by Justine McCabe
First published in Green Horizon Magazine / Spring Summer 2012
For we belong to a single body –
Arabs and Jews
Tel Aviv and Tulkarem,
Haifa and Ramallah –
What are they
If not a single pair of shoulders,
Twin breasts?
(Our Land by Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai in J’Accuse, 2001)
As we note the anniversary of the “Arab Spring’s” revolts against repressive regimes in the Middle East, democracy remains uncertain. But a linchpin around which these regimes have long operated continues: the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Indeed, as Egypt’s revolution began, James Jones–former commander of all NATO forces, former national security advisor to President Obama, and former special ME envoy to President George W. Bush–addressed the 2011 Herzliya Conference in Israel insisting that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the “knot that is at the center of the mass” of all regional and most global diplomatic problems today, . . . ” 1 According to Israel Today, “Jones rejected the notion that the current turmoil in Egypt proved that even without Israel and its land dispute with the Arabs the Middle East would not have peace. 2
That report criticized Jones for ignoring that “before 1967, Israel did not control the so-called ‘West Bank,’ and yet there was still much conflict.” However, the conflict’s origin is not the 1967 war. Rather it begins with Zionist colonization of historic Palestine from the late 19th century, culminating in the 1948 Nakba—”catastrophe”: Palestinian dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the majority native population from 1947-49 by a newly-created Israeli state, documented by many scholars, including Jewish Israeli historians. 3
Acknowledging this history is not only essential to resolving the conflict but also points to the solution: “One Democratic State” (ODS) in the land between the River Jordan and Mediterranean Sea. ODS is also the “Green” solution”—most just, legal, non-violent, sustainable. For these reasons, ODS was formally endorsed by the Green Party of the US in its 2010 platform.
The Two State Solution: Intention, Practice and Demise
The “two-state solution” is a chimera, at best meant only to end Israeli military occupation in parts of the West Bank (WB). It is not now, nor has ever been, a sustainable solution to the core problem between Israelis and Palestinians: Israel’s continuing dispossession of Christian and Muslim natives of Palestine and refusal to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homes because they are not Jews.
This solution is premised on legitimizing permanent inequality between Israeli Jews and Palestinians who would remain dependent on Israel. Concomitantly, it would legitimize ethnic cleansing and seizing territory by force.
How can this not be a recipe for ongoing insecurity, conflict and violence?
Ironically, because of its structural inequality and “facts on the ground,” the two-state solution is already dead. The WB has been integrated into Israel demographically, economically as well as territorially. Palestine-Israel is one de facto state, where one group dominates another. Israel’s orgy of settlement building following the 1967 war have now created 600,000+ Jewish-Israeli colonizers in the WB, many in what are now large cities engulfing Jerusalem. Israel continues to evict East Jerusalem Palestinians to build 13,500+ new homes for Jews only, a policy publicly condemned by South Africa as reminiscent of “forced removals” of their apartheid era. Thus, 2.4 million Palestinians are left scraps–fragmented Bantustans–in the WB, separated from 1.7 million besieged Palestinians in Gaza.
Describing the WB as the egg that cannot be unscrambled, 4 former Israeli Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, Meron Benvenisti recognizes the “Inevitable Bi-National Regime”
One must therefore seek a different paradigm to describe the state of affairs more than forty years after Israel/Palestine became one geopolitical unit again, . . . The term “de facto bi-national regime” is preferable to the occupier/occupied paradigm, because it describes the mutual dependence of both societies, as well as the physical, economic, symbolic and cultural ties that cannot be severed without an intolerable cost. Describing the situation as de facto bi-national does not indicate parity between Israelis and Palestinians–on the contrary, it stresses the total dominance of the Jewish-Israeli nation, which controls a Palestinian nation that is fragmented both territorially and socially. No paradigm of military occupation can reflect the Bantustans created in the occupied territories, which separate a free and flourishing population with a gross domestic product of almost 30 thousand Dollars per capita from a dominated population unable to shape its own future with a GDP of $1,500 per capita. No paradigm of military occupation can explain how half the occupied areas (“area C”) have essentially been annexed, leaving the occupied population with disconnected lands and no viable existence. Only a strategy of annexation and permanent rule can explain the vast settlement enterprise and the enormous investment in housing and infrastructure, . . . 5
Similarly, former national director of the American-Jewish Congress, Henry Seigman, regards Jewish settlements in the WB as having created an “irreversible colonial project” intended to prevent a viable Palestinian state: “Israel has crossed the threshold from ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ to the only apartheid regime in the Western world.” 6
Even if Israel supported a sovereign Palestinian state in the WB, there are other legal, environmental and moral problems with the two-state solution.
Palestinian Refugees
Where would millions of Palestinian refugees go? According to BADIL, the WB refugee rights center, there are about 7.6 million Palestinian refugees, 4.6 of whom are registered with the UN. Notwithstanding Palestinians’ inalienable right under international law to return home, there is already high population density, insufficient land in the proposed fragmented Palestinian “statelet” to humanely and environmentally accommodate those refugees, most originating from inside Israel.
The “Demographic Threat”
Zionist Israelis speak of ongoing threats to Jewish majority: growing numbers of non-Jews, a higher Palestinian than Jewish birth rate, increasingly low Jewish immigration relative to Jewish emigration resulting in estimates that by 2015 Palestinians will be the majority in historic Palestine.7
Israel has responded to this threat by escalating its apartheid-like regime: racist incitement like repeated calls for “transferring” Palestinian-Israeli citizens out; a 2003 law prohibiting Israeli citizens who marry Palestinians from the OPT from living with their spouses in Israel while Jewish Israelis marrying Jews from the OPT can live with them in Israel; a 2010 law requiring non-Jews seeking citizenship to pledge loyalty to Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state”; and outlawing support for the international Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and publicly-funded activities commemorating the Palestinian Nakba. 8
Given these demographics, Israel can only maintain a Jewish majority by killing or expelling non-Jews from Israel and continuing to make life so difficult for Palestinians they would leave.
Environmental Degradation of Two Unequal States
The unequal division of natural resources characterizing the two-state solution portends ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Water security has been most negatively impacted. Since 1967, Israel has not only arrogated regional water supplies and diverted over 80% of WB water for Israeli use, but the whole area now faces an absolute shortage of water because of over consumption and development. Meanwhile, (Mediterranean Sea) salt water is seeping into Gaza’s water as its water table falls. Under the two-state solution, USAID is expected to fund an Israeli plan to retain WB water sources in exchange for a desalination plant providing (privatized) water to the Territories. According to Stephen Lendman, “New Scientist points out that if these two projects become reality they’ll make “Palestine more dependent on desalination than almost any other nation in the world.” And given the cost of desalinated water, it will be out of reach for the great majority of impoverished Palestinians.” 9
Similarly, former US Green senatorial candidate Joel Kovel describes the environmental disaster resulting from Israeli efforts to maintain a Jewish state by dispossessing Palestinians:
“This has led to an ecological situation unique in history, one that hurtles toward environmental ruin. Human beings are ecosystems, too, and their capacity to fit into the great regulatory patterns of nature depends upon their internal integrity, manifest in mutual recognition and coherent communication. Estrangement, or alienation, is the human form taken by ecological breakdown; it is a failure of recognition between human agents, which makes cooperative action impossible and splits humanity from nature as well as itself. It follows that the most severely estranged society will also be the most subject to eco-disintegration. This more or less describes the State of Israel, and certainly its Occupied Territories, which comprise one of the most bizarre social formations ever planted upon the earth. Here, on a tiny plot of ground, dwell two people with two radically different legal and social systems, one the beneficiary of a powerful state and living in comfort while it works to terrorize and strangle the other who is stateless and bent upon surviving; the two are therefore as radically denied any cooperative arrangement as can be imagined, and primed to be an eco-destructive accelerant to the State of Israel as a whole. . . . Here we find deliberate actions taken to destroy the filaments of human ecosystems, by legal and extralegal means of expulsion, by removing, violently if necessary, the grounds of another’s communal existence, and by introducing physical means of disrupting the other’s relation to nature.” 10
The Clinton administration jettisoned international law in 1994 under the Oslo Accords, thereby dismissing equal protection for two grossly unequal parties. As Edward Said wrote, “So great has Israeli-US cooperation become on issues of illegality in defiance of the entire world community that it’s a gratuitous murder of language –its logic and meaning– to speak of a ‘peace process’ at all.”
In sum, this duplicitous process has mainly provided cover for Israel to seize more Palestinian land, fully aided by the US and often by a quisling Palestinian leadership. It only promises more dispossession and racism.
One Democratic State (ODS)
One Democratic State (ODS) in Palestine-Israel addresses the heart of the conflict: A Zionist Israel seeking to rid itself of non-Jews. Unlike any other state in the world, Israel defines itself as the state of Jews worldwide rather than the country of all its citizens, including approximately 25% who are non-Jews, mainly Palestinians. By law, Israel has institutionalized privilege of Jews over non-Jews. Like South Africa and Jim Crow US, this is institutionalized racism or apartheid under the UN’s 1973 International Convention.
By contrast, transforming Israel-Palestine into ODS has many advantages.
*ODS would observe international law:
- End to Israel’s apartheid-like regime in the OPT, now amply documented.11
- End to apartheid within Israel against its Palestinian citizens, also documented, including by the 2011 [Bertrand] Russell Tribunal on Palestine whose jury included former US Congresswoman and GPUS 2008 presidential candidate, Cynthia McKinney.12
- Comply with international law affirming Palestinian right to self-determination. At present, a Zionist Israel violates the law by its zero-sum game– achieving its “self-determination” at the expense of the self-determination of Palestinians.
- Comply with the international human right of Palestinians to return to their homes. In fact, for refugees who wish to return, feasible plans have been proposed creating minimal displacement of the current population. About 80% of Israeli Jews live in only 15% of the country; the vast majority of refugees could return to vacant or under populated areas from which they came. 13
*ODS would transform Israel’s growing pariah status as a racist country, bringing genuine security for its Jewish citizens.
*ODS would create an authentic homeland for Jews, as well as Palestinians. Zionist Israel’s oppressive policies toward non-Jews are inconsistent with Jewish values. Jews like international law professor Richard Falk assert that ODS would restore a genuine Jewishness to the people of Israel:
“For me to be Jewish is, above all, to be preoccupied with overcoming injustice and thirsting for justice in the world, and that means being respectful toward other peoples regardless of their nationality or religion, and empathetic in the face of human suffering whoever and wherever victimization is encountered. . . . ” 14
*ODS could be a catalyst for peace, democracy and tolerance in a region that has been a source of world instability, especially between the Muslim world and the West: 15
“Under international law, practices of colonialism and apartheid are judged damaging to international legal order and seriously threaten world peace and security. Findings of colonialism and apartheid legally obligate third parties to oppose the colonialism-apartheid system.” 16
Transformed, Israel could no longer be used to deflect attention from oppressive domestic policies of regimes in the region.
*ODS has growing support. Indeed, ODS was supported by Palestinians and some Jews before Israel’s creation. Recently, there have been several international conferences devoted to this (Madrid, London, Spain, Boston, Haifa) and working groups have been established, like the Movement for One Democratic State, October 2010 in Dallas, TX 17
Also, inspired by the “Arab Spring,” Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syria, the OPT, Egypt and Jordan rushed the borders of Israel demanding to be allowed to return to their homes in Palestine-Israel. 18
Polls show that while more Palestinians support a two-state solution, as Palestinians recognize its futility, support for ODS is growing, 19 as it is among even Jewish Israelis like former and current Israeli Knesset Speakers, Avraham Burg and Reuvin Rivlin.20 Other polls show that many Palestinians support gaining Israeli citizenship as a way of transforming the struggle into one for equal rights, 21 while most see the two-state solution as precursor to an inevitable ODS. 22.
Finally, ODS reflects reality: Palestine-Israel is, and always has been, a multicultural society, despite Zionism’s attempts to deny or Judaize it. In truth, Israelis and Palestinians have become inextricably connected by their mutual suffering and attachment to the same land. By working together to form one democratic state, both peoples eventually could be secure, at home.
Justine McCabe is Co-Chairperson of the International Committee of the Green Party of the United States. She also serves as a point person for the International Committee on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She earned doctorates in cultural anthropology and psychology and has lived and traveled widely in the Middle East, conducting anthropological research in Lebanon and Iran. Since the mid-1990s, she has traveled regularly to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories where she has conducted respite workshops for humanitarian workers. Justine practices clinical psychology in Connecticut.
ENDNOTES
- http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?ID=207259&R=R1
- www.israeltoday.c0.il/NewsItem/tabid/178/nid/22650/Default.aspx
- Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 2006; Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 2004.
- 60 Minutes, January 25th 2009
- http://www.americantaskforce.org/daily_news_article/2010/01/22/1264136400_13
- http://www.thenation.com/article/imposing-middle-east-peace
- http://www.d-transition.info/youthful-age-structures-4/palestinian-population-fast-approaching-israeli-jews-328/
- http://972mag.com/nakba-law-inside-pandoras-box
- http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn5037-israel-lays-claim-to-palestines-water.html; http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/198/40391.html
- Overcoming Zionism, 2007, pp.115-116.
- Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (HSRC) study, 2010 http://www.hsrc.ac.za/Media_Release-378.phtml ; UN special report, 2007; http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/B59FE224D4A4587D8525728B00697DAA
- http://www.russelltribunalonpalestine.com/en/sessions/south-africa/south-africa-session-%E2%80%94-full-findings/cape-town-session-summary-of-findings;
Inequality Report: The Palestinian Arab Minority in Israel
http://www.old-adalah.org/eng/Christian%20Aid%20Report%20December%202010%20FINAL.pdf;
Apartheid laws privileging Jewish Israelis http://www.itisapartheid.org/laws.html; and http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11762.htm - http://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2005/05/200849162924283293.html;
http://www.plands.org/books/Book%2002-00.html - http://richardfalk.wordpress.com/2011/01/15/on-jewish-identity
- UN Alliance of Civilizations 2006 report http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=3849
- http://icahdusa.org/2010/03/is-israel-an-apartheid-state
- http://www.onedemocraticstate.org
- http://electronicintifada.net/content/interview-planning-nakba-day-movement-lebanon/10046
- 2010 poll showed 34% favoring, up from 20.6% in 2009
http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=171559 - http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/now-it-s-your-turn-1.403059; and http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/israel-official-accepting-palestinians-into-israel-better-than-two-states-1.287421
- http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2010/07/west-bank-palestinians-say-yes-to-israeli- citizenship.html;
- http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/poll-most-palestinians-see-two-state-solution-as-precursor-to-single-state-1.325793
Magnificent and courageous depiction of the immorality of the current state of affairs and the only sensible solution. I just learned about the Green Party this morning from Noam Chomsky’s Wikipedia entry. Since it has been unthinkable for me to support either one of the majority War Parties for the past 20 years, maybe you guys are really “my people.”
Trouble is, Zionism is in control and will not permit anything other than Zionist-Jew control. Fair play/democracy is not on the Zionist-Jew agenda. If the present de facto one state is formalized, it will be with severe restrictions on non-Jews. Bank on it.
De Dutch Green party De Groenen has a similar point of view. Our party program includes: “The Greens believe that the international community must strive to a single state Palestine with for all residents the same civil rights. Because this is not yet to realize we advocate for recognition of Palestine as a state, because this improves the negotiating position of the Palestinian Authority and makes the relations in the peace negotiations with Israel more balanced. The Greens are member of the platform Stop the occupation.”
ALOHA:…. as a long-time member, state party chair and former green party candidate, i would like to strongly disagree with almost all of the arguments and policies expressed in this article. As one can see by comments already made, the “one-state” position and suggestion to destroy Israel is a thinly veiled, typical anti-semetic argument which the Green Party of the United States needs to revisit. Until then, we will continue to be marginalized. Nevertheless, almost all of the rest of the GPUS’s policies and positions are the progressive changes needed for survival of not only this country, but perhaps our planet.
I am an advocate of a one Democratic State. What I find intresting about you’re comment is: For one to wish for a one Democratic State where all citizens regardless of ethnithicity can vote (very American by the way) one is being anti-semitic and a destroyer of Israel. And as the evidence of the end notes above show that the zionists are basically anti non-jew, anyone who supports a Democratic State as stated above are the bad guys. How ironic. No wonder your candidacy failed.
Israel isn’t opposing their arab israeli population from voting. There are indeed arabs who serve in the Knesset, and majority-arab political parties (along with moderate poltical parties with arab and jewish bases). Get your facts straight. Respect the rights of the locals who would have deal with the fall out of a single-state solution, and their ability to make their own destinity (both sides would much prefer a 2 state solution). How crass and imperalistic to waltz in, create a yugoslavia and then cry when it inevitabily falls apart.
Its antisemitic because it denies to Jews what all other people have a right to – self determination. As we can see from not only the situation in Lebanon, but Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, not to mention Yugoslavia, a multi-ethnic state outside of the US/Canada/Australia, leads to a bloody civil war and ethnic cleansing.
As a senior citizen of the U.S. I lived thru the Big Depression as a child, WWII,and all succeeding wars, skirmishes, righteous interferences, etc which have and are continuing to deplete the population of this earth. Since scientists keep telling us that the population is increasing to the point of needing to succeed in space exploration in order to find habitable planets to take the overflow of earth perhaps it won’t be necessary if we continue to live with conflicts here on earth.
It’s time the entire world population grew up and stopped finding fault with each other for such childish reasons as race,color, religion, etc. The U.S. has practiced the same apartheid practices that we have despised in others, i.e. the American Indian, the African peoples who were brought here unwilling to be slaves, but now the influx of immigrants has truly made this a haven for all peoples even if they may be shunned by some of the longstanding residents. When you take the time to evaluate a person for themselves instead of as a group, it’s amazing how much can be found in their beliefs that coincide with yours.
PLEASE, Please, please LET THERE BE PEACE ON EARTH!
Yes! It is about time that a relatively major political party in the US is taking a sane stance on the issue of Palestine/Israel. Blind US support of Israel and the Zionist lobby (AIPAC) is a major detriment to US national security. We must deal fairly with this issue for any progress towards peace. A one-state agreement is the only viable solution considering how the economies of Palestine and Israel are intertwined.
This convinces me to vote for Jill Stein and the Green Party.
Harry, while terse, sums up what Nikhi was saying. “Zionist-jew”? Seriously? Not every jew is a zionist, and not every zionist is a jew. There are legitmate and serious criticisms of Israel, but not facing the fact that there is a fine line between those criticisms and anti-semitism is outright moronic. The single state idea is nice, but for now it’s a dream, and possibily a nightmare for both sides. Food for thought: Regarding an Israeli Supreme Court Ruling that land shall be sold to individuals reguardless of their ethnicity or religion, British philosopher Bernard Harrison has written, in a book chapter dealing with the “apartheid Israel” accusation: “No doubt much more needs to be done. But we are discussing, remember, the question of whether Israel is, or is not, an “apartheid state.” It is not merely hard, but impossible, to imagine the South African Supreme Court, under the premiership of Hendrik Verwoerd, say, delivering an analogous decision, because to have done so would have struck at the root of the entire system of apartheid, which was nothing if not a system for separating the races by separating the areas they were permitted to occupy.” The apartheid analogy is often aimed to delegitimize and demonize Israel and Zionism, applying a higher standard of behaviour to the Jewish state than to other nations or to the Palestinian Authority in order to justify the boycotting, ostracism, or elimination of the State of Israel. Critics say that much more obviously “apartheid”-like treatment of Palestinian refugees in the Palestinian Authority territory, Jordan and Lebanon, are ignored and are not the subject of delegitimization campaigns, exemplifying double standards. Irwin Cotler, a Jewish Canadian MP and anti-apartheid activist who was once a lawyer for Nelson Mandela said “The second manifestation of anti-semitism is the indictment of Israel as an apartheid state which involves more than the simple indictment of Israel as an apartheid state. It involves a call for dismantling Israel” He links this to other forms of delegitimization of the Jewish state by Palestinians, such as their attempt to deny any Jewish historical or religious links to the Holy Land as such, and especially to Jerusalem itself. There is certainly discrimination in Israel, and it’s awful. Israel isn’t monolithic, and there are many, many israelis (both jewish and arab) that would love nothing more than to see it end. Do Israel’s Arab citizens suffer from disadvantage? You better believe it. Do African Americans 10 minutes from the Berkeley campus suffer from disadvantage – you better believe it, too. So should we launch a Berkeley Apartheid Week, or should we seek real ways to better our societies and make opportunity more available…Vilification and false labeling is a blind alley that is unjust and takes us nowhere…You deny Israel the fundamental right of every society to defend itself…Your criticism is willfully hypocritical….You are betraying the moderate Muslims and Jews who are working to achieve peace. I can only hope the author of this article, Ms. McCabe’s anthropological research was more well thought-out than this attack ad. The situations are NOT the same.
What kind of state will the secular one state be?
Will it allow polygamy , honor killings and gay hangings like the falestinians practice or will it be western like Israel?
Maybe a good compromise will be a state that allow just a little bit of polygamy, honor killings and gay hangings?
What is Green Party policy on this?
Tomer, you are exactly correct. I’ve never been able to understand why people, with whom I agree on every other issue, come out with a one state solution without looking at the condition of non muslim communities in the Muslim Democratic countries of the world. I’m afraid that while some non Democratic Muslim Societies treat non-Muslims with some degree of freedom and respect, Muslim Democratic countries in the Middle East do not. I understand that this is not Islam itself. Some Muslim Countries in Southeast Asia have truly free democratic government, but this is not true of the countries surrounding Israel. Read the Constitutions of Hamas and Fatah. They both read like Mein Kampf. What the Green Party is suggesting is no less than the genocide of another six million. It makes me sick that the only party that sees American Domestic problems in a civilized way turns a blind eye on history. I do not believe that my wife, daughter, sister or friends should be executed if they are raped. That would be the law in One State Solution.
Israel was born out 2000 years of persecution culminating in the attempted genocide that was the holocaust. Arab and Persian evicted indigenous non Zionist Jews displacing as many Arab and Persian Jews as Israel displaced Palestinians in solidarity with the Palestinians.
This left many Arab and Persian Jews with no place to go but Israel who then felt pressure to expand. It also made it clear that they were against Jews not just the State of Israel.
Interestingly, the land confiscated from expelled Jews was not offered to displaced Palestinians. Effectively, the pan-muslim world took compensation for the loss of Palestine from indigenous Jews but never remitted that compensation the Palestinians.
Attention Justine McCabe and other readers of this blog:
I am a brand new member of the Green Party, Fourth Congressional District, Minnesota.
For the past two years, I have been working on an idea for a libretto that offers its own solution to achieving peace among Jews Palestinians and which professional musicians have told me has vast commercial as well as artistic potential.
I am willing to discuss my idea with someone who has the means of producing it or will purchase it from me and make it her/his own.
In order to discuss, we must each sign a non-disclosure agreement.
I’m sorry but I have put too much into to just give it away.
Besides, any proceeds would partially benefit the Minnesota Green Party as my other P&J causes.
If you wish to contact me, I am:
Willard B. Shapira
2545 Hamline N. Apt. 209-B
Roseville MN 55113
wshapira@comcast.net
651-493-7473
In addition, after reading Dr. Stein’s superb commentaries on peace, global warming and climate change which I think are closely connected, I urge the leaders of the national Green Party to meet with leaders of the nation’s leading peace and justice organizations and see if we can work closely together and in effect make the Green Party also the Peace Party now and start gearing up together for future campaigns and elections, locally and nationally.
It would give the peaceniks and their 501 (c) (3) organizations the political connection and voice they so badly need.
I will leave the rest to Dr. Stein, my Minnesota “home lady” Cheri Honkola and the other leaders of the national Green Party.
This is an historic opportunity we must take advantage to fill the political peace void left by the two war parties.
Let’s do it now!
This is why I can’t bring myself to vote Green. I agree with some of what you’re saying here, and believe it or not, I’m a Zionist, an Israeli, and a Jew. My problem here is not that you’re criticizing Israeli policies. Believe me, Bibi Netanyahu and his conservative friends have definitely earned some criticism. In fact, a lot of other Israeli leaders have done things I’m not so proud of. They have violated international law and human rights on numerous occasions, and I’m glad that you pointed that out.
But I still have a problem with the fact that that you’re criticizing Israel very thoroughly, but you’re ignoring any Palestinian infringements on the same international laws and rights. For instance, you write at length about Israel’s “institutionalized racism”. However, you completely failed to note the bigotry in the PLO and Hamas governments in Gaza and the West Bank respectively. For instance, you ought to be furious at the Palestinian Authority law that renders sale of land to Israeli Jews punishable by death. After all, it is “institutionalized racism or apartheid”. But somehow, you don’t seem to find that, or any other example of institutionalized racism committed by a Palestinian governmental organization, worth mentioning in a discussion about institutionalized racism’s involvement in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
In addition, you imply that Israel will soon begin a campaign of deportation and mass murder. This is a ridiculous claim. Yes, Jews are steadily moving towards becoming a minority in Israel. But that’s not how anybody (excluding a few disgusting, bigoted extremists, which is hardly a group found exclusively in Israel, or any other country) is proposing to fix it. In fact, most Israelis would like to fix this via a two-state solution, and the evacuation of West Bank settlements. Remember, the idea of a two-state solution is that Palestinians, like Jews will have a homeland, but that, again like Jews, they will not be forced from their current country of residence into the aforementioned homeland. In addition, the two-state solution would end the occupation of territories that do not rightfully belong to Israel, thereby eliminating this blatant violation of the international law that you claim to care about so much.
With all due respect one must know the history of this conflict to fairly judge both sides. When Ben Gurion and eleven future leaders of the not yet born state of Israel met in Haifa in 1937 they decided that it would be necessary to deport one million residents of the territory that would become the Jewish homeland. They did, in fact, exile three quarters of a million Arabs without a dime of reparations, thus creating the problem in the first place.
I agree that the violence is not limited to one side obviously, but Israel is a State and the homelessness and poverty, coupled with the stringent Israeli control of imports and money to these poor unfortunates was bound to breed what we currently see, radical minorities fomenting trouble. Israel drops bombs on innocents ,fires live ammunition into crowds of rock throwing children as well, all well documented.
As a Jew myself I am not at all pround of the State of Israel and do indeed lay the blame upon them. I believe, with all my heart, that in the fullness of time there will be one state there, two states will nto work as there are no resources for the Palestinian people to prosper and Israel has great need of the work force and the energy of new blood.
In closing I think one must judge the actions of desperate and homeless folks with a different set of eyes that one judges a constituted and legal Nation.
http://wikiislam.net/wiki/Honor_Related_Violence_(Palestinian_Authority_area)
Anyone who wants to live in the above world, plane tickets are available, and there is a liberal immigration policy.
I’m sorry for that I don’t mean to criticise . But I just wanted to say that the word conflict is not justifying the real situation . Israili occupation is a more appropriate word especially cause I see that you believe in Palestinians right of return the thing which denotes that the palestinians have been genocided from there home land .
I wish if you can justify them by using the word ” occupation” insted of “conflict”
thank you for reading .
I do appreciate all your articles .