On Davos and other pretty things – Pfeffer in Haaretz:

‘I've only ever been to Davos once. I was 12, on an early bar mitzvah trip with my late grandmother, and we were passing through, visiting boring distant relatives who were renting a summer apartment there. I was too shy to ask then and I still don't understand today why anyone would go there outside of ski season. On the long monotonous walk we took up and down a hill on the edge of the town, I tried in vain to imagine it covered in snow.’

(…)

‘First, the war in Gaza ends with Hamas for all purposes no longer capable of exerting any authority in the enclave. Then Israel leaves Gaza and a "revitalized Palestinian Authority" takes control. In the third and final stage Israel and the PA relaunch the diplomatic process toward a two-state solution while Saudi Arabia normalizes its ties with Israel and writes an 11-figure check to fund the mega rebuilding project.’

(…)

‘The only problem is that Israel doesn't have such a leader right now. But there's an easy way out of all this. At least that's what anonymous sources in the Biden administration have been briefing NBC News last week. According to its report, "several senior U.S. officials told NBC News that [Benjamin] Netanyahu 'will not be there forever.'" They are engaging with other Israeli figures in the hope that Netanyahu's plummeting support means that soon he will no longer be prime minister. And with Netanyahu gone, the administration's plan can go ahead.’

(…)

‘The two nations are destined to live together in this slender sliver of land and have no real prospect of realizing their dream of getting rid of each other. But any solution based on wishing away the most fundamental religious and historic beliefs of Israelis and Palestinians is doomed to fail.’

Read the article here.

So, the messianism is there to stay, but despite the messianism a two-state-solution is possible.

If messianism would stay within mosques and synagogues many things are possible indeed.

And by the way, Davos is beautiful in summertime as well. But you need to like hiking, at least a bit.

At a certain point the price for Messianism might be just a tad too high. But the Middle East was, is and will be Polanski's Chinatown.