[[link removed]]

THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION IS AN UNJUST, IMPOSSIBLE FANTASY  
[[link removed]]


 

Tareq Baconi
April 1, 2024
New York Times
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The Two-State solution mantra has allowed policymakers to avoid
confronting the reality that partition is unattainable in the case of
Israel and Palestine, and illegitimate as an arrangement originally
imposed on Palestinians without their consent. _

, Chantal Jahchan

 

After 176 days, Israel’s assault on Gaza has not stopped and has
expanded into what Human Rights Watch has declared
[[link removed]] to
be a policy of starvation as a weapon of war. More than 32,000
Palestinians have been killed, and the international community has
reverted to a deeply familiar call for a two-state solution, under
which Palestinians and Israelis can coexist in peace and security.
President Biden even declared “the only real solution is a two-state
solution” in his State of the Union address last month.

But the call rings hollow. The language that surrounds a two-state
solution has lost all meaning. Over the years, I’ve encountered many
Western diplomats who privately roll their eyes at the prospect of two
states — given Israel’s staunch opposition to it, the lack of
interest in the West in exerting enough pressure on Israel to change
its behavior and Palestinian political ossification — even as their
politicians repeat the phrase ad nauseam. Yet in the shadow of what
the International Court of Justice has said could plausibly be
genocide, everyone has returned to the chorus line, stressing that the
gravity of the situation means that this time will be different.

It will not be. Repeating the two-state solution mantra has allowed
policymakers to avoid confronting the reality that partition is
unattainable in the case of Israel and Palestine, and illegitimate as
an arrangement originally imposed on Palestinians without their
consent in 1947. And fundamentally, the concept of the two-state
solution has evolved to become a central pillar of sustaining
Palestinian subjugation and Israeli impunity. The idea of two states
as a pathway to justice has in and of itself normalized the daily
violence meted out against Palestinians by Israel’s regime of
apartheid.

The circumstances facing Palestinians before Oct. 7, 2023, exemplified
how deadly the status quo had become. In 2022, Israeli violence
killed at least 34
[[link removed]] Palestinian
children in the West Bank, the most in 15 years, and by mid-2023, that
rate was on track to exceed those levels. Yet the Biden administration
still saw fit to further legitimize Israel, expanding its diplomatic
relations in the region and rewarding it with a U.S. visa waiver
[[link removed]].
Palestine was largely absent from the international agenda until
Israeli Jews were killed on Oct. 7. The fact that Israel and its
allies were ill prepared for any kind of challenge to Israeli rule
underscores just how invisible the Palestinians were and how
sustainable their oppression was deemed to be on the global stage.

This moment of historical rupture offers blood-soaked proof that
policies to date have failed, yet countries seek to resurrect them all
the same. Instead of taking measures showing a genuine commitment to
peace — like meaningfully pressuring Israel to end settlement
[[link removed]] building
and lift the blockade on Gaza or discontinuing America’s expansive
military support
[[link removed]] —
Washington is doing the opposite. The United States has aggressively
wielded its use of its veto at the United Nations Security Council,
and even when it abstains, as it did in the recent vote
[[link removed]] leading
to the first resolution for a cease-fire since Oct. 7, it claims such
resolutions are nonbinding. The United States is funding Israel’s
military while defunding the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, a critical
institution for Palestinians, bolstering the deeply unpopular and
illegitimate Palestinian Authority, which many Palestinians now
consider to be a subcontractor to the occupation, and subverting
[[link removed]] international
law by limiting avenues of accountability for Israel. In effect, these
actions safeguard Israeli impunity.

The vacuity of the two-state solution mantra is most obvious in how
often policymakers speak of recognizing a Palestinian state without
discussing an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory.
Quite the contrary: With the United States reportedly
[[link removed]] exploring
initiatives to recognize Palestinian statehood, it is simultaneously
defending Israel’s prolonged occupation at the International Court
of Justice, arguing that Israel faces “very real security needs”
that justify its continued control over Palestinian territories.

What might explain this seeming contradiction?

The concept of partition has long been used as a blunt policy tool by
colonial powers to manage the affairs of their colonies, and Palestine
was no exception. The Zionist movement emerged within the era of
European colonialism and was given its most important imprimatur by
the British Empire. The Balfour Declaration, issued by the British in
1917, called for a “national home for the Jewish people” in
Palestine without adequately accounting for the Palestinians who
constituted a vast majority in the region and whom Balfour referred to
simply as “non-Jewish communities.” This declaration was then
imposed on the Palestinians, who by 1922 had become Britain’s
colonized subjects and were not asked to give consent to the
partitioning of their homeland. Three decades later, the United
Nations institutionalized partition with the passage of the 1947 plan,
which called for
[[link removed]] partitioning
Palestine into two independent states, one Palestinian Arab and the
other Jewish.

All of Palestine’s neighboring countries in the Middle East and
North Africa that had achieved independence from their colonial rulers
and joined the United Nations voted against the 1947 plan. The
Palestinians were not formally considered in a vote that many saw as
illegitimate; it partitioned their homeland to accommodate Zionist
immigration, which they had resisted from the onset. The Palestine
Liberation Organization, established more than a decade later,
formalized this opposition, insisting
[[link removed]] that Palestine
as defined within the boundaries that existed during the British
Mandate was “an indivisible territorial unit”; it forcefully
refused two states and by the late 1970s was fighting for
[[link removed]] a
secular, democratic state. By the 1980s, however, the P.L.O. chairman,
Yasir Arafat, along with most of the organization’s leadership, had
come to accept that partition was the pragmatic choice, and many
Palestinians who had by then been ground down by the machinery of the
occupation accepted it as a way of achieving separateness from Israeli
settlers and the creation of their own state.

It took more than three decades for Palestinians to understand that
separateness would never come, that the goal of this policy was to
maintain the illusion_ _of partition in some distant future
indefinitely. In that twilight zone, Israel’s expansionist violence
increased and became more forthright, as Israeli leaders became more
brazen in their commitment to full control from the Jordan River to
the Mediterranean Sea. Israel also relied on discredited Palestinian
leaders to sustain their control — primarily those who lead the
Palestinian Authority and who collaborate with Israel’s machinations
and make do with nonsovereign, noncontiguous Bantustans that never
challenge Israel’s overarching domination. This kind of demographic
engineering, which entails geographic isolation of unwanted
populations behind walls, is central to apartheid regimes. Repeating
the aspiration for two states and arguing that partition remains
viable presents Israel as a Jewish and democratic state — separate
from its occupation — giving it a veneer of palatability and
obfuscating the reality that it rules over more non-Jews than Jews
[[link removed]].

Seen in this light, the failed attempts at a two-state solution are
not a failure for Israel at all but a resounding success, as they have
fortified Israel’s grip over this territory while peace negotiations
ebbed and flowed but never concluded. In recent years, international
[[link removed]] and
Israeli human rights organizations have acknowledged what many
Palestinians have long argued: that Israel is a perpetrator of
apartheid. B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights
organization, concluded
[[link removed]] that
Israel is a singular regime of Jewish supremacy from the river to the
sea.

Now, with international attention once again focused on the region,
many Palestinians understand the dangers of discussing partition, even
as a pragmatic option. Many refuse to resuscitate this hollowed-out
policy-speak. In a message recently published anonymously, a group of
Palestinians on the ground and in the diaspora state
[[link removed]] wrote:
“The partition of Palestine is nothing but a legitimation of
Zionism, a betrayal of our people and the final completion of the
nakba,” or catastrophe, which refers to the expulsion and flight of
about 750,000 Palestinians with Israel’s founding. “Our liberation
can only be achieved through a unity of struggle, built upon a unity
of people and a unity of land.”

For them, the Palestinian state that their inept leaders continue to
peddle, even if achievable, would fail to undo the fact that
Palestinian refugees are unable to return to their homes, now in
Israel, and that Palestinian citizens of Israel would continue to
reside as second-class citizens
[[link removed]] within a so-called
Jewish state.

Global powers might choose to ignore this sentiment as unrealistic, if
they even take note of it. They might also choose to ignore Israeli
rejection of a two-state solution, as Israeli leaders drop any
pretenses and explicitly oppose any pathway to Palestinian statehood.
As recently as January, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said
[[link removed].] that
Israel “must have security control over the entire territory west of
the Jordan River.” He added, “That collides with the idea of
sovereignty. What can we do?”

And yet_ _the two-state solution continues to be at the forefront for
policymakers who have returned to contorting the reality of an
expansionist regime into a policy prescription they can hold on to.
They cycle through provisions that the Palestinian state must be
demilitarized, that Israel will maintain security oversight, that not
every state in the world has the same level of sovereignty. It is like
watching a century of failure, culminating in the train wreck of the
peace process, replay itself in the span of the past five months.

This will not be the first time that Palestinian demands are not taken
into account as far as their own future is concerned. But all
policymakers should heed the lesson of Oct. 7: There will be neither
peace nor justice while Palestinians are subjugated behind walls and
under Israeli domination.

A single state from the river to the sea might appear unrealistic or
fantastical or a recipe for further bloodshed. But it is the only
state that exists in the real world — not in the fantasies of
policymakers. The question, then, is: How can it be transformed into
one that is just?

Mr. Baconi is the author of “Hamas Contained” and the president of
the board of al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network.

* Israel
[[link removed]]
* Palestine
[[link removed]]
* Two-state Solution
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]