In the Israeli Parliament, Syrian and Saudi voices legitimize Israeli apartheid
On July 9, 2025, the Israeli Parliament welcomed two unusual Arab guests: Shadi Martini, Syrian activist in exile, and Abdulaziz Alkhamis, Saudi journalist. Their arrival was aimed at promoting a vision of “regional peace”, as part of a new “lobby for a security arrangement”. An initiative which is part of the logic of the Abraham agreements, and which claims to lay the foundations for normalization between Israel and certain Arab regimes. But behind diplomatic smiles and speeches on “coexistence”, a company of legitimization of the unthinkable: that of an apartheid regime engaged in a genocide in Gaza is looming.
A “peace” speech in the middle of a genocide
According to the words reported by the Times of IsraelShadi Martini would have mentioned a recent meeting with the new Syrian president Ahmed Al-Sharaa, who would have qualified a possible peace with Israel as a “unique opportunity, which only presents itself once every hundred years”. But how can we speak of peace with a state which, before our eyes, is carrying out a war of extermination against a civilian population?
Since October 2023, the Ministry of Health in Gaza has reported more than 57,000 dead in the Gaza Strip. But a recent independent study believes that the real human assessment, including the violent deaths (bombing, shots, executions) and non -violent (hunger, thirst, unrealized injuries, collapse of hospitals), now exceeds 100,000 victims. It is a hecatombe of unprecedented magnitude, which one cannot qualify otherwise only by name: a genocide.
Destroyed hospitals, targeted schools, sprayed refugee camps, water and systematic food cuts: the facts are there, documented by international NGOs, independent journalists and legal institutions. The International Court of Justice itself recognized, through conservatory measures, the plausibility of the act of genocide.
In this context, the enthusiasm of certain Arabic figures for a rapprochement with Israel is not only blind, but moral complicity. Still according to the Times of IsraelSaudi journalist Abdulaziz Alkhamis would have called Israel to “commit to coexistence”. A diplomatic rhetoric as hollow as it is cynical. Can we seriously evoke coexistence with a state that colonizes, expels, denies the national rights of a people and methodically organizes its physical, social and political destruction? This facade language only serves to whiten the crimes in progress and to prepare opinions to accept the unacceptable: a peace without justice, without memory, without recognition of the rights of the Palestinians. A peace of the elites, negotiated far from peoples and against their will.
What must be said, loud and clear: one does not negotiate peace with a state that leads a genocide. We do not normalize with colonial power. True peace, the only one that deserves this name, can only arise from the ruins of the apartheid system, with the full recognition of the rights of the Palestinian people: right to self -determination, right to return, end of the occupation and dismantling of the colonies. As long as these conditions are not met, all the speeches on “regional peace” will only be diplomatic lures. And those who participate – consciously or not – will have to respond to history, and to the peoples they claim to represent.
