Rebuilding Peace in the Middle East

Notes for Plenary Presentation to World Peace Forum, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 3 July 2026

Quoting US Vice-President JD Vance with approval is not something I thought I would ever do. But he was absolutely right when, in response to criticism by hardline Israeli leaders of the Iran peace deal last month, he said: “You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have”.

This is advice which could very appropriately be directed to the US itself, above all in recent decades in its conduct of Middle East policy, which has too often preferred bombs to diplomacy, most notably in Iraq in 2003, and now again in Iran this year— also with disastrous results.

The tearing up by the first Trump administration of the painfully negotiated Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), under which in 2015 Iran agreed to very significantly limit its nuclear program for the next fifteen years in return for sanctions and other relief, was a shocking abdication of sense, decency and respect for international agreements. It undercut the moderates in Tehran, provoked a hard-line backlash, and set the stage for this year’s US-Israel initiated war.

This was a war that began while negotiations were ongoing, without any pretence that there was an imminent threat from Iran of the kind that might, under international law, justify Israeli self-defence with US support. And it is a war ending, if it does now end (as hopefully it will with further successful mediation diplomacy from Pakistan), with the global economy battered, none of the stated US-Israeli objectives achieved, and Iran – with its capacity to control the Strait of Hormuz now unequivocally established – in a demonstrably stronger position than before.

As to the nuclear threat posed by Iran, scepticism is justified as to whether this has ever been real. Tehran certainly wanted to demonstrate its technical capability, and was happy to thumb its nose at the West by not compromising on its ‘right to enrich’ under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But it has always understood that to actually acquire any nuclear weapons was fraught with peril. It would be bound to provoke attack from a formidably armed Israel; meet with zero tolerance from China and Russia; trigger painful new international sanctions; and make Iran’s tense but manageable relations with its Arab neighbours much more perilous, likely triggering a nuclear arms race in the region, making short-lived any hegemony bought by its own weapon.

And there was also, at least so long as Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was alive, a quite genuine religious objection to acquiring this most indiscriminately inhumane weapon of all. To the extent that there was ever an Iranian nuclear threat, or continues to be one now, it is only cooperative diplomacy of the kind we saw in 2015, and to which all the Security Council P5 were contributors, that can end it, not US or Israeli bombs.

The country that most needs to heed JD Vance’s advice is Israel itself. Its unwillingness or inability, for decades now – too often with unthinking reflexive support from the US – to negotiate a just political solution which meets the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people, and its periodic resort to overweening violence to crush Palestinian opposition, continues to lie at the heart of the Middle East’s ongoing catastrophic instability.

It is the central reason for the hostility Iran and its proxies have directed toward Israel. It is the reason why the much-heralded Abraham Accords have failed to achieve their intended normalization of relations between Israel and key Arab and Muslim majority states. And it is the reason why Israel, so long as it continues to contemptuously reject legitimate Palestinian aspirations, will – as the horrendous attacks of October 7, 2023 made terribly clear – never be free of the spectre of terrorism or external attack.

To understand the roots of October 7 is not to justify the slaughter of innocents, then or ever. Israel was undoubtedly entitled to respond with all the force that international law allows. But for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s government – and those who blindly support it – to remain in denial about those roots, and to offer no political way forward, is simply to invite more of the same. This is especially true now that so many ordinary, decent Palestinians have been displaced, traumatized, and angered by the disproportionate genocidal savagery of the Israeli response in Gaza, and its continuing attacks on Lebanon.

My decades of experience with conflict prevention and resolution both as Foreign Minister and heading the International Crisis Group, including years of talking to all sides in the Middle East, have drummed home to me the truth that despair – the loss of hope – can all too easily turn into rage, and then into indefensible outrage. By the same token, history shows that the threat of violence diminishes rapidly during those periods – and there have been several over the years, for example immediately after Oslo – when there was genuine hope for a just and dignified settlement.

Most of the rest of the world is now telling Israel that the best way forward is diplomacy rather than further violence – echoing Vance, that it can’t kill its way out of solving its security problems. If Israelis really want a more secure future, it is time for them to listen. While it will be nightmarishly difficult now to negotiate a credible two-state solution, given the outrageously unconstrained scale of illegal settlements on the West Bank, with a change of Israeli government this is not completely impossible. But such a negotiation could only begin to succeed if an endgame-first approach is adopted: with the parties first reaching agreement on what the final outcome should be on all disputed issues, and then reverse-engineering the operational steps to get there. Relying on step-by-step confidence building, as in the past, just makes the process hostage to the last extremist on either side.

Certainly the effort must be made, not only because the two-state solution remains overwhelmingly the preferred policy internationally, but also because this is so obviously in Israel’s own long-term interest. As many analysts have said for years, Israel can be a Jewish state, a democratic state, and a state occupying the whole of historical Judea and Samaria. But it cannot be all three at the same time. As Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy recently wrote, Israelis have to decide “what we want – two states, one democratic state or one suicidal apartheid state. There is no fourth option, and there will never be one.”

Constructing a viable pan-Palestinian government – preferably with the support of key regional players – will certainly be a long haul. I am among those who have long believed that the imprisoned Palestinian activist Marwan Barghouti – popular in both Gaza and the West Bank – could be the Mandela-like unifier that Palestinians desperately need. But for precisely that reason, persuading Israel to release him will be a Herculean task, at least as long as Netanyahu remains in power.

Regardless of whether the two-state solution proves to have any life left in it, conferring on Palestine the extra legitimacy, leverage, and bargaining power that is inherent in recognizing its statehood, which the US and a number of key European states still refuse to do, would help achieve for both sides a future that is better than the awful status quo. Even if the only remaining option is to negotiate a new, democratic, non-apartheid single state (in which Palestinians enjoy fully equal rights alongside Israel’s Jewish population), giving Palestinians more legitimacy and weight at the bargaining table would serve the goal of securing a sustainable peace.

Rebuilding peace in the Middle East will of course require, in addition to all these changes of political direction, a massive financial commitment by the international community to rebuild a totally devastated Gaza to its pre-war state, at a cost recently estimated by the World Bank, EU and the UN to be upwards of $71 billion over five years. And in this context it has become obvious that the vehicle for doing so will have to be something other than the US-proposed Board of Peace – just another misconceived Trump vanity project, not a serious attempt to harness international resources to right an ugly wrong.

Some may perhaps ask why it is that the need for sustainable peace in the Middle East still commands such attention in our own Asia-Pacific region, including my own country Australia – and is the subject of this first Forum plenary! –when we are all so far distant from the action.

One part of the answer is now supremely obvious: the global economic impact of the latest Gulf war, with skyrocketing oil prices, rising costs of global commodities, and deepening levels of food insecurity and poverty. None of us are immune from these impacts, although China has insulated itself better than most with its foresight in building massive oil reserves.

But there is another answer as to why the failure to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the root of just about every other threat to peace in the region, should matter to us all, and that is its human impact. This certainly resonates in Australia, where more than half our population was born overseas, or has at least one overseas-born parent, and where nearly a million Australians identify their origins as Arab or Palestinian, or their religion as Islam. When Middle East tensions explode locally, as they did in the terrible mass shooting of Jewish Australians at Sydney’s Bondi Beach last December, the whole country is devastated.

The suffering that continues to be generated by Israel’s inability to come to terms with the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people is nothing less than an assault on our common humanity. And that alone is sufficient reason why every country that can possibly contribute to rebuilding peace in the Middle East, including China, should do just that.