There are moments in history that demand that one not remain silent when one is confronted with a matter of conscience. It requires that we act.

That moment is now ...

Early in this conflict centred now in Gaza, I had come to the conclusion that Israel had reached a tactical and strategic cul-de-sac. It has been borne of a deep denial that it lost the war on October 7. Some are only now beginning to realise it.

Rory Carroll, a Guardian columnist recently summed it up as follows:

“Some Israeli commentators and analysts said that behind the government’s continued rhetoric of vanquishing Hamas and total victory a rethink was taking place, prompted in part by the prospect of mounting IDF [Israel Defence Forces] casualties and waning international support for Israel amid carnage in Gaza.”

Israel, as a consequence of that “carnage”, is now a pariah state that practises state terrorism in the eyes of a majority of the global community. It is clear that it has been waging a vengeance campaign with impunity, courtesy of the United States, which has turned world opinion in revulsion firmly against them.

Even friends have begun to sow doubts. Except, that is, for the amoral ones — the American and European political elites, and assorted oligarchs — with Joe Biden, his Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, complicit in the worst war crimes seen in that immediate region for decades. All of this in four short weeks.

It’s just starting for the Israelis. Watch what happens when they fully realise that the global community is now demanding a two-state solution be implemented. Now! Not at some time or indeterminate date in a land far, far away. The clock is already ticking.

This demand is now being echoed belatedly by the US, which has conveniently brought it out of its diplomatic toolkit — if only in the service of a fruitless attempt at appeasement and in an effort to wipe away its undoubted shame.

This may even cost Biden his presidency next year, the direct opposite of what he envisioned when he threw his lot in with the extremists in that Israeli cabinet. Blinken should resign for this colossal failure of American statesmanship which has damaged credibility for all the world to see. Now, however, upon seeing clearly who they are in bed with in that extremist Israeli Government, they have belatedly begun to take baby steps away from their absolutist rhetoric that gave carte blanche to a radical, racist, settler-dominated group within the Israeli political ecosystem.

Perhaps they did not get the memo from the US State Department officials whose analysts they froze out from briefing the President within the first 48 hours of the conflict. They could have provided a more objective view of that Israeli Government, which could have provided a different pathway for Biden and avoided the massive damage to his own political credibility and public support. I suspect that memo would have simply said that Goliath can never be the hero of the story. Right now, it is Israel itself which is Goliath.

Ironically, in a tragic way, this is the same two-state solution that Binyamin Netanyahu and his political allies have been fighting all of their adult lives to ensure never sees the light of day. The one caveat, though, is that the adoption of such would be, at worst, prelude to civil war in Israel. At best, it would unleash a massive wave of unrest and indiscriminate killings, at a scale the likes of which Israel has never seen.

We all know and have known for decades that there is no viable Palestinian state without the illegal settlements on the West Bank and beyond being handed back to the Palestinians.

This would also vindicate former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, whose quest for a two-state solution summed up by the slogan “Land for Peace”, was rewarded with his assassination in 1995 by an extremist Israeli of Mizrahi background who was a supporter of the settler movement. It is the same radical political faction controlled by Mizrahis that rose to dominate the present Israeli coalition government pre-October 7.

By way of contrast, if Netanyahu and Co had a slogan, it would be “Facts on the Ground”. Thousands of hectares of Palestinian land over the past few decades were appropriated, mostly by Jewish, religious zealots, while the state turned a blind eye — or, conversely, actively harnessed the IDF and other state agencies to enable the dispossession of Palestinian land. And Israel’s chief patron, the US, had turned a blind eye to it all. This practice continues, even as the increasingly horrific conflict in Gaza, which is increasingly also engulfing the West Bank, proceeds unabated without a ceasefire in sight.

Why let a good crisis go to waste?

We must also acknowledge that the subsequently disowned Israeli cabinet position paper that called for the expulsion of the 2.3 million Gazans to the Sinai [for ever] showed their real intent. They call it “Greater Israel”. Under this map, there are no occupied territories — no West Bank, no Gaza and, most important, no Palestinian refugees. There is only Israel with a relatively small minority of so-called Arab citizens.

Simply put, the Israelis have become that which they once despised.

In closing, the deaths of close to 11,000 civilians, comprising thousands of women and more than 4,000 children, and those Israelis who fell victim on October 7 cannot and must not be in vain.

In that sense, Hamas and the right-wing extremists that have dominated Israeli politics since the assassination of Rabin are the mirror image of each other. They are both committed to what I would call a single-state solution — the maximalist solution. However, for both and for vastly different reasons, that vision is no longer sustainable for the Israelis — nor is it obtainable for Hamas, not that it ever was.

It is time to end the occupation of the West Bank and in Gaza — for real this time — and forge a new pathway to peace around the two-state solution, an old idea made new again amid this horrible, existential conflict.

Ps: I would like to commend Social Justice Bermuda, Khalid Wasi, Glenn Fubler, and those protesters and marchers who participated in the call for a ceasefire in Gaza, including hundreds of thousands globally over the weekend. They, too, would not allow the call of conscious to go unanswered. That takes real courage. They are far from alone, as my guesstimate is that anywhere from 70 per cent to 80 per cent of Africans and those within our diaspora, including those in the US, the Caribbean and Bermuda, have stood solidly behind the idea of a just peace for the Palestinians — and have done so for generations. To cite Bob Marley: “Who feels it knows it, Lord”.

• Rolfe Commissiong was the Progressive Labour Party MP for Pembroke South East (Constituency 21) between December 2012 and August 2020, and the former chairman of the joint select committee considering the establishment of a living wage