharon, still calls for Israel's destruction. Moreover, Hamas does not support the Palestinian National Authority’s application for UN membership. In fact the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) speaks for only part of the Palestinian people and therein lies its real weakness.

There is however a new issue that complicates Israeli-Palestinian relations: namely that the Palestinians are not willing to recognize Israel's right to exist as a “Jewish” State. The Palestinian minority in Israel who make up 20 percent of the total population see this emphasis on Jewish identity as discriminatory, a view reinforced by a bill recently approved by the Israeli Parliament which prohibits even the commemoration of the “catastrophe of 1948” – the name the Palestinians give to the events that led to the birth of the State of Israel – and also “allows courts to revoke the citizenship of anyone convicted of spying, treason or aiding its enemies”.

The use of religion or ethnic values to strengthen the cohesion of a state is an old formula. It was the doctrine that every “nation” should have its own state, thus merging state and nationhood, which led in the recent past to so many of Europe’s misfortunes and resulted in the two World Wars. It contradicts the concept of the democratic state, namely that it should represent all citizens regardless of their religious or ethnic affiliation. All this demonstrates the difficulties which must be overcome if the problem of the Israeli-Palestinian coexistence is to be solved.

Moreover, with the Arab spring, the decline of US influence and the political irrelevance of the EU on the world stage, the situation in the Middle-East has become more unstable. Israel, encircled by a hostile Arab world and two non-Arab powerful countries – Turkey and Iran – is increasingly isolated. Turkey, which broke off its relations with Israel after the accident of the Turkish flotilla trying to violate the blockade of Gaza in 2010, is seeking leadership of the Arab awakening and offering itself as a model for democratic transition. Iran, which is promoting its own nuclear program, declares that it seeks the destruction of the state of Israel. All these factors push Israel towards seeking security exclusively in military force.

Another aspect of the emerging new international order in the Middle-East is the Palestinian request at the UN to be recognized as a state in its own right. Although supported by a wide majority in the General Assembly, this move risks to be blocked by the US veto in the Security Council. President Sarkozy’s proposal that Palestine could be granted observer status at the General Assembly is more realistic since it avoids the American veto. It could be considered as an intermediate stage on the way of full membership.

Israeli-Palestinian peaceful coexistence needs first of all the presence of a European intermediary force under the aegis of the UN, similar to the 2006 intervention in Lebanon, but under a single European command in accordance with the “permanent structured co-operation” provision in the Lisbon Treaty. This enables a group of EU member states to put in place a rapid reaction force with authority to act as an arbiter between the contending parties, to stop new Israeli settlements in Palestinian areas and to safeguard the security of the whole region.

To be effective, such military intervention needs to be accompanied by a diplomatic initiative to establish a Conference on Security and Co-operation in the Middle-East with the aim of reducing armaments, creating a denuclearized zone in the region and developing economic, technological and cultural co-operation.

As in today’s world nation-states acting alone can no longer provide a sufficient basis to ensure economic development or even political independence, it is vital to start an integration process in this region with a “hard core” made up of Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan. Introducing the principle of federation as the basis of relations between states in the Middle-East can succeed and endure provided it is complemented by a framework of security linked to the prospect of economic and social development.

A strengthened EU could offer a suitable model in both respects. The starting point could be a “Water, Energy and Infrastructures Community” along the lines proposed by Jacques Delors when he was President of the European Commission. His inspiration was led to the European Coal and Steel Community which aimed to place strategic resources such as coal and steel under a common authority, thereby starting a process which would make new wars impossible.

European unification is a still unaccomplished process and could still fail if the Monetary Union were to disintegrate, but it has prevented the outbreak of armed conflicts within EU borders. This is the reason why European federalists are committed to building a federal core within the EU which could show the rest of the world how to federate a region covered by several states. The main historical achievement of the EU is that its evolution toward a federal arrangement is living proof that in this narrowing world a multinational community that reconciles unity with diversity has become a reality. It is a matter of the clearest common sense.

Today, 63 years after the birth of the State of Israel, a comparison can be made between the Arab spring and the successful pacification between France and Germany with a return of democracy in Europe after the two World Wars. Israel is no longer the only democratic country of Middle-East. Now the peoples of the region are choosing democracy, the pacification of the region has become possible.