According to the Lebanese geopolitical analyst, Ralph Baydoun, the conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Middle East should be ended by the diplomatic involvement of several parties, among which the main role will be played by Israel, the Palestinian Authority, the United States, Turkey, and Qatar.

Baydoun, who lives and works in Beirut, spoke about this on the N1 television program, hoping that at some point the US, as a strong influencing factor, will finally say “Enough is enough”.

“All the active parties, directly or indirectly, must sit down at the table. In this war, Qatar has a good role to play. They, like Turkey, will have to get involved diplomatically. The Americans are a big influencing factor here, just like Israel,” said Ralph Baydoun, who strongly criticised the Israeli forces, labelling their military activities in the Gaza Strip as genocide.

“The West began to criticize Israel intensively and now we can hear statements about the unacceptability of the loss of a large number of civilians,” he said.

Speaking about the relations in Lebanon and the position of Christian communities in the Middle East, the analyst said that as a Lebanese Christian, he felt that there was a lack of penetration in the contribution that Christians can make to mediate in building peace in the Middle East.

“The most damage is caused to us in the Middle East by constant wars, colonization and invasions. Christians fled from Iraq after the American invasion of that country. Christian communities, although there are still some left, have fled from Syria to a significant extent, but they are still being followed by constant ISIS attacks. We live in Lebanon, and we want to stay here, even though the demographics are changing. We are indigenous to this land and always have been,” Baydoun told N1.

Diversity then and now

He criticized theories about the clash of civilizations and the “Christian West” or the “Muslim East”. Baydoun also commented on Islamophobia in the West:

“Islamophobia in Europe is a direct consequence of the theory of the clash of civilizations developed by Samuel P. Huntington in 1996,” the Lebanese publicist and geopolitical analyst concluded.

Baydoun said that the diversity of the population in the Middle East, especially in Lebanon, was not a problem in the past, before the colonization processes, but that today this country rests on a sectarian system in which each of the religious groups can block the institutions.

“If the Shiites withdraw from the session, the session is automatically declared unconstitutional,” he said.