When is the world going to sit up and do something about it - if ever? And at the moment the world means the US of A.
As a South African, I have seen the worst aspects of an apartheid state, but Israel has managed to amplify it a thousand times over.
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Tuesday, 22 May 2018
Israel/Palestine is already one state –the only people who talk of 2 States are Zionists
The Death of the 2 State Illusion
Those Who Support 2 States
Support an Apartheid Solution
Another brilliant
article from Israel’s premier journalist, Gideon Levy. It can only be a matter of time, perhaps when
Netanyahu has finally silenced the few remaining NGO’s and human rights
organisations that attention will be turned to Levy and Amira Hass and the
other journalists who aren’t prepared to play ball with Zionism.
There are some gullible
fools and political cowards unfortunately in the Palestine solidarity movement,
who still call for a 2 State solution
These naive souls, amongst which one must count the Executive of the
Palestine Solidarity Campaign, who
sincerely believe that the Israeli government is going to agree to a separate
Palestinian state.
It is difficult to
know whether these people actually believe this, because it is always
hard to get inside someone’s head. The fact that Netanyahu stated at
the last election that there would be no 2 state solution, the fact
that there is no member of his ruling coalition who calls for a
Palestinian state is irrelevant. When Tzipi Hotoveli, Israel’s
religious nut of a Deputy Foreign Minister and a member of Likud states
that “We
need to return to the basic truth of our rights to this country,” she
said. “This land is ours. All of it is ours. We did not come here to
apologise for that.” what part of that I wonder do these people not understand?
The Israeli Labour
Party also doesn’t believe in a 2 state solution. Sure they pay lip
service to it but the position as outlined by their leader Avi Gabbay is
opposition to the dismantlement of the settlements. The settlements
have been so constructed as to prevent a 2 state solution and without
their being dismantled any Palestinian state would have more holes in it
than a Swiss cheese.
The
Times of Israel of 2nd November 2017 summed up the situation
perfectly: After pro-settlement comments, Gabbay reiterates support for two-state
solution
Of course I would be
less than honest if I didn’t confess to opposing 2 states on principle.
The root cause of the problem in Palestine is not two peoples fighting
over one piece of land as liberal Zionists pretend but a settler
colonial movement which displaced an indigenous population and erected a
racial supremacists state as in South Africa. A 2 state solution, even
were it feasible, would be a monstrosity. Israel would be even more
racist and aggressive. The Palestinian state, which would be a
Bantustan in practice, would be a horrific police state whose main job
was to police its own subjects in order to keep Israel satisfied,
because there would be a massive power imbalance between them. Indeed
the Palestinian ‘state’ would be something like the quisling entity that
the Palestinian Authority operates at the moment.
That is why I opposed,
in 1993, the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO. At the time I
resigned from PSC over the issue when, at an emergency conference,
two-thirds of the meeting agreed to support them. My views on them are
best represented in a debate with Julia Bard of the Jewish Socialists
Group in the pages of National Labour Briefing, A Mess of
Potage in October 1993.
In the article I said that:
The Accord divides the Palestinian nation in two. It excludes not only _
those Palestinians living inside pre-1967 Israel, but the two million
Palestinians who were exiled in 1948 and 1967. It explicitly rules out
the right of return. Israel continues to control the Allenby bridge to
Jordan.
Under the Accord Israel will retain control over land, water and
resources. The Palestinians will collect their own garbage, control
education and health and police themselves. In effect, the prison guards
will be removed from inside to outside the prison walls.
The debate is
reproduced in Oslo
Revisited - Debate Between Julia Bard (JSG) & Tony Greenstein (Return)
Zionism was not
founded in order to establish a state in half the Land of Israel (Eretz
Yisrael). It claims the whole land. Indeed the biblical Land of Israel
extends up to the Litani river in Lebanon and down to the Nile in Egypt
and across to the Euphrates in Iraq, so there is quite a way to go.
The idea of stopping half way and handing over 22% of the territory of
Mandate Palestine is absurd.
Of course there are
some people who talk about 2 states who know full well that it will
never be achieved. Firstly Zionist organisations in this country, in
particular Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Labour Movement but
also the Board of Deputies of British Jews support 2 states. However
these same organisations support all Israel’s repressive actions
in the Territories. They all support the Occupation wholeheartedly.
Yet unless there is sufficient opposition to the military occupation,
there is no chance that Israel will unilaterally hand over part of the
West Bank for a state.
We saw that last week
when the Board of Deputies and Labour Friends of Israel rushed to
support the Israeli army's gunning down of 60 unarmed Palestinian
demonstrators whilst blaming the violence, not on those who did the
shooting but on the victims (for which Hamas is the all-purpose
address).
It should therefore clear that these organisations are hypocritical liars. They know that there will never be a 2 state solution as does the pro-Zionist Alliance for Workers Liberty,
an allegedly Trotskyist organisation. So why do they support 2
states? Because that is the best way to undermine calls for the only
possible solution to Israeli Apartheid, a democratic, secular state in
the whole of Palestine. Support for 2 States is also a way of opposing
the call for equal rights for all those under Israeli rule, i.e. an end
to the present Apartheid situation.
There are of course a
second group, such as Jeremy Corbyn, who have no analysis worthy of the
name and simply oppose Israeli repression and call for a 2 State
Solution because they fondly imagine that the ‘international community’
will put pressure on Israel to conform. However it should be obvious
even to these people that the United States, which is in essence the
‘international community’ has no intention whatsoever of pressurising
Israel to agree to a 2 state solution.
Emily Thornberry,
Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary also calls for 2 States. I have no
doubt whatsoever that she does not believe it is possible. She is an
ardent Zionist and a member of Labour Friends of Israel. As such her
posturing on the issue is entirely cynical. She is above all a
supporter of the Atlantic Alliance and the special relationship with the
USA. Israel is integral to that.
The reality today is
that there is already one state. As Gideon Levy says, there is no
border between pre-1967 Israel and today’s Greater Israel. The only
question therefore is whether or not all those living under Israeli rule
should be granted equal rights. Those who oppose this are supporters
of the present Apartheid situation. Of course this will mean that there
will no longer be a Jewish State. That is not such a loss. What is a
Jewish state? Does a state pray to god or put on tefillin (phylacteries)?
A Jewish state simply means a state where Jews have more rights than
non-Jews. It is a Jewish supremacist state and no one who calls
themselves a socialist should have anything to do with such a concept.
Tony Greenstein  |
| A debate on the Oslo Accords in Labour Briefing in October 1993 with the Jewish Socialist's Julia Bard |
Calling
Israel a democracy when less than half its subjects live in freedom is a
propaganda trick that has worked better than one would have thought
Gideon
Levy Apr
15, 2018
 |
| FILE PHOTO: Arrests at the Gaza border, 2007AP |
With the approach this week of
celebrations marking Israel’s 70th birthday, 12 million people live in
the country. Some of them are citizens, some are residents, some are
detainees, and all are subjects. Everyone’s fate has been determined by
the country’s governing institutions.
On this Independence Day,
we have to acknowledge that the country’s genuine borders are the
Mediterranean Sea to the west and the Jordan River to the east,
including not only the West Bank but also the Gaza Strip.
Israel controls all this territory and everyone who lives there through
various and sundry means, even if from a legal standpoint there’s no
mention of this.
Forget the law. Israel long ago
abandoned it. In practice it rules Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip. In the case of Gaza, it suffices with control from the outside,
which is more convenient. On Israel’s 70th birthday, the time has come
to recognize that the occupation of the territories in 1967 is not
temporary. It was never meant to be and never will be. The 1967 border
has been erased. The distinction between 1948 and 1967 doesn’t exist.
It was only in the state’s first 19
years, a blink of an eye from a historical perspective, that the country
existed without the territories. For the balance of its history, the
occupation has been an inseparable part of it, its character, its
government, its essence, its DNA. What existed here for a brief time and
is gone will not be coming back.
It’s critical that we rip the cover off
the alleged transience of the occupation, which for some Israelis has
been a sweet delusion and for others a dangerous threat. There is an
abyss dividing a temporary occupation and a permanent one.
In its early years, Israel was small in
area and population, but its youth, like everyone’s youth, quickly
passed. For most of its existence, Israel hasn’t resembled the girl we
remember. Its days as a small country with a Jewish majority have passed
and the clock can’t be turned back. It’s no longer the small woman of
our dreams. It’s the big woman of our nightmares.
On Israel’s 70th birthday, the time has
come to recognize that Israel is a binational state under whose control
two peoples live, equal in size. It maintains separate governing systems for them: a democratic one for Jews, discrimination for Israeli Arabs, and dictatorship for Palestinians. It’s not an equal democracy for all its subjects, meaning, of course, that it’s not a democracy.
There’s no such democracy where what’s
allowed for one people isn’t for another. Therefore, on its 70th
anniversary, Israel being called a democracy when fewer than half its
subjects live in freedom is nothing but a propaganda trick that has
worked to a greater extent than one would have thought.
It’s not only Israelis who deny and
repress this reality. It’s more convenient for the Western world, too,
to look at Israel’s more enlightened side, to ignore its dark side and
continue to call it a democracy. After all, in the West, what country
hasn’t also had such a colonialist back yard? And who could really
confront Israel, a country that rose from the ashes?
Israel is therefore the darling of the
West, despite the hollow lip service to the Palestinians, and so the
West too has embraced the excuse of the occupation’s temporary nature:
“Just wait, wait a little longer for the ‘peace process’ and the
Israelis will be pulling out of the territories.” So it’s important that
the lie of the transience of the occupation be exposed.
If the occupation isn’t temporary, it
would be clear that Israel isn’t a democracy but rather an apartheid
state par excellence. Two peoples and two systems of rights. That’s was
apartheid looks like, even if it hides behind excuses ranging from
temporariness to security grounds, from the right to the land to the
concept of the chosen people, including the divine promise and messianic
redemption.
These excuses don’t change the picture.
In South Africa, no doubt an apartheid state, the regime invoked
similar excuses to justify its existence. No one bought them. But with
Israel there actually are buyers. One difference between South Africa
and Israel is that Israel is stronger, more sophisticated and better
connected to the world. And it has done a better job obscuring its
apartheid.
It’s big, strong and nondemocratic.
Israel oppresses the Palestinians through various means with one result:
There isn’t a single free Palestinian in the West Bank or Gaza Strip.
Their fate is determined by the Israeli government in Jerusalem and the
Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, and they have no rights at either one. Is
this not apartheid? Is it democracy?
And now on to the showy and proud
Independence Day ceremonies planned by Culture Minister Miri Regev.
Let’s not rain on her parade.
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