Why has the conflict in the Middle East escalated?

You also analyse how it came about that left-wing to far-left forces around the world deny Israel’s right to exist and side with Hamas. How did this happen??

In a recent interview with the well-known British television journalist Pier Morgan, singer Roger Waters (former lead singer of Pink Floyd) claimed that Israel had fabricated lies about Hamas’ rape campaign. When confronted with the UN reports proving the rape campaign and the International Criminal Court's requests for arrest warrants against Hamas leaders for this very reason, Waters insisted it was a fabrication. The philosopher Judith Butler, who has made a career out of defending women’s right not to be sexually essentialised, has made the same claim as Roger Waters.

In 1968, it was the French communist intellectual Maxime Rodinson who refused to accept that the Jewish people had any connection to the land of Israel. The fact that these people spoke Hebrew, or that Palestine is full of Jewish archaeological sites, or that there was a clear Jewish majority in Jerusalem in the Ottoman census of the early 19th century – all these facts were declared meaningless by Rodinson because they did not fit into his communist theory.

In many cases, people on both the left and the right do not want to be confronted with the facts, preferring to stick to their opinions. The problem with the left is that, unlike the right, it often makes global and universalist claims. Right-wing fascists don't really care about such claims, as long as they have their own turf. Left-wing extremists, on the other hand, all too often cloak their anti-Jewish and sometimes even anti-Semitic claims in a pseudo-universal, seemingly ‘objectivist’ veneer.  

Hamas denies Israel’s right to exist, sections of Israeli Jewry deny Palestine’s right to exist. Why?

Both believe that by demanding ethnic exclusivity they are strengthening their claim to their own homeland.

My main article has just been published in the highly acclaimed “The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Contemporary Migration”. In it, I emphasise that migrants are the most protected category in the Torah under Jewish law. And even if far-right religious Jews believe that the land belongs exclusively to them, they had a Jewish religious duty to annex the West Bank and grant full Israeli citizenship rights to the Palestinians there. This is exactly what Israel did to the Palestinians who remained in Israel after 1948 and were under military rule until 1966, when they were granted Israeli citizenship. If you really believe in religion that much, then it's not an à la carte menu. But if you misuse religion for your own secular, nationalistic emotions, then you are twisting your own religion to fit your exclusive nationalism.

Interestingly, an Islamist movement like Hamas quotes the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in its charter (Art. 32). What does an Islamist movement have to do with a vile anti-Semitic text written in 1905 in Tsarist Russia? But if you want to manipulate Islam for your own nationalist agenda, anything goes.

With the exception of Iran, the other Arab states are conspicuously reluctant to support Hamas. What is the position of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, for example?

These neighbouring countries are about the only ‘responsible adults’ in the region. Morocco could also be added to this list of countries working for the better. All of these states, with the exception of Egypt, the seat of the Arab League, are ‘sherif’ kingdoms, that is, kingdoms that trace their royal lineage directly back to the Prophet Muhammad. I think these states feel a real sense of responsibility and duty to improve the West Asian region.

And since there is so little hope in this region at the moment, they are the only ones who provide any form of optimism for me. 

What will it take for a solution to the war-like situation between Hamas and Israel?

The only possibility is that the international community manages to persuade both sides to reach a compromise. The situation reminds me strongly of the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s: without the immense pressure during the Dayton Agreement and later during the NATO mission in Kosovo (1998–1999), there would have been no end to the violence.

It will take a lot more intervention from above and hard pressure to get both sides to compromise, because neither side is acting with any serious degree of reason anymore.