France's Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Noel Barrot, centre, with participants during the Paris Peace Forum. The conference comes ahead of France’s expected recognition of a Palestinian state.THIBAUD MORITZ/AFP/Getty Images
Even as war raged on in Gaza, and Israel was launching a new war on Iran, several hundred Israelis and Palestinians gathered Friday in the French capital to try to restart long-dormant peace talks.
Among them were Gazans who had escaped the inferno of 616 days of war in the narrow coastal territory.
“I’m Rita, but there are two million names in Gaza, two million people who want to live. So this war must end now,” Rita Baroud, a 22-year-old journalist who got out of Gaza only a month ago, told the conference in a speech that drew a standing ovation. “Don’t let Gaza bleed in silence. Don’t kill our hopes the way our bodies are being killed.”
The conference was also attended by several Israelis who lost family members in the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023.
The meeting, hosted by President Emmanuel Macron and the Paris Peace Forum he founded in 2018 to deal with mounting international crises, represented the first substantive attempt since Oct. 7 to restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
The conference also came ahead of France’s expected recognition of a Palestinian state. Le Monde reported last month that Paris is hoping Canada and Britain will take the same step at the same time.
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The Oct. 7 attacks saw 1,200 Israelis killed, prompting Israel to invade Gaza. Fifty-three Israelis remain hostages of Hamas, some of whom are believed to have died.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health says more than 55,000 Gazans have been killed amid the fighting, which has left most of the strip in ruins. The World Food Programme warned last month that 470,000 people were facing “catastrophic hunger” as a result of Israel’s siege.
Nidal Foqaha, the executive director of the Palestine Peace Coalition, said he believed the way to end the conflict in Gaza is to revive the two-state solution that has been at the centre of more than three decades of peace talks.
But that faith in a negotiated solution isn’t shared by all Palestinians. Mr. Foqaha and other Palestinian attendees were criticized online for attending the conference alongside Israelis while the war continued in Gaza.
“Those who criticize us … they are seeing it in a different way,” Mr. Foqaha said. “But we see it in our own way, and we will continue our pursuit and our struggle for the realization of the two-state solution.”
Ms. Baroud was one of just two Gazans – among 80 who sought to attend the conference – who were allowed to board a chartered flight Thursday from Cairo to Paris. It wasn’t clear whether they had been denied exit permits by Egypt or whether French authorities had refused them entry visas.
Israeli peace activists, who easily outnumbered their Palestinian counterparts at the conference, said they also faced criticism for promoting the idea of an independent Palestinian state when many Israelis are still reeling from the horrors of Oct. 7.
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“One of the challenges we face in Israel is that people say: ‘How could you?’” said Mor Ynon, who became a peace activist after her parents were murdered in their home by Hamas gunmen on Oct. 7. Ms. Ynon said the mayhem of that day “made me realize that I wanted to dialogue and I wanted to meet people from the other side of the fence who also believe in non-violence.”
Gershon Baskin, a long-time Israeli peace activist and hostage negotiator, said the Paris meeting was the second time Israeli and Palestinian peacemakers had met recently, after a smaller gathering in Cyprus in February that was held under Chatham House rules, ensuring there would be no publicity. The group decided in Cyprus that their next meeting should be held in public, so the world could see that there were still Israelis and Palestinians dedicated to a peace based on the idea of two states for two peoples.
“We need to convince Israelis and Palestinians that on both sides there are partners for peace,” Mr. Baskin said. “We need to go against the common understanding where each side claims that it wants peace but the other doesn’t.”
Mr. Baskin, a veteran of the painstaking peace negotiations of the 1990s and early 2000s, said there was no need to start over from scratch when it came to hammering out the details. The Paris conference broadly endorsed an agreement reached in 2008 between then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former Palestinian foreign affairs minister Nasser al-Kidwa.
That deal fell apart when Mr. Olmert was forced to resign over corruption charges. The updated Olmert-Kidwa proposal calls for an immediate end to the fighting, the release of all hostages and Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza as preconditions for moving toward the two-state plan.
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The proposed pact would eventually see Jerusalem shared as the capital of both states, as well as land swaps that would allow Israel to keep its largest settlement blocks in the West Bank in exchange for expanding Gaza and the creation of a land corridor linking the coastal strip to the rest of the Palestinian territories.
Both Mr. Olmert and Mr. al-Kidwa took part in the Paris conference. Mr. Olmert called their joint proposal “the only plan which is compatible to the fundamental needs of both sides.”
The Paris effort comes at a charged moment in international diplomacy. On Tuesday, Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Norway – all long-time supporters of Israel – took the unprecedented step of slapping sanctions and travel bans on Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, two far-right members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet, for inciting “extremist violence and serious abuses of Palestinian human rights.”
That drew a rare condemnation from the United States, exposing a rift that could deepen this weekend as G7 leaders gather in Kananaskis, Alta.
Palestinians and their allies had been expecting Mr. Macron to announce his country’s recognition of an independent Palestinian state at a United Nations conference on the two-state solution next week, which France is co-hosting with Saudi Arabia. However, Reuters reported Friday that the conference would be postponed because of Israel’s attack on Iran.
Reuters separately reported that the U.S. had sent a diplomatic cable to an unspecified number of countries in recent days urging them not to attend the UN conference and warning that “unilaterally recognizing a Palestinian state would effectively render Oct. 7 Palestinian Independence Day.”
Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand’s office, in an e-mailed reply to questions from The Globe and Mail, said “recognition of a Palestinian state by Canada will come at a time when it is most conducive to building a lasting, sustainable peace.”