The two-state solution is no longer possible and the only way forward is the struggle for a democratic secular state accommodating both Palestinians and Israelis, writes Stefan Moore.
A young girl in the Gaza Strip is taken to receive medical care, Oct. 17 2023. (Fars Media Corporation, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
By Stefan Moore
Special to Consortium News
As a secular Jew raised in a fiercely anti-Zionist family, I grew up viewing the State of Israel as an unfortunate fait accompli and accepting that the two-state solution was probably the best that could be hoped for.
Since then, I have come to the conclusion that the creation of a Jewish state was a catastrophic mistake and that Zionist Israel has relinquished its right to exist.
What good could possibly have come from a project that handed a group of Jewish Europeans a land that for countless centuries was inhabited by Arab Palestinians?
Not only did Palestinians have no say in the creation of a Jewish state on their homeland, but just at the time when other developing countries around the world were finally breaking free from the yoke of colonial rule Palestinians, like Native Americans and Australia’s First Nations people before them, became the victims of European settler colonialism — this time endorsed by a U.N. resolution that neither the Palestinians nor any of the Arab states agreed to or voted for.
Second Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, Aug. 28, 1898. On podium, center stage, Theodor Herzl is seen indistinctly, giving keynote address. (Robert Spreng/National Library of Israel/Wikimedia Commons)
The driving force behind both the 1917 Balfour Declaration that called for a Jewish homeland in the British Mandate of Palestine and the 1948 U.N. Partition Plan that established a Jewish State, was Zionism, a religious, political and cultural movement that began in the late 19th century to claim Palestine as the God-given homeland of the Jewish people.
Contrary to official mythology, however, the Zionist fervour was not shared by the majority of Jews.
The socialist Jewish Labour Bund in Eastern Europe, for instance, believed that Jewish culture should be preserved right at home in the shtetls (villages) as opposed to running off to Palestine and thought that the notion of Jews colonising Palestine was farcical. They even wrote a mocking Yiddish song for the Zionists – “Oy, Ir Narishe Tsionistn” (“You Foolish Little Zionist”).
Meanwhile Jews, Christians and Muslims had been living aside each other in historic Palestine in relative peace for centuries. It was only after the rapid influx of European Jewish refugees fleeing the pogroms in Eastern Europe following World War I, and in the wake of the Holocaust, that the conflicts in Palestine escalated and the bloodshed on both sides began.
By the time of the U.N. partition plan, Israeli Defence Force brigades had already launched a bloody campaign of burning villages and killing men, women and children to drive Palestinians off their land. In all, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled into refugee camps in neighbouring Arab countries.
This was the beginning of the Nakba (the catastrophe) that continues today – most strikingly in Gaza — as Zionist zealots insist Israel has a rightful claim to all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Basel Steet, Tel Aviv, 1939 named after Basel, Switzerland where Zionist Congresses were held. (Public Domain)
In their view, all of Palestine belongs to Jews because in the words of Likud Party Knesset Member Danny Danon, the Bible is “our deed to the land.”
For Zionists like Danon, expelling Palestinians is an existential necessity, a view that echoed in 1956 by Moshe Dayan, military commander of the Jerusalem Front in 1948, who proclaimed:
“We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a home… This is the fate of our generation, and the choice of our life – to be prepared and armed, strong and tough – or otherwise, the sword will slip from our fist, and our life will be snuffed out.
What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived.
Let us not be afraid to see the hatred that accompanies and consumes the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who sit all around us and wait for the moment when their hands will be able to reach our blood.”
Next Uprising Would Dwarf Oct. 7
A Hamas rocket attack from Gaza into Israel, Oct. 7, 2023. (Tasnim News Agency, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
As Dayan knew then, Israel would never be safe. In Gaza now, Israel is creating the next generation of Palestinian resistance fighters who have witnessed their families slaughtered, guaranteeing that the next uprising will dwarf the Hamas invasion of Oct. 7.
Whatever legitimacy Israel might have claimed as a haven for Jewish refugees who were abandoned in the West after the Holocaust, their right to a state of their own has long since been forfeited.
Both the 1917 Balfour Declaration that promised Jews a homeland in the British Mandate of Palestine and the 1948 U.N. partition plan creating the State of Israel stipulated that the rights of Palestinians had to be safeguarded and, following the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948, U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 of that year specifically said the refugees’ had the right to return “at the earliest practicable date.”
On all counts, Israel has completely failed to live up to its obligations to protect the most basic rights of the Palestinian people.
Today, Palestinians living inside Israel remain second-class citizens without equal rights to own property or even use their own language. On the West Bank, Palestinians are dispossessed and murdered daily by Jewish settlers with the backing of the IDF.
In Gaza, even before Israel’s invasion following Oct. 7, Palestinians have lived under a brutal state of siege in an open air prison. The millions of Palestinians who were exiled into refugee camps in neighbouring Arab states are still denied the right to return.
Indeed, the Zionists have brought to Palestine the very scourge they fled in Europe — murdering, expelling and ethnically cleansing an entire population, mirroring the behaviour of their Nazi oppressors.
In the documentary film Tantura about the 1948 massacre of almost 300 Palestinians in the Palestinian village of Tantura, former Israeli soldiers, now in their 90s, retell the story of the slaughter unashamedly.
One brigade member laughs as he recalls, “Of course we killed them, without remorse… If you killed, you did a good thing.” An old woman says matter-of-factly, “Let them remember (what we did to them) like we remember what happened in Europe (the Holocaust). If they did it, we can also.”
Yet, despite the evidence of Israeli war crimes, Zionists have continued to deny Israel’s atrocities while claiming their own superiority. Professor emeritus at Haifa University, Ilan Pappe, says of the mindset:
“I think the self-image of Israel as a moral society is something I haven’t seen anywhere else in the world. We are the ‘Chosen People’ (in the Old Testament Jews were chosen by God as his special people). This is part of the Israeli self-identification…(But) basically, the project of Zionism has a problem… You cannot create a safe haven by creating a catastrophe for other people.”
Today, complicit Western leaders and their media proxies wring their hands about the regrettable loss of civilian lives in Gaza while hypocritically calling for a two-state solution they know is virtually impossible since Israel has reduced the amount of Palestinian land from 45 percent at the time of partition to 15 percent today.
Craig Mokhiber, who recently resigned as New York director for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights over the U.N.’s failure to act on war crimes in Gaza, said in his resignation letter:
“The mantra of the ‘two-state solution’ has become an open joke in the corridors of the U.N., both for its utter impossibility in fact, and for its total failure to account for the inalienable human rights of the Palestinian people.”
Writing On Wall For Two-State Solution
Academic Ghada Karmi at the Palestinian Festival of Literature in 2011. (PalFest/Raouf haj Yihya via Creative Commons)
After 75 years of Israel’s colonial oppression of the Palestinian people, it has become glaringly obvious that any notion of a two-state solution has become little more than a fig leaf for Israel’s apartheid regime and the only way forward is one secular democratic state that safeguards the fundamental rights and equality for all of its citizens.
Obviously, it won’t happen overnight or without conflict – Israel will aggressively defend its perceived right to exist as a Jewish state with the massive backing of the Western powers. Palestinians will never abandon their yearning for a homeland as it was before the arrival of European Jewish settlers — but the writing is on the wall.
Almost two decades ago the late Palestinian-American academic Edward Said wrote that:
“The beginning (of one democratic state) is to develop something entirely missing from both Israeli and Palestinian realities today: the idea and practice of citizenship, not of ethnic or racial community, as the main vehicle of coexistence.”
More recently, Palestinian academic and physician Ghada Karmi has cautioned:
“The U.N. that made Israel and must now unmake it, not by expulsion and displacement as in 1948, but by converting its bleak legacy into a future of hope for both peoples in one state.”
But if the U.N. fails to act, Karmi sees a more apocalyptic path to the end of the Zionist state. In her recent book One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine, she writes:
“Israel will fiercely reject the shared state, but will be powerless to prevent it from happening. … It will not happen solely as a result of a one-state campaign and solidarity movements. … but rather through people’s natural resistance to relentless oppression leading to the ultimate overthrow of the oppressors.”
If that can happen without cataclysmic global repercussions, possibly bringing the U.S. and Europe to the brink of the next world war, perhaps a new secular democratic state for both Jews and Palestinians will evolve from the struggle.
In any event, it is time to acknowledge that the Zionist project has been a spectacular failure and the status quo can no longer be maintained. Israel has become a pariah state in the eyes of most of the world and the winds of change are now howling across the region.
Stefan Moore is an American-Australian documentary filmmaker. His documentaries have received four Emmys and other awards. In the U.S., he was co-director of TVG Productions in New York, a series producer at WNET and a producer for the prime time CBS News magazine program 48 HOURS. In the U.K. he worked as a series producer at the BBC, and in Australia he was an executive producer for Film Australia and the ABC.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Thanks Stefan great stuff here.
I am not the person to add anything of a historical nature by commenting about the Jewish populating Palestine. Most of those commenting here today have done a pretty masterful job of that. The history exposed here is great to see finally.
We must never forget that James Jesus Angleton was a Zionist of the highest order. It has been said that JJA was the biggest Zionist of them all (at CIA). It is my firm belief that he, Edward Teller and Zalmon Shapiro all shared personal responsibility for Israel getting Special Nuclear Materials and other technical assistance from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission insiders, in part because of JJ’s position at CIA.
If one looks one can find the linkage. The linkage leads to persons never elected to any U.S. government position, who used their government positions in a clandestine manner to achieve this goal.
If Israel had no nuclear weapons it would never enjoy the special treatment and considerations that it receives to this day. Something, in my view, that allows them to walk all over the U.S. government. It is hugely disappointing that the right wing governments of Israel have succeeded in infiltrating the U.S. government to such a degree as the AIPAC has enjoyed.
I would recommend everyone who commented here so far us this site to further their knowledge of how Israel became the benefactor of the power of the AIPAC lobby in the U.S. congress. SEE: hXXpts://israelobby.org
Also check out the 2 vol set by Whitney Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail. Regardless, in view of the selected course taken by the Zionist leadership in D.C. supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza it is very evident that the time to out and end to this brazen behavior by the U.S. government has come.
I’m seventy five years of age very soon, I have seen more than enough of the Zionist behavior in my life time and consider the Zionist mindset to be a cancer on our society. Our nation cannot survive two masters.
Thanks CN
A good piece. I have only one comment. At the end of the day, one country (Great Britain) gave away land that wasn’t theirs to people who didn’t live there. They’d been doing that for centuries – take over other people’s land, enslave the people, steal the fruits of their labors. What’s not to like? One constantly hears the holocaust card played, an event that, at this point, is 80 years old and it would be valid in my eyes if they extracted land from Germany, France, and Austria to create this new Israel but, alas, they didn’t. Maybe if they hadn’t chosen to cruise the Roman Empire after the Romans kicked their petty kingdom to the curb around the time of Christ, they wouldn’t have these troubles.
Great comments and interesting article.
Maybe it’s time Judaism gave the big ole boot to Zionism.
Yes it’s weird and recent but it’s a bad idea to pretend it’s formation was any more vicious than that of most if not all states. It’s partly this relentless focus on the Nakba etc. that has made it so hard to peel otherwise liberal and decent American jews off the godawful vampiric husk of the liberal zionist project.
US zionist jews came of age in the interim when it was genuinely hoped that the horrors of the founding could be swept under the rug as they are everywhere else, and peace and prosperity established in a country that just happened to have a jewish majority. Part of the reason it’s taken them so unbelievably long to realize the dream is dead (and it died all the way back in 67) is that their most ardent opponents don’t acknowledge the existence of this period at all.
Quite grateful for Israel / Palestine history… so tnx Mr Moore, CN.
Without context we Earth individuals unable to form opinions re events… ergo ignorance natural reaction.
Unfortunately corporate war profiteers evade truth serving quarterly income… IOW History broken up into 12 weeks @ time…… Insanity!
There is a solid argument that the UN did not create Israel.
Quote:
By 1947, partitioning Palestine was not a novel idea. There had already been multiple proposals and plans drafted by various parties going back to at least 1919. Some were more brazen than others in their disregard for Palestinians and their rights, while others made a half-hearted attempt to reconcile the well-being of the Palestinians with the fact that they were about to lose the majority of their country to newly-arrived settlers.
I do not wish to delve into the specifics of the 1947 partition plan, nor analyze it from a practical or moral perspective [You can read more about this here]. Rather, this article is more concerned with the claims surrounding the UN and the persistence of the myth that it established Israel, particularly through UNGA resolution 181.
To be clear, UNGA resolution 181 simply did not partition Palestine. It was in fact, a partition plan, which was to be seen as a recommendation, and that the issue should be transferred to the Security Council. But don’t take our word for it, we encourage you to read the actual resolution and see if you arrive at the same conclusions. The resolution does not in any way obligate the people of Palestine to accept it, especially considering the non-binding nature of UNGA resolutions.
For its part, the Security Council attempted to find a resolution based on the UNGA recommendation, but could not arrive at a consensus. Many arrived at the conclusion that the plan could not be enforced. Israel was unilaterally declared by Zionist leadership by force while the Security Council was still trying to arrive at a conclusion. The plan was never implemented.
Legal authority?
However, there is an argument that although the plan never came to fruition, the UNGA recommendation to partition Palestine to establish a Jewish state conferred the legal authority to create such a state. As a matter of fact, this can be seen in the declaration of the establishment of the state of Israel.
This argument falls flat on its face when we take into account that the United Nations, both its General Assembly as well as its Security Council do not have the jurisdiction to impose political solutions, especially without the consent of those it affects. There is nothing in the UN charter that confers such authority to the United Nations. Indeed, this was brought up during discussions on the matter.
Warren Austin, the US representative at the Security Council stated that:
“The Charter of the United Nations does not empower the Security Council to enforce a political settlement whether it is pursuant to a recommendation of the General Assembly or of the Security Council itself […] The Security Council’s action, in other words, is directed to keeping the peace and not to enforcing partition.”
Furthermore, not only would this be outside the scope of the United Nations’ power, it would as a matter of fact run counter to its mandate. This was even brought up by The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine itself:
“With regard to the principle of self-determination, although international recognition was extended to this principle at the end of the First World War and it was adhered to with regard to the other Arab territories, at the time of the creation of the ‘A’ Mandates, it was not applied to Palestine, obviously because of the intention to make possible the creation of the Jewish National Home there. Actually, it may well be said that the Jewish National Home and the sui generis Mandate for Palestine run counter to that principle.”
This is a direct admission that the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine runs counter to the principle of self-determination for Palestinians already living there. The United Nations needed to twist itself into a knot and make an exception to their own charter to recommend the partition of Palestine. Despite these efforts, the United Nations did not manage to partition Palestine, and even if it did it would be void due to it not being within its powers.
Furthermore, the selective nature of Israeli appeals to the UN are quite well-documented. In this instance, the UN is touted as the supreme arbiter of justice and international consensus, but the moment it decrees anything bearing on Israeli interests, or criticizing its violation of international law, it is suddenly a cowardly, corrupt organization intent on spreading antisemitism. An organization that is framed as a source of legitimacy is instantly discarded when it becomes inconvenient.
So no, Israel was not established through the United Nations. Israel was established through warfare and the creation of facts on the ground. Facts it created through the massacre of Palestinians and the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of villages
hxxps://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/the-united-nations-created-israel/
Thanks for that perspective, roscross – Israel created through sheer brutality, not the UN that had no such powers or jurisdiction.
There are no secular Jews because Jews are followers of a religion. If Judaism had never been invented no Jew would ever have existed.
Secular is a discreet word for atheist where the religion and its God are totally rejected. There are no atheist Jews for the same reason there are no atheist Christians, because it is impossible to be an atheist follower of any religion.
If you use the word secular to mean a non-practising Jew then you are using the words wrongly. A non-practising Jew is still a follower of Judaism but does not practice the religion.
secu·lar
[?s?kj?l?]
ADJECTIVE
not connected with religious or spiritual matters:
SECULAR means a total rejection of religion. So, the writer is not a secular Jew but a non-religious individual with some Jewish ancestry. The Zionists invented the delusion of atheist/secular Jews because they were atheists but they needed Jewish money to fund their fascist colonial dreams for Palestine. Zionism exploits Judaism and its followers and never more so than with the fantasy of secular Jews. Zionism is actually a taint on Judaism and Jews and in essence, demonstrates by its actions, deep anti-semitism, i.e. a hatred of Judaism and Jews.
I am well acquainted with the history of Zionism and with the terrible mess that the Jews of Israel have made of the land that was given to them. However, there is one question that has always vexed me: Where, after centuries of awful persecution in Christian Europe culminating in the Nazi holocaust, were the Jews of Europe supposed to go? After World War-II, there was no nation on earth that wanted them–including the United States and western European nations. Can one imagine Jewish refugees returning to their former homes in Germany and eastern Europe, where their existence had been a living hell? Thus, it was the absence of any alternative that led to the choice of Palestine, with which Jews had at least some cultural and historical connection.
My point is that history did not begin with the Zionist movement in the 19th century or end with the declaration of a Jewish state named Israel. There are reasons why Palestine was chosen to become a home to Jews. None of which excuses the longstanding mistreatment and now the genocide of the Palestinian people who rightly call the land their home.
A homeland for the Jews (Balfour Dec) did not imply “a Jewish State”. That term did not arise until 1947, was aspirational and a fatal mistake. Several million non-Jews live in Israel disproving the Jewish identity with statehood. That the United State consented to that term was even more of a mistake. It has haunted Israel and the U.S. ever since. It would help if that term were dropped. Of course it won’t be as the right wing majority is wedded to the concept. It will likely be the impediment to a one state solution as it is not possible for the Palestinians to consent to live in a Jewish State.
Since most European Jews who wished to leave did not go to Palestine as colonists but migrated to many other countries, there was no question of where they were supposed to go. It is Zionist hasbara that Jews, followers of a religion, had nowhere to go because only 20% of the Israeli colonists were ever European Jews looking for refuge after WWII.
It is totally untrue to say after WWII no nation wanted them. A huge number went to Australia and others to the US, Canada, South Africa, the UK and many other countries.
It was not the absence of options that a few went to Palestine because the Zionist plan for Palestine began in the 1890’s and there had been Jewish plans even earlier than that.
Quote: Nearly 80 years before the Holocaust, a group which came to be known as the “Bilu pioneers” came to settle in Palestine. It was comprised of primarily Russian Jewish settlers who viewed their mission in Palestine as a pioneering one towards “the physical upbuilding of the land as contributing toward both a revitalization of the Jewish nation and the reemergence of Jewish masculinity and virility”. While this group predated Zionism as a political movement as we understand it today, it would not be unreasonable to call it proto-Zionist.
The Bilu pioneers would be followed by other groups, such as the Hibbat Zion. Some would fail and leave, others would remain. However, the shift in the quality and organization of Zionist colonialism would begin in 1897. Convened in the Swiss city of Basel, the first Zionist congress included over 200 delegates from all over Europe. The program of the congress called for establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, and to begin coordinating the settlement of Zionists there. The Zionist congress distinguished itself from previous attempts at settling Palestine by being the first to organize and marshal colonization efforts in a centralized and effective manner.
All of these efforts to colonize Palestine began nearly a century before the Holocaust, and was already picking up steam after the first world war. By the end of the 1800s, Theodor Herzl -the founder of political Zionism- was sending out letters to imperialist powers all over the globe in an attempt to elicit their aid in colonizing Palestine. Perhaps the most infamous is his letter to Cecil Rhodes, arguing that Britain recognized the importance of “colonial expansion”:
hxxps://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/israel-penance-for-holocaust/
The other question is why the Israelis then proceeded to act like their persecutors, even after being given far more of Palestine by the UN than expected. To which the answer seems to be Zionism -ie the Iron Wall, the title of an excellent book by Iranian Jew Avi Shlaim.
Good question, Rob, and you are correct, most of the world abandoned the victims of the Holocaust although many ended up in places other than Palestine. The US in particular, that would have been the natural choice since it already had a large Jewish diaspora, used the 1924 antisemitic/anti-Bolshevik Johnson-Reed Act to reject Jewish immigration. Europe, recovering from the war, was no help. Over the decades, a number of Jewish homelands or refuges were proposed – USSR, Uganda, Japan, Madagascar, Alaska, Tasmania and Northern Australia – some more realistic than others but all rejected by the Zionists. So given that the Zionists had been settling in Palestine in small numbers for decades and they had a developed a powerful international lobby, the 1947 UN resolution became a fait accompli. Even then, the UN did not guarantee the creation of a democratic state that recognised the equal rights of Arabs and Jews, and that was not in violation of the UN Charter that prohibits the use of force and ethnic cleansing that was being planned and carried out even prior to 1947. Instead, the UN resolution created a state that is inherently unequal, where there can never be peace and no one is safe. This is why I believe that the creation of the Israeli State has been a spectacular failure and that we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Zionism.
The partition resolution, UNGA181, was voted on in November 1947, not in 1948 as the article states. What a lot of people are not aware of is that the vote was postponed over the Thanksgiving weekend because of pressure from the Truman White House, because they saw that the vote count was then AGAINST passage of the resolution. Truman waged a heated campaign in the interim to bribe and/or threaten countries which had announce their intention to vote AGAINST the partition resolution. The campaign worked and when the General Assembly convened, the vote passed. Details of that vote, which was carried out under undemocratic pressure (adding insult to injury in that Palestinians and Arab states were not adequately consulted by the UNSCOP committee which toured Palestine earlier in 1947), are told in the early pages of Collins/Lapierre’s “O Jerusalem”…the very first book on this issue I read when touring occupied Palestine on foot in 1982. Much more detail on the chaos in the Truman White House leading up to the vote (both his Sec. State Marshall and Sec. Defense Forrestal were OPPOSED to passage of the resolution on the grounds that it was against the national interests of the United States) is told in John Judis’s “Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Israel-Palestine Conflict”.
Thank, Carl, I stand corrected – UN resolution 181 was passed in 1947 and was to be implemented in 1948 when the British Mandate over Palestine ended. As for Truman’s role in getting the vote passed, he was being pressured by the Jewish lobby that was hugely influential in the Democratic party (threatening to withdraw their support if Truman didn’t play ball) and, after the fact, Truman was reportedly quite resentful of being railroaded.
A tree of evil drops the seeds of self-destruction upon its own roots. Hamas and all others in the Middle East who are resisting are seeds of liberation sown by generations of outsiders.
The political solution will not be determined by Jews whether they are Zionists, Nonzionists, religious or secular. The solution will not be determined by Americans or Europeans.
The solution is being decided even now by those who have the most to gain and least to lose. The solution could come soon or many years from now. The issue to be resolved is not the number of states but the state of equality between the river and the sea.
My question is, if someone mooted today that a slab of someone else’s country be cut off so followers of one religion from somewhere else could set up their own country, which demanded total power to be retained solely by followers of the religion, who would support it? The recommendation made by the UN for partition, and it was only ever a recommendation, was immoral and illegal because the UN had no right to summarily partition any country.
Israel was founded in colonial and genocidal war and has never been legitimate.
Ah, who would support it …. the same folks who put money in their pockets and power in their hands …
Not only does a Zionist state have no more right to exist than does a Nazi state, or even an apartheid state like Apartheid era South Africa, but Israel’s leadership has no more right to enjoy impunity than did the Nazi leadership. Or for that matter, than does the duopolic leadership in the United States. Then again, rights are apparently a delusion, as is any difference between right and wrong.
Excellent summation – of course the creation of the modern state of Israel was irreversibly flawed. Two wrongs don’t make a right. And no, Zionists will not eliminate their enemies no matter how many assassinations they carry out, and yes, the next uprising will be even larger and more deadly than the current one.
I do not comprehend this closing passage however: “If that can happen (successful revolt) without cataclysmic global repercussions, possibly bringing the U.S. and Europe to the brink of the next world war, …” I understand the tail has wagged the dog(s) (both US and UK) for many decades now, but to think that Europe will embark on a new “Crusade” to save what Israel has now become, is imo very unlikely. And the US is sinking politically to the point that it can’t find it’s ass with both hands.
A one-state solution would be a return to the status quo ante — before British mandate. It would work — and work very well — only if the country were divided up into cantons like Switzerland, each with a high level of autonomy, with the central government acting primarily as coordinator (and peace-maker) among the disparate entities, in short a confederal union. The problem with that — and Switzerland has been wrangling with it since the beginning of the First World War — is that such a weak central government makes it very difficult, often impossible, to maintain the military-industrial complex that Switzerland’s armaments industry so ardently wants.
The author erroneously writes (like so many who are poorly informed on the subject) about “the 1948 U.N. Partition Plan that established a Jewish State”. There was NO such resolution. It is an invention and mainstay of Zionist propaganda.
There was a non-binding General Assembly resolution in 1947, N°181, proposing partition in imitation of the 1937 Peel Commission Plan, which had been roundly rejected by the indigenous communities, Jewish, Muslim and Christian, because it proposed to divide up a land where they had all lived in harmony since time immemorial. Only the Zionists settlers supported it. The 1947 resolution was voted through only because the United States threatened the Latin American countries (who were a majority at the time) with draconian economic sanctions if they voted for it. In the end, most of them abstained. Only the votes of member states that voted count, These abstentions reduced the number of voting member states to the point where the U.S. was able to muster among them a simple majority. The United Kingdom refused to vote for it.
Again, it was a PROPOSAL, non-binding, and it proposed to give the Jews 55+% of the territory even though they were barely 30% of the population. The campaign for a plebiscite such as those that followed the First World War was denounced as “divisive”, backward-looking, a project of the “failed” League of Nations etc.
Thank you, RJPJR. You and others have pointed out this important distinction – that resolution 181 was non-binding and lacked any legitimacy in the creation of a Jewish state.
The problem is the US centralized empire wants to keep its settler colonialist state in the ME for strategic purposes. That’s why it backs it to the detriment of its own people. For Israel to fall, the empire needs to fall. Not that that would be a bad thing.
Hoping the ICJ will speed things along by judging Israel guilty of genocide. And then the US of the same.
I understand that a one-state solution seems the only viable one; on the other hand, after nearly a century of conflict, these factions despise each other so thoroughly how can it be expected that they will ever willfully co-exist?
“… these factions despise each other so thoroughly …”
The people don’t “despise” each other. the land grabbers despise and want to eliminate those whose land they covet.
Ok so sorry I wasn’t more specific. Even still, how does anyone expect the “land grabbers” to peacefully co-exist with those whose land they covet and have terrorized for so long?
Funny that when Biden was elected we heard that science is back. These same people are now backing to the limit those that claim Palestine belongs to them because of a thousands of years old biblical deed promising them that land.
A good, honest and soulful statement about a mad project of the few gone completely awry for so many. I bow my hat to you, Mr. Moore. The new mass murderer cringes in morbid fear of his victims, his only consolation the icy fingers with which the “West” feeds him and eggs him on. His back is glued against a decaying rampart, where he squats in the squalor of his own dream of emulating the mass murderer who preceded him.
Powerful, graphic words Anthony, encompassing all the horrific aspects of this crime against humanity and its enablers.
Many Palestinians were also forced into the West Bank and Gaza as well. I don’t know the numbers, but maybe even the majority stayed in historic Palestine as refugees. Good article though. One state solution all the way. Two states is the impossible Zionist talking point. It is a dead idea.
Violence against Paleinstians started as soon as European Jews, espeicially political Zionists from Russia/Lithuania/Poland/Ukraine started to target Palestine.
People like Victor Jabotinsky (one of whose acolytes and assistants was Benzion Netanyahu, Benjamin’s father), Josef Trumpeldor, David Gruen (Ben Gurion), Moshe Arens, and othrs of the same ilk.
Zionism was always was premised on the removal of Palestinians from Palestine, and it stared at least a generation before the self-creation of Israel in 1948.
The article fails to argue that a one-state solution is more viable than a two-state solution.
Ukraine was a polarized one-state solution before it broke apart into two states.
So were several eastern European states that fragmented. The examples go on and on.
It should be obvious that a one-state solution would be unstable and dominated by one group.
We should not hear again of a “one-state solution” unless the article makes an argument.
As a socialist, I support one socialist state, of Jewish and Muslim workers in solidarity. Zionism must be eradicated as a perverse and violent human aberration. The working class must turn on their oppressors together.
Palestinians would be overjoyed to live in a single state of Israel/Palestine with equal rights; clearly, supremacist Zionists hate the very idea but will simply have to get used to it. It’s likely, or at least I hope it is, that Ireland will become a single state and fanatical Protestants in northern Ireland will, like fanatical Zionists, have to accept they are not superior people.
The notion that Zionists will “simply have to get used to” democracy echoes the article: neither propose any mechanism of government that would cause tyrants to create a democracy that could function despite long-entrenched bitter conflict. Of course they won’t, or they would have done so. Unfortunately, solving problems requires considering the realities of politics and power.
Zionism has never been a Jewish-majority movement.
Just to clarify what you mean. As I have (chosen to) believe the dogma of Zionism has not been a foundation of the Jewish faith and that proposition is supported by the majority of the world’s Jewish communities. I am aware that some of the most articulate critics of Zionism claim to be of the Jewish faith.
The paradox is, that further to my comment the mainstream media and western politicians would have everyone believe that the cult of Zionism is embraced by mainstream Jewry. This is fostered by the Zionist lobby.
Yes, an important point. It is a relief to read this article’s clear indication of the existence of opposition to Zionism from within the Jewish community at large. How often we read simply “the Jews” as being the problem, much in the way some refer to “the whites” as being the problem. Oversimplification to stupid generalizations plagues rational thinking and prompts “the submissive void,” so that clarifications on this matter are direly needed.