These last three months have made it apparent that there has to be a major change to what we know of as Israel/Palestine. But it has been coming for some time – perhaps since the enactment of Israel’s Basic Law of 2018 which conferred a right of self-determination exclusively on the Jewish people thereby asserting supremacy at the expense of the Palestinian people, they making up some 50% of the inhabitants of the land controlled by Israel. The offensiveness of the concept is beyond belief. It has led, directly, to an apartheid state.

The greatest constraint in doing anything about the problem is US involvement. Israel has been able to sell itself to the US people as the only democracy in the Middle East and thus having shared values. Those who are perhaps more perceptive see the connection as not so much democracy but as the dollar, the dollar which has demanded a US footstep into the Middle East, and its fossil fuel reserves. Religious Zionism was engaged to support the settler-colonial enterprise. That settler-colonial enterprise switched from white European colonization pre 1948, to an Israeli independent project thereafter. The enterprise has sold itself cunningly as an enabler of US ‘full spectrum dominance’.

Religious Zionism needs to be expanded upon. Zionism asserts that Israel cannot be occupiers of Palestinian land. How, it asks, can the Jewish people be occupiers in their own homeland, land ‘given to them by God’, as described in the book of Joshua. How does one argue with such an argument?

And a subset of religious Zionists is evangelical Christians in the US who see Jewish control and settlement in the entire land of Israel as a requirement for fulfilling their end-times prophecies. Again, how does one argue? Surely intelligent people must realize that humanity has advanced somewhat over the past 3,000 years since the time of Joshua.

And there are other constraints. A major one is a readily available mechanism. The United Nations, the entity which might be seen as the obvious tool, is handicapped by the veto of each of the five permanent members of the Security Council, one of which, the US, is of course the problem.

The Two State Solution

This seems to be the only realistic option. The Palestinian Authority advances it, and Hamas has also de facto accepted it. Today, 138 of 193 UN member states recognize Palestine as a state. This solution, with the borders being the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as Palestine’s capital was the proposal advanced by President Erdogan of Turkiye on 11 October 2023.
I accept that some advance a one-state solution, and I also accept that it has certain advantages. The problem however, as I see it,........

© Pearls and Irritations