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Israel and Palestine - One solution for Two enemies
Read more on - Polity | Economy | Schemes | S&T | Environment
- The Story: The 11 day long battle between the rockets of Hamas, fired from Gaza strip, and the missiles coming from Israel, ended in May, with hundreds dead. It gave the world another chance to think about what went wrong with the Oslo accords that were signed in 1993 with so much hope.
- Historical slippage: For 50 years now, various attempts to bring peace to historical Palestine have tried working on a two-state solution as the only way forward. Today, many analysts wonder if that was the wrong idea. It may also have been providing Israel the immunity to continue its 'ethnic cleansing' of the Palestinians.
- Britishers, here too: The idea of partitioning Palestine was offered by the new British occupiers of Palestine in 1937, a time when the Zionist movement was hardly 50 years old. The Zionist goal ten was to turn historical Palestine into a comprhensively Jewish state, and a chunk of the Palestinian homeland was proposed as a future state. This preposterous idea was naturally rejected by the Palestinians!
- Tragic event: The international community in 1940s insisted that the Palestinians should give half of their homeland to the settler movement of Zionism. This is a rare event in history where a whole community is being asked to be philanthropic for someone else's cause. The Palestinians kept reiterating that the settler movement of Zionism would not be content with just half of the country, and they may be wiped out. Truly, in less than a year, under the guise of UN support, the new Jewish state took over nearly 80% of historical Palestine. They cleansed almost a million Palestinians (more than half of Palestine’s population), and demolished half of Palestine’s villages and most of its towns in 9 months in 1948. The Nakba had happened. (Nakba = the catastrophe)
- Israel’s occupation: In 1967, Israel occupied the rest of historical Palestine, expelling another 3,00,000 Palestinians. It was not possible after 1948 to repeat a massive ethnic cleansing, and it was substituted by incremental cleansing. The last stage in this process was one of the root causes that ignited the cycle of violence in 2021. The proposed eviction of Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrah, an East Jerusalem neighbourhood, started it.
- This eviction is part of an overall blatant attempt to Judaise East Jerusalem. Imposing military rule in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip after they were occupied was another means. This enclaved the people there without basic human and civil rights.
- It is nothing but an apartheid regime imposed on the Palestinian minority in Israel.
- There was constant refusal to allow the 1948 refugees to return. This completed the matrix of power that allowed Israel to retain the land.
- Two-state solution: The two-state solution proposes establishing two states - (i) Israel for the Jewish people and (ii) Palestine for the Palestinian people. The solution was offered for the first time by liberal Zionists and the United States in the 1980s. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was willing to give it a go in 1993, by signing the Oslo Accords. The Palestinian position has had no impact in the current balance of power. Israel’s interpretation is what matters more now, and no global power would challenge its interpretation.
- Israel’s thoughts: The two-state solution is another means of having the territories of West Bank and Gaza Strip, without incorporating most of the people living there. So Israel partitioned the West Bank (20% of historical Palestine) into a Jewish and an Arab part, in the second phase of the Oslo Accords, known as the Oslo II agreement of 1995. The Palestinians were forced to accept it under American and Egyptian pressure.
- One area, called area C (consists of 60% of the West Bank) was directly ruled from 1995 until today by Israel. After 2009, under Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel is in the process of officially annexing this area, while ethnically cleansing the Palestinians living in it.
- The remaining 40% of the West Bank, areas A and B under Oslo II, were put under the Palestinian Authority. The Authority optimistically calls itself the state of Palestine. But it has no power whatsoever, except that given to it, and withdrawn from it, by Israel.
- Bantustanisation attempt: The white-dominated government of South Africa classified the country’s Black Africans as Bantu. A Bantustan was a territory that the National Party administration of South Africa set aside for black inhabitants of South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia), as part of its policy of apartheid. In Israel, the Gaza Strip was divided too, with the hope that another Bantustan, like the one in areas A and B, would be established there under the Palestinian Authority’s rule and under the same conditions. But arrival of Hamas, and its ally, the Islamic Jihad, resisted this offer. Israel laid a siege and blockade on the Gaza Strip. To complete the partition of the West Bank, and the siege of Gaza, Israel passed a citizenship law in 2018, known as the nationality law. It made Palestinian citizens in essence to be the “Africans” of a new Israeli Jewish apartheid state.
- Summary: The two-state solution is based on the assumption of parity, approaching the conflict as one fought between two national movements, and that's not how it is. The presence of more than 6,00,000 Jewish settlers, with a very high rate of natural growth, means that Israel will never consider moving them out. Even a soft version of a two-state solution is impossible. The only alternative is to decolonise historical Palestine and build a new State - a State for all its citizens all over the country. Settlers and natives should together build a new state that is democratic, part of the Arab world and not against it.
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