The Birth Pangs Of A New Reality

Coinciding with the 80th session of the UN General Assembly, the United Kingdom, together with three other Western countries—Australia, Canada, and Portugal—announced their recognition of the State of Palestine on 21 September.

This is part of a wave of recognition of Palestine by major Western countries, following a groundswell of official recognition of Palestine as a country that took place last year.

However, many of us Palestinians, and even our supporters, believe that the flurry of recognitions is primarily aimed at allowing these powerful nations from the global North to evade the adoption of serious measures to end the ongoing two-year genocide in Gaza.

Recognizing Palestine as a state while continuing to trade with and sell weapons to Israel is essentially a cosmetic position, one of empty rhetoric that leads nowhere, while tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of innocent Palestinians are being butchered in THE first real-time genocide in history.

Amnesty’s Crisis Response Manager, Kristyan Benedict, sums it up: “Recognition is no doubt significant but will be a hollow gesture if the UK does not also seek to end Israel’s genocide, illegal occupation, and system of apartheid against the Palestinian people.”

Genocidal Israel and its American sponsor are fighting against a tsunami of growing international solidarity with the Palestinian people and the isolation of the genocidal state and its strategic plan of erasing Palestine from the world's political map and moving into a phase of terrorizing the Arab world, from Qatar to Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and even Tunisia.

The Israeli strategy relies on changing facts on the ground in ways that challenge international law altogether, by carrying out a combination of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and genocide in the Gaza Strip.

This is the reason why recognizing a Palestinian state is no longer a priority. Stopping the genocide and imposing sanctions, including an immediate military embargo, is. Britain recognizes a hypothetical state while supplying the Israeli apartheid and genocidal regime with weapons and spare parts for its bomber aircraft, which are exterminating the people of the state it has recognized!

It is worth returning to the conditions once set by the Palestinian National Consensus as minimum requirements for the acceptance of the two-state solution:

-the withdrawal of the Israeli army and settlers from all Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem;

-the release of all Palestinian prisoners held by Israel;

-the recognition of the right of Palestinian refugees to return to Palestine and compensation for their suffering.

In fact, these were merely Palestine’s minimum conditions expressing a willingness to compromise!

The truth is, any Palestinian entity that violates these conditions, for example any agreement to set up a so-called Palestinian state on a tiny patch of the Gaza Strip or a serious of disconnected miniature spaces in the West Bank, will be nothing more than a renewed version of the vast prison in which the genocidal state confines the Palestinian people within an ever-shrinking geographic area in the 1967 territories, and with a population that continues to decline as a result of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

I once wrote that the two-state solution is the opium of the Palestinian people! It is no longer so. It should be clear that the principle of the two-state solution in Palestine is, in fact, racist.

In truth, IT IS a racist solution par excellence, because it is based on ethnic-religious identity: Palestine for Palestinian Christians and Muslims, and Israel as a state for Jews only. Do we, as a people who have fought against apartheid, really want to accept that?

What we need to do now is to go on the offensive; we should demand the dismantling of the racist two-state solution and pave the way for the only democratic alternative: a secular democratic state on the historic land of Palestine that gives equality to all its citizens, regardless of religion, ethnicity, and gender.

Any plan other than this will be a waste of the time and the lives of those who have risen defending our right to exist as a people!

What should be discussed is how liberating Palestine requires a new strategy that guarantees basic Palestinian rights outside of the facade of what Amilcar Cabral would call “flag Independence”.

What should be discussed, while Israel’s bloodbath continues in Gaza, is the necessity of moving away from the two-state solution as a precondition for the liberation process.

What should be discussed is how Palestinians articulate strategies of resistance that must be followed by dismantling the apartheid, settler-colonial structure created by Israel and replaced by a futuristic-- albeit realistic--alternative in pursuit of a permanent, just peace.

I am totally convinced that Gaza could be the spark that initiates a different Palestine between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean in the heart of the Arab World. Gaza is offering what could be the birth pangs of a new reality characterized by the end of the racist two-state solution and the establishment of a secular democratic state on the historic land of Palestine, an inclusive state like South Africa

We have been told to accept Israeli settler-colonialism in its ugliest form — the genocide, apartheid, the occupation, the colonies, the checkpoints, the segregated roads, the colour-coded number plates, the forced evictions and house demolitions, the administrative detention, torture, rape and imprisonment of Palestinians, and the crippling of young Palestinian students at the beginning of their lives by Israeli snipers who shoot at their spines.

However, a new era is beginning where a paradigm shift is taking place. This shift is a move away from the separatism represented by the two-state solution — which aims to establish a Palestinian Bantustan and deny the rights of millions to their land — to full Palestinian unity.

Hence the wave of recognition of Palestine as a state, i.e to put an end to the beginning of the end of all these crimes!

It's very encouraging to see more Palestinian activists embracing a clearer analysis that reflects a vision that can move beyond the racist two-state solution by radically critiquing activism and nationalist theories of the past.

The colonial West does not seem to know that a new paradigm is forming, a shift of thinking about the racist two-state solution. Palestinians must make it absolutely clear that they will never abandon their basic rights under international law, namely, freedom from occupation (1967), return of refugees to their towns and villages and equality for third-class Palestinian citizens of Israel.

A rights-based approach IS the embodiment of our right to self-determination.

Recognizing a Bantustan or a series of about 17 tiny, disconnected Bantustans and calling them an independent state is reminiscent of the infamous “Independent Homelands” of apartheid South Africa.

These recognitions are nothing other than a desperate attempt to revive a long-dead, decaying corpse. All racist solutions have always met the same unchanging fate: the dustbin of history. The right of the Palestinian people, with all its components, to self-determination is non-negotiable.

It is long overdue that the international community demand that the genocidal Israel, a state that has violated every single international law one can think of, including committing the crime of genocide unashamedly, end its medieval siege of Gaza and compensate for the destruction of life and infrastructure that it has visited upon the Palestinian people.

 In fact, most of the supporters of the two-state solution in academia, foreign policy circles, and beyond are Israeli, American, or European who do not see anything wrong with a settler-colonial project.

The few Palestinians who are in favour of this racist approach to the Palestinian question fail to acknowledge facts on the ground: the system between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is a one-state reality, an apartheid state where one community has all the privileges of citizenship, while the other community is deprived of its fundamental human rights.

The alternative?

Dismantling apartheid and settler colonialism altogether!

Professor Haidar Eid spent most of his life in Gaza. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.