The Ben-Ami recipe for Netanyahu: “He must have the same courage that we have seen with peace in Colombia”

The Nobel Peace Prize winner Juan Manuel Santos and the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Israel Shlomo Ben-Ami spoke this Tuesday at the World in Progress forum, organized by the PRISA group in Barcelona, ​​about an issue as urgent as it is liquid: peace in the world at a time when everything seems to be about to explode. After the Colombian Government, led by Abelardo de la Espriella, questioned the peace agreement with the FARC guerrilla before the UN Security Council, both have come out to defend it. Ben-Ami, by elevation, by using it as an example of what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would have to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict: “He must have the same courage that we have seen in Colombia.” Santos, like its architect: “There are politicians who are not against peace, but who want to maintain their little bit of power,” he lamented.

Santos recalled that on few occasions in its history has the Security Council been as unanimous as in the approval of the verification missions on the Colombian peace process. The last one, precisely, was renewed on the 30th, despite criticism from the Colombian ambassador Mauricio Gaona. “How do you describe an ambassador who arrives, sits before the Council and tells its members that everything they have done in the last ten years is of no use, that they were wrong?” asked the former president, who described as “clumsiness” the commitment of De la Espriella's Executive to question the peace process.

Ben-Ami has brought up the irony that Santos was the one who approved the peace agreement with the FARC, but others were in charge of implementing it. A situation similar to the one Netanyahu had to face with the roadmap left by Ariel Sharon. The 2016 Nobel Peace Prize winner has regretted that his three successors in the presidency of Colombia have not asked him for advice on peace. Iván Duque tried to reduce them, but Congress prevented him from doing so; Gustavo Petro did tell him about his Total Peace initiative, which Santos has described as a failure (he sought to negotiate with all the groups at the same time) and, finally, there has been the feeling that there is no dialogue with De la Espriella.

“There are politicians who are not against peace, but who want to maintain their little bit of power,” stressed the former president, who believes that precisely the failure of Petro's plans has also been used against him. “Those opposed to the peace agreement with the FARC began to say that the insecurity caused by the criminal gangs that were strengthened by the Total Peace had been a product of the Peace Agreement when it was quite the opposite,” he lamented.

Santos has revealed the weight that Ben-Ami had in the birth of a peace process in which, according to the UN, 85% of the almost 14,000 signatory guerrillas were still linked to some reintegration program this year and meant that they could attend the elections in Colombia. He recalled a key moment during a meeting between the two in Paris. "Shlomo told me: 'I know the dilemma you are facing, I know how difficult it is. But do the following exercise. Stand in front of a grave and look back and ask yourself the following question. If I had had the courage to take the risk of starting a peace process and it had been successful, how many lives would I have saved?'" he recalled.