S. Argun | Red Phoenix correspondent | Washington–

Israel announced recently that they have approved 22 new settlements in the occupied West Bank, including 12 existing illegal settlements, now fully legitimized in the eyes of the Israeli state, and nine new settlements. The current Israeli government has legalized or established 50 new settlements since 2022. In early May, Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich also confirmed the Israeli government will approve plans for a new road that he hopes will bring in “a million residents.” This move is also clearly intended to facilitate the annexation of East Jerusalem – and the effective halving of the West Bank. 

Finally, we have the announcement at the beginning of May of Operation Gideon’s Chariots to occupy Gaza long term and to “voluntarily” displace the two million Palestinians within, a solution rejected outright by the neighboring states. The aid distribution in Gaza has been taken over by the Israeli state, with international groups pushed out or, in the case of the aid flotilla, shot at. with Israeli troops firing on starving Palestinians as they try to acquire food. The plan of the Zionist entity is clear for anyone to see: they intend to use starvation to accomplish the full depopulation in Gaza, rather than guns and bombs. The graveyard remaining will then allow for an influx of Israeli settlements. 

All of these developments make the infeasibility of the two-state solution clearer than ever before. Setting aside the morality of such an arrangement, the main opposition to be overcome is not Palestinian but Israeli. Despite what the media and popular history may say, the Israelis have never once actually offered to create a Palestinian state with full sovereignty of air, water, energy, and security. (See Rashid Khalidi, “The 100 Years War On Palestine,” pp. 193–194, for Rabin’s intended outcome for the Oslo process. Also see John J. Mearsheimer, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” pp. 94–97)

The Oslo Accords, commonly cited as the point when the Palestine Liberation Organization refused the creation of the Palestinian state, also did not offer a state. The final outcome, now clear, was the creation of the comprador Palestinian Authority that would manage the difficult security situation in the West Bank (Khalidi, 205), while allowing itself to be dismembered at will or overridden by Israeli governance. The Israeli population in the West Bank increased the greatest rate from 1993-2000, with no commensurate reaction by the “liberal” prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, who nevertheless managed to get himself assassinated by one far-right terrorist and succeeded by another, Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu, then and now, has committed to the further dismemberment of the West Bank to ensure no two-state solution is ever viable. 

Even if Israel could be cajoled to accept a solution it has spent the utmost effort for the last six decades to prevent, the Palestinians should not and can not be asked to give up most of their lands permanently. The proposed Israeli and Palestinian states should be combined into a single, binational state, called Palestine. However, simply establishing such a state could actually pave the way for further dispossession of Palestinian land. In 2022, the GDP per capita of Israel outstripped that of the Palestine’s by a factor of 14, without even considering the disastrous effects of the war on Gaza and the West Bank. Under capitalist modes of production, the Palestinians would serve as a captive population, easily dispossessed of land, abused by the Israeli and comprador bourgeois, and unable to meaningfully return most of historic Palestine. It would be the same apartheid by another name. Any truly binational one-state solution must then include a mass program of economic redistribution, including land reform, state control of industry, and guaranteed right of return for Palestinians abroad and in the occupied territories. 

The binational, socialist one-state solution is doubtless difficult to achieve, but has always been the only moral solution. Many will doubtless call such a proposal naive, but at this stage it is also a more realistic outcome than a two-state solution with a sovereign Palestine. One state prevents the violence inherent in the complete displacement of large populations, Jewish or Palestinian. While the governments of Europe continue their rhetorical turn against Israel, they will tend to push more strenuously towards the two-state solution, as it has been the most popular resolution amongst American policymakers, a solution that will only serve to ensure Israeli dominance of the Palestinian people and legitimize the mass theft of Palestinian land. Israel could only be made to accept the two-state solution after extreme pressure from the rest of the world, and if the rest of the world wants to apply that pressure, then it should push towards the best possible outcome. The extreme crisis of colonialism in Palestine requires a bold and farseeing resolution, not half-hearted calls for land partition.

Categories: International, Israel, Palestine

Tags: Zionism