Palestine’s problem is only partly expressed as a frustrated 2-State Solution; it might, more effectively be understood as a 2-Israel problem.

The times are desperate, and the belief systems and politics that create them must be called out and described for what they are: preposterous. The poets make more sense of than most; Yeats, especially:

“We had fed the heart on fantasies / The heart’s grown brutal with the fare”.

Translation: no matter how much one might long for it, a Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel – the Two-State Solution – is a doomed aspiration.

It is a hope besieged on all sides by a confluence of forces, and given that it has been frustrated for 76 years, it has already passed, by several factors, beyond the longest sieges of history – Candia (21 years); Philadelphia, Anatolia 12 years); Ishiyama Honganji, Osaka (10 years); Drepana, Carthage, and Thessalonica, Macedonia (both 8 years); late 18th Century Gibraltar (43 months); Leningrad (872 days).

These forces have been described in straightforward political-historical terms on this site, especially in the insightful and compellingly argued accounts by former Australian ambassador to various Middle East states, Dr. Bob Bowker. What follows are a couple of riffs upon the themes which he, and many others address for the purpose of highlighting strains of thought and action which, though present, need to be repeated so that their nature might be captured – and yes – held up to the ridicule and contempt that they deserve.

It helps to understand this objective if one approaches the world of international politics as a dysfunctional realm in which cognitive dissonance is both the required and the operational emotional state of all those who enter it.

Put another way, they are not only required to normalise the need to hold contradictory beliefs and attitudes, and therefore to engage in contradictory behaviour but also to interact with others in generically the same state but whose beliefs and behaviours will frequently contradict their own.

For Palestinians whose demand is that they live in their own genuine nation state, on lands they have long inhabited, their appeal fails at a fundamental level: the system of states -and that mythical shapeshifter, the “international community” – loudly proclaims four fundamental principles which are antithetical to each other.

These are that: state sovereignty is inviolable; nations and other collectivities of peoples have the right to self-determination; democratic politics within states is the best guarantee of international order; and the protection of human rights is universally agreed.

What is not proclaimed is the Principle of the Exception. Although some might say that the occasional reference to Thucydides – “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” – and that his overall history of the Peloponnesian Wars is a paean to imperialism’s self-absolution from acknowledging rights or justice in the relations between states, they do not capture the nature of the Exception.

And for the Palestinians........

© Pearls and Irritations