By Mamdouh Habashi
Book: The Palestine Question II – The two-state trap
Author: Mamdouh Habashi
Cover: Rabab Hakem
First Edition
April 2024
Introduction
In fact, I was surprised by the many and varied reactions to the coalition’s booklet No. 13, “The Palestinian Question,” as if I had presented a unique work on this thorny issue – which is certainly not the case.
Reactions varied between intense praise – often exaggerated – and criticism or criticism that reached the point of disparagement. The majority of those criticized were Europeans who were influenced to an unhealthy extent by the Zionist propaganda that has dominated media and education in Western Europe for decades.
But there were also those Europeans who praised the text and even tried to revise it with constructive criticism. Therefore, I would like here to inform the honorable reader of the most important additions that I received, and I believe that they are worth it.
In contrast to many political terms that must be defined by International Law specialists, such as terrorism, for example, these jurists have developed a definition – which has changed and been revised over time – for genocide. The most famous professor of international law, from the University of Hamburg, Norman Paech[1], drew my attention to this, so he sent me a letter. An article in this regard, entitled “Iron Swords” – Genocide in Gaza[2], stated:
International law is sober and unsentimental, and has formulated its criteria for genocide in Article 2 of the 1948 Genocide Convention, Article 6 of the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and Article 6 of the German International Criminal Code of 2002, which unanimously state that: “ Genocide is any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such.” These actions include: “Killing members of that group, although the number is not important.” As well as “causing serious physical or mental harm to members of the group,” and “deliberately imposing living conditions on the group that would lead to its physical destruction, in whole or in part.”
Anyone who sees pictures of the ruins of the Gaza Strip and hears the reports of its people can easily realize that the stereotypical reports in the media about Israeli attacks against Hamas sites are nothing but an incompetent attempt to justify the indiscriminate war against the entire population of the Gaza Strip as a real war of defense. This “war of extermination against Hamas” shows that Hamas is not a small sect, nor is it a “cartel,” but rather it is clearly an organization with broad branches in society, the elimination of which requires expulsions and indiscriminate war even on non-participants. Only a cynic could justify this as unavoidable collateral damage in a defensive war.
As for my professor, the great historian Dr. Assem Al-Desouki, he sent me what he wrote about the founding phase of the State of Israel, including very important events, especially what happened behind the scenes, which even specialists may not know. Therefore, I considered it my duty to publish it, as it might enrich the dialogue.
The birth of the Jewish state;
The largest political fraud in history in the name of religion..
During World War I (1914-1918), the foundation stone was laid for the establishment of a state for the Jews. The Sykes-Picot Agreement was concluded in May 1916 between England and France regarding the division of the Ottoman Levant between them, and Palestine was England’s share. Accordingly, the famous Balfour Declaration[4] was issued on of November 2, 1917 regarding Britain’s sympathy for establishing a national homeland for the Jews in Palestine.
When Jerusalem fell into the hands of the British forces in mid-1917 during the war, General Allenby, the leader of the campaign, announced the establishment of a military administration called the “Southern Administration of the Occupied Enemy Countries.” The enemy here is Turkey (the Ottoman Empire), and the country is Palestine 1918. Within the framework of that administration, Chaim Weizmann, head of the World Zionist Organization, came to visit Jerusalem on April 27, 1918, at the invitation of Colonel Storrs, Governor-General of Jerusalem, and met with an elite of Jerusalem men and notables, and a number of Arab men. He explained to them that the Jews were returning to Palestine to connect the past with the present in order to recreate An intellectual and literary center, and warned them against believing the slanders that inform them about the goals of Zionism, and that the “returning” Jews would not harm their neighbors in any cultural or agricultural project.
Before coming to Jerusalem, Weizmann had obtained Lord Balfour’s approval for the idea of laying a foundation stone for the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus on July 24, 1918. With the end of World War I in October 1918, the way was well paved for the completion of the Zionist project in Palestine. In the summer of 1920, the Allies met in San Remo[5], southern Italy, to implement the secret Sykes-Picot agreement in the form of the mandate system approved by the League of Nations[6], and England became the mandate of Palestine starting from 1922.
England chose Herbert Samuel, an English Jew, to head the British Mandate government in Palestine. It began working to implement the Balfour Declaration, where the “Jewish Agency” was established, which is like a shadow government to manage Jewish affairs, as it included officials in all areas of life: agriculture, industry, trade, education…etc. It was decided to establish a board of directors of Jews and Arabs (Christians and Muslims) equally, but the Arabs refused because the equality was not consistent with the ratio of Arabs to Jews. Pressure began on the Arabs to leave their lands through indirect methods, which included facilitating borrowing to spend on agriculture by mortgaging the land. If the Arab farmer was unable to repay the debt, the land would be withdrawn from him in repayment of the debt. In the event of a boom in crops, the Mandate government would place obstacles in front of Arab farmers that would prevent them from exporting their products, so they would be unable to pay off their debts, so the land would be withdrawn… and so on.
A few months before the outbreak of World War II, in May 1939, the British government issued the White Paper on appeasing the Arabs of Palestine. The book specified a transitional period of ten years, after which all powers would be handed over to the people of Palestine, on the condition that Britain ensures good relations between the two components of the population there!! Each group should enjoy an independent entity in cultural, social and administrative affairs under the new state. The number of Jewish immigrants in the following five years was also set at seventy-five thousand, and after that, immigrants may not be accepted except with the approval of the Arabs and after ensuring the country’s economic ability to absorb them.
Ben-Gurion commented on the matter by saying: “Let us look at the White Paper as if there was no war, and let us proceed with this war alongside the Allies as if there was no White Paper”. Accordingly, Chaim Weizmann contacted British Prime Minister Churchill in December 1939 and presented him with a project to establish a Jewish state in Palestine that could accommodate four million immigrants. Not only did Churchill agree to it, but he sent Weizmann to the United States to put his experience as a chemist at the service of the military industry and play a secret role in dragging the United States into an alliance with Britain in the war. In Washington, Weizmann succeeded in strengthening his ties with US President Roosevelt, and the Jews began to have a strong influence on the American government that intensified after it entered the war. The man revealed that Zionist ambitions were no longer limited to the idea of a national homeland in Palestine, but rather to transform all of Palestine into a “Jewish commonwealth.”
While London was considered the main center of the Zionist movement during World War I, he moved to New York City during World War II. In this city, the most important conference in the history of Zionism was held, known by the name of the hotel in which it was held, which was the Baltimore Hotel. This was during May 1943 and was attended by delegates from Zionist organizations in the world, and eleven members of the American Senate, including Harry Truman, who would become president of America. The conference demanded that the door to immigration for Jews to Palestine be opened wide without restrictions and under the supervision of the Jewish Agency and not the British Mandate government, and that Jewish divisions be formed to fight alongside the Allies under their own flag. Britain accepted the involvement of a Jewish battalion on the battlefield in Europe. After the end of the war, the battalion returned to Palestine without handing over its weapons and began using them to attack safe Palestinian villages under the supervision of the British authorities.
The matter was not limited to that, but the Zionist gangs began attacking the English Mandate government in order to leave Palestine and declare the Jewish state. The Mandate administration proceeded to arrest most of the leaders of the Jewish Agency and search the Jewish settlements in search of weapons. All that was done by these organizations was to blow up the King David Hotel. (July 22, 1946), which included many British administration offices. The British government decided to present the problem to the United Nations General Assembly, which held a special session (April 28 – May 15, 1947) in which England announced that it would end its mandate after a year (May 14, 1948). The matter, as is known, ended with the issuance of a decision to divide Palestine on November 29, 1947 into Arab and Jewish sectors, with an international administration for Jerusalem.
The partition decision was a violent shock to the Arabs, and as a result, in the second week of December (1947), the Arab League Political Committee held several sessions in Cairo, attended by most of the heads of Arab governments, where it was decided to prevent the implementation of the partition decision to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, while providing weapons to the Arabs of Palestine and opening the door to volunteerism. From all Arab countries.
Since the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly was merely a recommendation to be submitted to the Security Council for issuance of the resolution, the American government exerted its efforts to prevent the matter from being presented to the Security Council or to the International Court of Justice to consider the legality of the partition. Accordingly, during April 1948, the Zionist organizations in Palestine intensified operations of terrorism, terror, and intimidation of people. This includes the occupation of New Jerusalem, and the expulsion of Arabs from some cities such as Haifa, Jaffa, Tiberias, Safed, and Al-Qastal, whose leader Abdul Qadir Al-Husseini was martyred when he tried to reclaim them. The Irgun and Stern organizations, led by Menachem Begin, stormed the village of Deir Yassin on the outskirts of Jerusalem and mutilated the bodies of the victims. The British forces did not move to confront the situation even though they were stationed in the place. The goal behind these operations was to put the United Nations in front of a fait accompli and to make officials understand that the Jews could implement the partition decision with their knowledge.
On May 13, 1948, the day before Britain’s withdrawal from Palestine, Chaim Weizmann, head of the World Zionist Organization, visited Washington and met with President Truman. He said after his visit: “I was able to strengthen our relationship with our friends in Washington and made sure that our state would be recognized the moment it was established.” The next day (May 14 – the night of May 15) the United Nations General Assembly met to discuss the situation of Palestine after Britain’s withdrawal. Several months earlier, the US State Department had been working to mobilize member votes to approve placing Palestine under international trusteeship. But at approximately a quarter to six in the evening of May 14, the head of the American delegation to the General Assembly (Austin) received a phone call from “Marshall,” the American Secretary of State, telling him that President (Truman) was about to announce within minutes America’s recognition of a temporary Israeli government in the part designated for the Jews. In the partition decision, and that he had to return to the meeting hall to prepare the delegations of countries for this procedure, the man had no choice but to put down the phone and return to his home and did not return to the hall. Only minutes passed until news agencies broadcast the American President’s confession.
The war broke out and the Arab armies achieved victories despite all the circumstances. The Egyptian forces were 29 kilometers south of Tel Aviv, and the Iraqi army was 16 kilometers to the east. Here the Security Council declared a truce (October 1948) to protect the Jews. While the Arabs adhered to the truce, the Jews did not adhere to it, but rather began seizing the land in order to put the Security Council in front of the fait accompli.
Thus, Israel was established on the basis of Judaism, and this simply means not recognizing the other, whether Christian or Muslim, except out of hypocrisy, despite the claim of its politicians that they are democratic, secular, and liberal. What proves this is that they still preserve the “Hatikvah” anthem, which drips with bitterness toward others and incites their hatred, while demanding that Muslims delete verses from the Holy Qur’an regarding the Jews. Indeed, they forced the Palestinians to delete from the Palestinian National Charter the phrases that urge resistance to Israel as a condition for their request. Peace and no tangible benefit so far..!!
The Palestinian Issue from the perspective of globalization
It was stated at the end of the first part of “The Palestinian Question” under the title “Where Are We Now?”: “…” This new polarization on the global level links the fate of the Palestinian issue to the path of the struggle for the liberation of humanity. In the future, the Palestinian issue will affect and be affected by this conflict. “But more than at any time in the past.”
Today it seems to me the importance of understanding this organic relationship between global imperialism and Israel, in order to clarify the danger of the two-state solution ideas to the entire Palestinian issue, and even to the conflict between imperialism and the forces of liberation in the entire world.
Israel’s defeat in the Al-Aqsa Flood War means a painful blow to imperialism and a deep rift in the structure of its global system that always aims to subjugate the global South to the global North[8]. The context of the genocide in Gaza does not deviate from the context of the ongoing colonial genocides to maintain the existing pattern of relationship, and it is one of what Dr. Ali Al-Qadiri[9] calls “structural genocides” that constitute the foundation of Western hegemony over the world, the world of the South in particular.
As the late, great Samir Amin[10] says in his seminal paper[11], which I call his “testament”: “…historic imperialist powers have established a system of collective military control over the planet, led by the United States. NATO[12] membership is inextricably linked to the construction of a united Europe, so is the militarization of Japan reflects the requirements of this new collective imperialism that replaced the national imperialisms (in the United States, Great Britain, Japan, Germany, France, and a few others) that had previously known continuous and violent conflicts among themselves.” I say that this imperialism created its fortresses in every part of the post-World War II world, to confront the leftist tide that came as a result of the victory over Nazism, and as a natural reflection of the balance of power at that time. These fortresses were represented by systems such as South Korea, Singapore, and others, while Israel was the most obvious of them. Its fortification was represented by generous US economic and military support.
Dr. Ali Al-Qadiri says: “Israel represents a functional arm of Western imperialism. After its victory in the 1967 war, Israel has become a partner in the global power structure.” Accordingly, there is something like a dialectical interaction between Israel’s “functional” and the margins of its “independence.” Both factors lead to the fact that the Israeli insistence on continuing the war, which by the way is a purely Western interest, is primarily due to securing a safe strategic environment for the continuity of this entity and proving its worth for its functional position in a way that ensures continued Western investment in it in the present and future. A decisive Israeli victory aims to keep Western deterrence in place against the people of the Global South. That is, there is an ideological connection between the West and Israel that makes “Zionism” a political and ideological tool for the power of global capital. A threat to Israel’s position in the region is a threat to the structure of international relations and to the structure of the region’s relations with the Western imperial center, and therefore a threat to the function of all of them.
That the world is one unit, and the conflict is one conflict, that is the meaning of globalization. The current war is part of the war taking place in the world to change the “international order”, which takes various military, political, financial, and economic forms, and this is what prolongs the life of this war. Therefore, to expose the trap of the two-state solution, all liberation forces in the world must contribute to it. It is natural to find among the supporters of the one-state, multi-ethnic and multi-religious democratic solution, similar to what happened in South Africa in 1994 after a conflict that lasted generations, among the peoples of the West, and to find supporters of the two-state solution to eliminate the Palestinian issue and submit to racism and fascism and the continuation of the system of subjugation of the Global South to the Global North, from the regimes most dependent on the West, especially the Arab ones, and even the Palestinian ones as well.
Israel and the law
Since its establishment, the State of Israel has been illegitimate and illegal, because every derivative of mendacity is equally mendacious, no matter how strong this mendacity strengthens over time. The two-state solution, despite the unfairness of the Palestinian right versus the Zionist wrong, requires a high degree of peace, cooperation, and good neighborliness, which we see fading away with time, especially after the crimes of genocide that the whole world has followed in audio and video since October 7, 2023. This solution has become more distant than ever, assuming the good intentions of its advocates.
What is truly strange about the position of advocates of the two-state solution today is that the Zionist leaders, and not only the current government, but all those who preceded them, starting with Ben Gurion and Golda Meir, have never recognized the two-state solution[13], and since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 they have consistently refused to recognize the United Nations resolution 181 of 1947[14], which stipulated the establishment of two states and defined their borders with internationally recognized maps.
The matter was repeated when the State of Israel applied for membership in the United Nations, where it was required to accept membership that it return to the borders of Partition Resolution No. 181, because it had occupied 24% more than the area allocated to it in the 1948 war, and it also refused to return the refugees, who are two-thirds of the Palestinian people. In 1949, those who were forcefully uprooted from their homes and lands; The Zionist delegate, on behalf of his government, promised to implement the two conditions, so membership was accepted without implementing the two conditions.
Legally, the implementation of these two conditions does not expire with the passage of time, meaning they are still binding. Therefore, the United Nations’ recognition of the membership of the State of Israel is considered invalid, as was expressed in Resolution 194 of 1948[15].
A careful look at the lessons of the history of this conflict makes us understand why the two-state solution was and still is not a solution but a trap, only to sustain and complete the Zionist project, not only since 1948, but especially since the 1993 Oslo Accords[16]. In these agreements, the Palestinian negotiator agreed, and still does to this day, to all the conditions that were placed on the proposed Palestinian state, especially with regard to security and giving up the right of return. He also agreed even to the number of settlements that devoured Jerusalem and the West Bank after the agreements.
The explanation for this official Zionist position is, firstly, because the essence of the Zionist project, despite all the political maneuvers to hide it, is the occupation of all of Palestine and the displacement of all Palestinians. The State of Israel is the national homeland of Jews throughout the world. Secondly, because the West – historically the colonial powers in the world – and since the Zionist project was and still is a geo-strategic colonial project, this West has never been serious about the two-state solution. Therefore, the nascent State of Israel was allowed to violate all United Nations resolutions and international laws without the slightest accountability, if we exclude the media statements that the West was and is still making from time to time to save face, and which, after the massacres of genocide and ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip since the “Al-Aqsa Flood,” became clearer. In her hypocrisy.
The United States was and still is demanding that Israel should preserve the lives of civilians, and condemns the bombing of hospitals, while at the same time supplying it with weapons and ammunition worth billions of dollars, not to mention using the “veto” three times to stop the Security Council’s decision to stop the aggression.
These are the real reasons for all the wars that the region has known, since World War I. They are also what explains the survival of the two-state solution, to be a drug for the true but naive peace seekers, and to keep the furnace of war burning, and Israel, in its Zionist project, to swallow and Judaize piece by piece, and to accuse resistance to injustice and occupation with terrorism.
Pros & Contras of the Two-State & One-State Solution
Let us discuss the situation as it is and not as we, or each party of the conflict, wish. The disadvantage of the one-state solution is that in reality there is little desire for participation from the parties to the conflict. The Israelis, who have a significant power advantage, are much more militant than the Palestinians. Both sides seek self-determination on their terms. But the clear truth is that it is impossible to achieve the conditions of both parties together, because they are looking for them in the same place. Therefore, we must all be free from the logic of the twentieth century in dealing with this file using the method of geographical division of the land, or the method of self-government under occupation. That is, the discussion about a one-state solution must focus on identity, one state with two (or more) peoples, and sharing power through the ballot box only.
History has taught us that resolving partition always leads to perpetuating conflict and deepening anger across generations, and there are many examples of this, including India, Korea, Vietnam, Cyprus, Yugoslavia, Sudan…etc. History has also demonstrated the failure of the “land for peace” begging formula. The challenge facing all of humanity today is to separate peace from land, that is, to recognize that the security of all cannot come from the possession of land, but from equal rights.
As Matthew Teller[17] wrote, “The historically wide gaps between Jewish communities, whether between Israel and the diaspora, secular and observant or even between streams of observance – their separate outlooks and priorities, their differing levels of influence and mutual respect – are today vast. It will take immense skill and bravery from people all across the Jewish world to successfully detach the spiritual and cultural bond between Jews and Zion (meaning the Land of Israel) a- formative tenet of Jewish identity – from the destructive, discredited idea of supremacist governance inherent in Zionism…”
“…Two-state approaches to peace rest on the creation of single-ethnicity, religiously defined states, an Israel for Jews and a Palestine for Muslim and Christian Arabs. But sectarian exclusivity is not a Middle Eastern ideal. It is European. Persecution in the 1880s killed many in Russia’s deeply rooted Jewish communities and displaced millions {….}. against this backdrop that a group of European Jewish journalists and political pundits, seeking safe havens, borrowed from evangelical Christian millenarianism[18] to promote the novel idea that Jews were a nation and so deserved self-determination in a state of their own. This was political Zionism, an ideology contrasting sharply with the spiritual longing for Zion expressed in Jewish liturgy[19].”
“… This has illuminated a long-standing slogan of liberation: “From the river to the sea” (with or without “Palestine will be free” appended). Some – wildly mistaken – choose to interpret the sentiment as genocidal, a call for the erasure of Jewish presence. Public prosecutors in Germany even tried (and failed) to criminalize it. The phrase is not new: It has been said for 60 years or more by Palestinians and Israelis alike who oppose the reality of partition.”
“… Faced with such absurd cruelty, “From the river to the sea” is simply a plea to be rid of it. It seeks to sweep away the divisions, to reclaim equality. It is an uncomplicated rejection of Israel’s laws of classification and segregation and an assertion of the most basic right to dignity in one state. It highlights that partition represents calamitous political failure.”
“…The standard proposal sees conversion of the 1949 armistice lines into international borders between two new states. But those lines apportion 78% of the land to Israel. Even with land swaps and other adjustments taken into account, supporting a “solution” that hands four-fifths of the available territory to one party seems naive at best…”.
There is much, much more that could be mentioned to explain and clarify the impossibility of the two-state solution from a practical standpoint, let alone politically and in principle. For example, but not limited to, how do we deal with 700,000 fanatical Zionist Jewish Israeli settlers who have established their settlements in the West Bank while they are armed, aggressive, and operate as unofficial militias assisting the Israeli army?
Then the two-state solution necessarily includes Gaza, and when the phrase “safe corridor” for the thirty miles that separates Gaza from the West Bank was written in the Oslo II Agreement, the dreamers defended all types of building bridges, tunnels, overhead roads, railways…etc. Thirty years was enough to prove that all this is nonsense or a daydream.
The International Law grants all those expelled in 1948 the right to return to their homes within what is known today as Israel, which simply deprives them of this right, ignoring all international laws and resolutions. The two-state solution would “legitimize” this Israeli intransigence and discord. Then there are about two million Israeli citizens who are Palestinian Arabs. What if the new state of Israel decided that there would be no room for Arabs? Will they be displaced to the new State of Palestine across the border? This is not a far-fetched scenario, if we take into account the extent of Zionism’s racism and the similar ethnic cleansing that has been witnessed in human history, in which hundreds of thousands were killed or injured.
Then there is Jerusalem[20]. If we ignore the so-called international guardianship that was decided and never worked, as Israeli politicians have described it since 1949 as their eternal capital, and since 1978 as indivisible, many questions will arise about airspace, water rights, and other cross-border issues. But it is related to the principle of sovereignty, such as the establishment of a regular army, for example… Do those advocating a two-state solution imagine or hope that Israel, with its deeply racist Zionism, will accept a real Palestinian state with actual sovereignty next to it?!
Or do those advocating a two-state solution imagine or hope that the Palestinians will accept anything less than a fully sovereign state after this solution failed twice throughout the history of this conflict, in 1948 and then in 1993?
We must now separate our call for a one-state solution from those who call for one-state Zionist racism and fanaticism, and who are planning ethnic cleansing, “to rid us of them forever.” The stark difference in the balance of power between Israel and the Palestinians is the source of appeal for proponents of annexation and demographic engineering to perpetuate “Jewish supremacy.” But a politically viable and morally acceptable one-state solution does not involve throwing anyone overboard.
What is important now is to transform public opinion around the world to this new, old perspective, abandoning the game of drawing borders, and looking at division as a panacea for every disease. It is certainly not that, but rather a new trap for resistance.
INNER HOUSE
At a time when we are trying to expose the trap that is being set up for the entire Palestinian issue by proposing the two-state solution – for the third time – addressing the forces of liberation and humanity in the entire world, we must first look at the inner house, that is, at the Palestinian arena itself.
Since Oslo, and even before that, the Palestinian cause has suffered from internal division, which has worsened since the separation of the Gaza Strip from the West Bank. Today, after the global polarization around the issue, which was caused by the “Al-Aqsa Flood” war, the issue of uniting the ranks of the Palestinian factions has become an existential necessity, that is, a matter of life or death.
The question today is: What are the Palestinian factions united or aligned around… And – as we all know – there are ideological and political differences between them?
There are Islamic, nationalist, and Marxist factions, and their political positions vary depending on their ideological references. How can we demand that the world accept a one-state solution in which all people coexist under one sky and build their future together despite all their differences and disagreements, and we are unable to solve this issue in our internal home first?!
The long journey of liberation is still in its infancy because – as I explained in the first part – we are facing global imperialism and not just Israel. Therefore, the Palestinian factions, with all their diversities, must adopt one principle in the process of closing ranks, which is “resistance”. This necessarily entails getting rid of all consequences of Oslo and the illusions of the two-state solution.
Excuse me, dear friends, and do not consider this advice of mine as interference in your internal affairs, just because I am not Palestinian, as we say in Egypt “The people of Mecca know better about its alleys”. If you look and contemplate the current situation, you will find us together in the same cage.
Although I am an internationalist and not a nationalist, let alone an Islamist, I call on you to postpone ideological, and even political, conflicts until after liberation. The state of peace is the arena of intellectual conflicts, but now we are all in a state of war, the Islamic shoulder against the nationalist shoulder against the Marxist shoulder.
Wars are what give the warrior the right to exploit intellectual references that, in a state of peace, are certainly sinful for others. In World War II, which the Soviet Union called the “Great War of Liberation”, the Red Army relied on “Russian nationalism” to mobilize the soldiers’ resolve against the invaders, even though the official ideological reference for the entire Soviet Union was “internationalism,” which is against nationalism. Likewise, all political slogans and practices with religious references, whether Islamic or non-Islamic, will be disagreed upon in times of peace. But wars have their laws.
Today we have to evaluate two ideologies in their historical context and the determinants of their direction. We have a present example in Egypt that is still in our minds, as in cases of exacerbated radicals such as the one we experienced for at least four decades until the uprising of January 25, 2011, simple (reform) demands are considered a step forward, and may make achievements on the way to reviving the movement again. Therefore, the populist rhetoric that attacks such simple reform demands on the grounds that they are not revolutionary is considered a leap from reality with disastrous consequences, especially when the political awareness and consciousness of the masses is far lower than their objective conditions.
The emergence of reformist thought – represented by the negotiation of a two-state solution – in cases of accelerating revolutionary tide – represented by the first intifada in 1987 – is considered a brake and a stumbling block, and in some cases an outright betrayal, of this revolutionary tide, which leads, and has already led, to setbacks, ambiguities, retreat, defeats, and deep divisions. If we look at the state of the revolutionary tide today in the Palestinian arena, it is difficult for anyone to argue against the fact that it is at its peak, that it has broken borders, and has taken the issue to the horizons of the entire world, and that a state of alert is in progress. Mobilization, solidarity, steadfastness, pride and dignity have not been known like that to the Palestinian cause throughout its entire history. How do we resort today to re-proposing the two-state solution for the third time and betray all these sacrifices when we know that it may be the last chance?!
The two-state trap
Today, since the intensity of the battles in the “Al-Aqsa Flood” War, one tone has been echoed in all political circles around the world – as if it were a singing choir – revolving around the necessity of finding a political solution to the Palestinian issue, to achieve sustainable peace in the region.
The Al-Aqsa flood came to awaken the entire world to the fact that there is a deep wound that has been bleeding for 75 years and refuses to heal.
The only tune in this choir is: “The two-state solution”, as if it were the magic solution that everyone had missed and suddenly discovered, as if this solution had not been tried twice and did not succeed, once with the partition decision in 1947, and the second time with the Oslo Accords in 1993.
The most important question that no one is asking today, unfortunately, is: Why did the two-state solution fail?
Here I would like to pose this pivotal question, and I ask everyone who cares about the Palestinian issue to rethink it with me, so that together we arrive at a logical answer to the other question that must follow: What is the solution?
The solution in my view – and it is the only possible solution, no matter how long the evasion of all the colonial powers supporting Israel – is one state for all its citizens, equal in all rights.
As for why the West insists, even today, on ignoring this simple and proven solution, it is because it created Israel not out of love for its Jews, who have been persecuted for centuries – as it claims – but because it is a colonial base for it in this vital region, which is of great importance in its geo-political plans, since the nineteenth century.
Doesn’t it catch your attention – dear reader – that you have never heard of the one-state solution with two nationalities?
In order to begin to answer the first question; Why did the two-state solution fail and continue to fail? I would like to quickly return to what was stated at the beginning of the first part of “The Palestinian Question,” entitled (Racism in the Genes of Zionism):
“A discourse that accepts the expulsion of a people from their land as a way of achieving its purpose is by definition racist, regardless of who is leading the project…”.
First, we must agree on this obvious issue, in order to reach logical conclusions, why there is no solution to this conflict by establishing two states, so we can reach the only possible solution – no matter how long the conflict lasts – that is, one democratic state for all its citizens of both nationalities.
Israel is not the first or only example of racism in human history. Since the beginning of civilization, this history has been filled with countless examples of racist practices. Human history is also full of conflicts between racist forces and forces of liberation from racism, which we are not now going to enumerate. But we can limit all of this history to three models that it is difficult for anyone to disagree with.
The first model: It is one in which racism triumphed over the values of humanity, exterminating entire peoples, so this scenario was a solution to the conflict. We find this in what Europeans did in the Americas, and Australia after their discovery.
The second model: is the victory of the Allied armies over (racist) Nazi Germany, which brought racism to its highest levels.
The third model: The victory of the African National Congress (ANC) in 1994 over the apartheid regime in South Africa, after 92 years of struggle, especially the armed struggle.
In the second model (Hitler), the forces of liberation from racism won a clear military victory, which led to the abolition of all racist laws in Germany, and the establishment of laws of complete equality between human beings. But extracting the virus of racism from the collective and individual consciousness of society was the most difficult, and it continued for a generation – or more – when the new rulers of Germany, after their victory in the war (the Allies), began the process of extracting Nazism (Entnazifizierung/ Denazifization) from the minds infected or contaminated with it.
As for the third model (South Africa), it was the victory of the forces of liberation from racism through an increase in the level of global solidarity with the struggle of the black majority of the indigenous population, to the point of forcing the apartheid regime to surrender and accept to live together, citizens of African origin and citizens of European origin, who have the same rights and duties, under the roof of one state governed by the electoral fund, thus Nelson Mandela became the first African president of this state in 1994. Today – after thirty years of this state – racism is no longer the basis of its conflicts, but have become rather class struggles like the rest of the countries of the world.
I believe that the Palestinian issue will not be resolved except by a scenario similar to the third model (South Africa). The war that broke out on October 7th 2023, with the Al-Aqsa flood, led to a new type of polarization at the global level. The majority of the peoples of the earth, in its South and North, stood in solidarity with the Palestinians, and the majority of The colonial powers led by the United States remained entrenched behind Israel. It is the beginning of a new accumulation in the global collective awareness of the reality of the racism of the State of Israel, and that it is not – as the colonial powers have always claimed – the only democracy in the Middle East, simply because there is no democracy with racism, except the democracy of the “masters”.
This new type of polarization confirms that a solution to the Palestinian issue is not near, and certainly not easy. Colonialism and global imperialism still have many tricks up their sleeves, especially tricks to deceive people. The most important of these tricks that we have to face today is the call for a two-state solution… again.
War can be avoided but peace cannot be avoided; Therefore, there has been talk for months about what comes after the end of the war?
Everyone knows that the extreme right-wing government in Israel, which is extremely racist and takes pride in declaring its racism publicly, will not remain after the end of the war. Many Zionist forces inside Israel see calls for a two-state solution today as their only chance to preserve their survival in the future.
Therefore, global imperialism is preparing the stage today to bring the entire world into the play of “two-state solution negotiation process”, similar to what was before Oslo, which will continue for a decade or two, during which imperialism will be able to redraw the geo-political map of the conflict, to bury the Palestinian issue irreversibly. The most important element of this negotiation process is the participation of all “regimes” with a direct interest in “ending” the Palestinian issue, meaning eliminating this chronic headache called “resistance”. Therefore, the United States and its partners are keen to involve all regimes except the Palestinian resistance factions. Anyone who stands outside this stage becomes a “terrorist” and must be killed by an official permit from the United Nations, or what they call the “international community”.
It goes without saying here that the Palestinian Authority, which despite all the Israeli crimes in Gaza, still embraces the Oslo Accords and adheres to it, even though Israel itself has rejected it from its inception, is not considered one of the resistance factions. Global imperialism prepares this authority – after “modification” – to be, in the next stage in the two-state solution negotiation process, the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. It is an integral part of the official Arab system, which considers resistance a lump in the throat, even if it does not dare to speak out today about it, like some of the Gulf sheikhdoms who are hot-tempered toward “Normalization” with Israel.
As for the plot of the play, it will be an explicit discourse that the whole world has put great pressure on Israel to accept a Palestinian state next to it. Therefore, the Palestinians today must make no less concessions in the same direction.
No coexistence with racism
Anyone who watched on television and social media how Israeli soldiers massacred the population of Gaza without the slightest mercy is certain that such actions only come from people whose blood is saturated with deep-seated and ingrained racism from an early age. I also consider them to be victims of Zionist racism from which the forces of liberation throughout the world must work to purify them.
This will only be possible by changing their social reality. Social reality is what determines social awareness, and this social being will not change as long as the State of Israel remains based on the foundations of Zionism with its ten principles, which were developed by nineteenth-century colonialism and implemented in the twentieth century. It was also proven and documented[21] by the great Israeli writer, Professor Ilan Pappé[22].
- Palestine was an empty, barren, semi-desert land on the eve of the Zionists’ arrival there in the late nineteenth century. The Zionists inhabited it, and cultivated it.
- The Jews were a people without a land.
- Zionism is Judaism.
- Zionism is not a colonial movement.
- The Palestinians left their land voluntarily.
- The 1967 war was imposed on Israel.
- Israel is the only democratic country in the Middle East.
- Oslo Myths, Oslo was not a peace agreement, but rather an Israeli ploy.
- The Gaza tragedy is caused by Hamas.
- The two-state solution is the only path to peace.
Ilan Pappé refuted all these lies in the style of an impeccable university professor and historian. He convinced everyone who read him with the argument, and he was doomed to be condemned by the Israeli Knesset and leave Israel in 2008.
Zionism is a form of racism
We have the best proof of what we say in the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379[23]. The resolution, which was adopted on November 10th 1975, with a vote of 72 countries “YES” to 35 “No” (and 32 members abstained from voting). The resolution specifies that “Zionism[24] is a form of racism[25] and racial discrimination.” The resolution called on all countries of the world to resist Zionist ideology, which, according to the resolution, poses a threat to global peace and security. This decision is often cited in discussions of Zionism and racism. This decision was canceled by Resolution 46/86 on December 16th 1991.
Based on previous resolutions issued by the organization in 1963 calling for the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination, and its resolution in 1973 in which it condemned, among other things, the sinful alliance between racism and Zionism, and the Mexico Declaration on the Equality of Women and their Contribution to Development and Peace in 1975, which declared the principle that:
“International cooperation and peace require the achievement of national liberation and independence, the elimination of colonialism and neo-colonialism, foreign occupation, Zionism, apartheid and racial discrimination in all its forms, as well as recognition of the dignity of peoples and their right to self-determination”.
It is based on what was issued by the session of Heads of State and Government of African Unity in August 1975, which held that:
“The ruling racist regime in occupied Palestine and the two ruling racist regimes in Zimbabwe and South Africa date back to a common colonial origin, constitute a complete entity, have a single racist structure and are organically linked in Its policy aimed at wasting human dignity and sanctity”.
As well as the Political Declaration and the Strategy for Consolidating International Peace and Security and Strengthening Solidarity and Mutual Assistance among Non-Aligned Countries, which were adopted at the Conference of Foreign Ministers of Non-Aligned Countries in August 1975, which condemned Zionism as a threat to world peace and security and called for resistance to these hands. Theology of racism (imperialism)…
The most recent is what came from Amnesty International:
He is not greedy, who seeks complete equality
Here, I can only quote what Tamim Al-Barghouti said as an answer to the question[26]: “Why won’t the two-state solution work?
If you hear someone calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state on the borders of June 4th 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital, to be led by a process of negotiations with the Israeli entity, then think a little about what you heard before you agree. Even in terms of language, listen and pay attention.
Talking about a state of which its borders were drawn by the war of forty-eight and the war of sixty-seven. The armistice line in the first war produced the map, and the second war produced your rulers’ acceptance of it.
It is a state whose borders have drawn two defeats for you. It invites you to barter between them. You accept your first defeat so that we can spare you from your second defeat. A country designed for you by your enemy with his weapons twice. As the sculptor and the potter do with clay; but it goes beyond the point of having a state whose borders are defeats.
The establishment of a Palestinian state within the borders of a state that is militarily exposed and economically subordinate to Israel, forcing everyone who rules it to take the place of the occupation, replace it and do its job. It’s either that or collapse. If you doubt, look at the map. This state will theoretically be established in the West Bank and Gaza, so the West Bank will be its largest territory and its political and economic base. Accordingly, its interest will require protecting Israel from any supposed attack coming from the eastern side, for example, because Israel will prefer to let the battles rage on, if that attack occurs. On the land of the Palestinian state, in the hills of the West Bank, not in the narrow coastal plain that was occupied in 1948 and where most of the immigrants to the Hebrew state were concentrated.
Many of us may not know – because it is somewhat shameful information – that the width of that plain in some areas (i.e. the distance between the hills of the West Bank and the Mediterranean Sea) does not exceed fifteen kilometers. You, my friend, can cut Israel in half, from east to west, if you walk slowly, as if you were walking with your fiancée, in less than three hours. And in your car in less than ten minutes, and in the plane before its wheels lift off the runway. Therefore, the Palestinian rulers who accept to take charge of a Palestinian state established in the West Bank will do everything in their power to have this state act as a buffer zone that protects Israel. They know that their failure necessarily means Israel’s invasion of their land and the loss of their rule, and perhaps the loss of their lives and the lives of those they love. Their political, and even personal, interest will be to protect Israel, not threaten it.
Then this Palestinian state will not only be a buffer between the Arabs and Israel, but it will also be a buffer between it and its people, as half of the population of that state, a third of the population of the West Bank and two-thirds of the population of Gaza as well, are refugees originally from the Galilee and the coast, so it must prevent violent operations launched from its lands against the state. Hebrew, otherwise Israel will carry out this insurance operation, which will also threaten the existence of the Palestinian state from its foundations, so this Palestinian state will be an ally of Israel against half of its citizens, and against everyone from this nation who wants to resist Israel.
If it is said that this state can become stronger and take a platform to liberate the rest of Palestine, the price of its establishment will be Israel’s guarantee that none of that will happen. Now you see that security coordination and military exposure are a condition for the establishment of an autonomous authority in Palestine, so what about a state? It will only have police weapons directed at its people. Other than that, it will be disarmed. If it is armed, it will expose itself to invasion. And even if it were allowed to arm itself, how many centuries would it take to build an industrial base that would produce weapons that match not only Israel’s weapons but also those of its sponsors from other countries? bony? If, say, you resist Israel with light weapons in the manner of guerrilla warfare, I tell you that this is successful and possible, but it requires that the rulers of this country transform from rulers into guerrillas, and are willing to move from palaces to caves, which is a rare thing among rulers, and even if they do, this will mean: The end of the state and a return to the situation we were in before the peace operations, occupation and resistance. The economy in this country will be dependent, as it was during the days of direct occupation, on businessmen who buy from Israeli factories and sell their products in the West Bank, and workers who work in construction beyond the Green Line, so its poor and rich will be dependent on Israel. It will also depend on international grants conditional on Israel’s peace, and the state will promise its citizens prosperity if they are peaceful. But that promise will not be fulfilled, because that state cannot be democratic and half of its population are refugees originally from the coast and the Galilee, and it was established only in exchange for giving up their right to return. If you allow them to hold fair elections, it is likely that they will bring in a government that cancels the peace agreements upon which the state was founded. Its basis. Therefore, it must be a tyrannical state, without effective elected institutions, and this in turn means the absence of parliamentary control over money, because the elected councils were originally invented to monitor government spending, so corruption becomes easy and spreads, so what it obtains from grants from its international sponsors is concentrated in the hands of a few of its rulers, which increases from the poverty and misery of the governed. None of the refugees returned to their lands in the Galilee and the coast, nor did they gain political freedom, nor did they obtain money and wealth as a form of collective bribery, in exchange for giving up all of their rights.
Just as tyranny leads to corruption due to the absence of oversight, corruption leads to an increase in tyranny so that the plunderers protect themselves from the wrath of the plundered. This country will be another nightmare, like many of its sisters in the Arab world, with a people whose money is plundered, whose voice is silenced, and who do not choose their rulers. Its rulers do not protect it, but rather protect its invaders from it. They work hard to make them comfortable, and the only difference between this situation and the original occupation is that this new will be called independence and will last.
The two-state solution, in essence, is a dedication to apartheid. It gives the invaders 80% of the land, where they have a strong army, nuclear weapons, and an independent economy. It gives the invaded 20% of the land with no independent weapons or money. Then it relieves Israel of half the Palestinians between the sea and the river.
It is a solution that confines half of the people to a fifth of the land, in exchange for their neutrality in the war, and their abandonment of the remaining half.
A solution you see today – and it is still a promise – divides the Palestinians, tempts some of them with conditions of slavery that are slightly better than what others get, in order to enslave everyone.
A solution that practically deprives the Palestinian people of the political and military victory of the majority that became theirs between the sea and the river, which makes overthrowing the apartheid regime in the country incomparably more difficult.
But the victorious conqueror is often tempted by his power, and his greed destroys him. Although the two-state solution is the only guarantee for the survival of the racist regime in Israel, successive Israeli governments lean more to the right, to extremists, and to settlers who aspire to annex the West Bank. It is as if Israel wants the Palestinian National Authority to serve it without even giving it the tools with which it can serve. Nominal independence is the condition for practical slavery. Practical slavery is also a condition for nominal independence.
Since Israel does not accept the two-state solution, out of its desire to annex the West Bank, and at the same time fears the large Palestinian demographic population between the sea and the river, the solution that its leaders have come up with today is the same that their predecessors have come up with yesterday. A new Nakba (catastrophe), the expulsion of the Palestinians from the West Bank, gradually or suddenly. In preparation for this, Israel confines the largest number of them to the smallest possible area of land, and annexes the rest. This was the essence of the “deal of the century”, and the reason for applying the Israeli law to the settlements, considering them part of the Land of Israel, displacing Jerusalemites, and so on.
I say: The two-state solution will establish tyranny, corruption, and dependency in the supposed Palestinian state, and an apartheid regime that seeks ethnic and religious cleansing in Israel. It is a solution that prolongs the life of the apartheid regime. But the greed and arrogance of the invaders made them kill that solution, seeking another catastrophe, and to take a land without its inhabitants, but a believer is not stung from the same hole twice. And here the people were not able to control Gaza for many years, and before that they were not able to control Sinai, nor Beirut, nor Tire and Sidon, nor even the border strip in southern Lebanon, and the arrogant one is defeated.
The right-wing Israeli governments are steadily heading towards losing this conflict, and if we do not let each other down, we are heading towards victory. My father used to say: “One does not cross a chasm with two jumps, nor cross it while suspended in the air in two stages.” Beware of defeat disguised as half-victory. The one, who seeks complete equality with the other people is not greedy. But whoever accepts to be half a human becomes a complete scoundrel. Do not be deceived, the page of history is in front of you. Sign it as a free man if you wish, or as a slave if you wish, the pen is in your hand”.—
All liberation forces in the world must work to achieve the only state for all its citizens, a secular democratic state, a state with no religion except citizen rights and human rights, a state that fights racism inside and outside it… There is no coexistence with racism, no matter how long the road takes.
Contents
The birth of the Jewish state;. 8
The Palestinian Issue from the perspective of globalization. 16
Israel and the International Law.. 19
Pros & Contras of The Two-State & One-State Solution. 22
Inner house 27
No coexistence with racism.. 35
Zionism is a form of racism.. 37
He is not greedy, who seeks complete equality. 39
[1] Norman Paech – Startseite / Aktuelles (norman-paech.de)
[2] https://www.norman-paech.de/app/download/5817042610/NDS+Gaza+Krieg+um+Gaza+03-11-23.pdf
[3] The Sykes-Picot Agreement was a 1916 secret treaty between the United Kingdom and France, with assent from the Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Italy, to define their mutually agreed spheres of influence and control in an eventual partition of the Ottoman Empire.
[4] The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British Government in 1917 during the First World War announcing its support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population
[5] The San Remo Resolution passed on 25 April 1920 determined the allocation of Class “A” League of Nations mandates for the administration of three then-undefined Ottoman territories in the Middle East: “Palestine”, “Syria” and “Mesopotamia”.
[6] was the first worldwide intergovernmental organization whose principal mission was to maintain world peace.[1] It was founded on 10 January 1920 by the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War.
[7] The national anthem of the State of Israel.
[8] See the book: The Future of the South in a Changing World, Samir Amin, Dar Al-Amin, Cairo, 2002.
[9] A Lebanese thinker and economist, a researcher at the National University of Singapore, and a former visiting researcher at the Department of International Development and the Laboratory for Advanced Research on the Global Economy at the London School of Economics. Watch: https://youtu.be/MH_5Ojp8GaY
[10] Egyptian thinker and economist. He is one of the most important founders of global systems theory. He is best known for introducing the term “Eurocentrism” in 1988 and is considered a pioneer of dependency theory.
[11] https://www.networkideas.org/featured-articles/2018/07/internationale-workers-peoples/
https://www.ahewar.org/debat/show.art.asp?aid=617519
[12] The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance of 32 member states—30 European and 2 North American. Established in the aftermath of World War II, the organization implements the North Atlantic Treaty, signed in Washington, D.C., on 4 April 1949.
[13] https://youtu.be/a5zw3Yz-yas
[14] https://undocs.org/Home/Mobile?FinalSymbol=A%2FRES%2F181(II)&Language=E&DeviceType=Desktop&LangRequested=False
[15]https://undocs.org/Home/Mobile?FinalSymbol=A%2FRES%2F194%2520(III)&Language=E&DeviceType=Desktop&LangRequested=False
[16] Look at part 1 “The Palestine Question”.
[17] British Jewish journalist and writer
[18] Millennialism – Wikipedia
[19] https://www.jewfaq.org/liturgy
[20] https://youtu.be/fMeyRzKZnO8
[21] https://www.google.com.eg/search?sca_esv=6480816f92634337&sca_upv=1&cs=0&q=Ten+Myths+About+Israel&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONgFuLUz9U3sMjOMylR4tVP1zc0TDa1zK6IT7LQkspOttJPys_P1k8sLcnIL7ICsYsV8vNyKhexioWk5in4VpZkFCs4JuWXlih4FhclpuYAADQvNB5RAAAA&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiUj4v0_7eFAxUrUKQEHUXADFIQ9OUBegQIBBAH&biw=1280&bih=649&dpr=1.5
[22] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilan_Papp%C3%A9
[23] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembly_Resolution_3379
[24] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism
[25] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism
[26] https://youtu.be/PPY0EYN4WPw?si=JeU-qAZ7hsruc4m6
Also read
The Palestine Question
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