‘One State Between the Jordan River And the Mediterranean Sea’

France and Saudi Arabia led a major global diplomatic effort, convening at the United Nations headquarters in New York City. Representatives from the European Union and the Arab League, as well as from the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Norway, attended the meeting, as did representatives from Latin America, Brazil and Mexico, and Asia and Africa, Japan, Indonesia, Turkey, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, and Senegal.

Noting the critical historical context in which the meeting is being held, the leaders and representatives signing the New York Declaration affirmed their agreement to “achieve a just, peaceful, and lasting settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on the effective implementation of the two-state solution.”

As a Palestinian descendant of refugees, from the ethnically cleansed village of Zarnouqa, entitled to my internationally sanctioned right of return, I take issue with the support for the two-state solution as one that is considered THE solution “that fulfils the national aspirations of Israelis and Palestinians.”

As a resident of Gaza, I seem to be in constant shock that there are politicians who still believe that there are two equal sides to what they call the ‘Israeli-Palestinian conflict!’ Did these same politicians believe in the 1970s and 80s that there were two equal parties in South Africa, White and Black, with equal claim to the land.

Those who waited for Israel to commit atrocities before the entire world could hear and see before recognizing the State of Palestine are merely trying to cover up their tacit complicity in the Zionist occupation of the West Bank and G Strip for nearly sixty years.

The last-minute awakening of the French President, the British Prime Minister and the German Chancellor, and their decision to participate in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates' airdrop of aid to the Gaza Strip—a move condemned by humanitarian aid organizations as a useless symbolic act—deserves nothing but contempt, especially since these NATO countries are among the most significant military collaborators with the genocidal state after the United States.

It is noteworthy that the Arab countries that attended the conference have turned a deaf ear to the Israeli genocide in Gaza, which has been ongoing for nearly two years, except for hollow statements of condemnation and denunciation. They even voluntarily chose not to plead before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, during its consideration of the case filed by South Africa against Israel.

With the escalation of Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip, accompanied by horrific scenes of killing and starvation of defenseless civilians, these countries have issued nothing indicating their intention to halt their normalization process, even though they have the moral, and even pragmatic justifications to sever relations with genocidal Israel and break away from this relationship which runs counter to the will of their people.

Let’s remember that the conditions once set by the Palestinian National Consensus as minimum requirements for the acceptance of the impossible 2 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; and recognition of the right of Palestinian refugees to return and compensation for their suffering.

These were merely minimum conditions expressing a willingness to compromise! The truth is, any Palestinian entity that violates these conditions will be nothing more than a renewed version of the vast prison in which the genocidal state confines the Palestinian people within the 1967 territories, within an ever-shrinking geographic area and with a population that continues to decline as a result of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Recognizing a Bantustan and calling it an independent state is reminiscent of the infamous “Independent Homelands” of last-century South Africa. No wonder the word “liberation” is never mentioned in the final document of the two-state conference. It is, therefore, 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.

Alternative?

Dismantling apartheid and settler colonialism altogether! A secular democratic state for all of its citizens between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.

Haidar Eid is a Palestinian scholar and author. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.