FOR THE SAKE OF PEACE, A ONE-STATE SOLUTION IS NEEDED

 

FOR THE SAKE OF PEACE, A ONE-STATE SOLUTION IS NEEDED

The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British government in 1917 announcing support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. The declaration was contained in a letter dated Nov. 2, 1917 from the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland.

Fast forward to the global Black Lives Matter movement. Palestinians have eagerly embraced the symbolism with large banners saying “Palestinian Lives Matter” on prominent display in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Since its birth Israel has displaced the local indigenous Palestinian population by brute force, supported by billions in U.S. military aid prodded by AIPAC and other powerful pro-Israel organizations.

Meanwhile, an estimated 640,000 illegal Jewish settlers now live in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Even the leaders of Israel’s center-left parties increasingly no longer support such a fragmented Palestinian state, and now openly support Israeli annexation.

The Trump-Kushner disastrous “peace plan” envisions an archipelago of Palestinian towns, scattered across the West Bank, under tight Israeli military control, much like the bantustans of apartheid South Africa. This is a profoundly cruel “remedy” perpetrated by Netanyahu’s right-wing government in close collaboration with the Trump administration. The only practical, equitable way forward is one state where all Palestinians and Jews enjoy the same equal rights, otherwise Israel’s claim to being a Jewish democratic state is patently absurd.

Highly respected writers such as Peter Beinart, Yousef Munayyer and the late Edward Said have argued that equality comes in the form of one state that includes Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.

Recent history provides convincing examples where such remedies have been successfully implemented. A peace agreement between Protestant Northern Ireland and the Catholic South ended decades of bloody strife.

Another poignant example is the settlement between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda. Rwanda is currently one of the most progressive states in the African subcontinent. Decades of foreign “divide and rule” mischief (Britain in Ireland, Belgium in Rwanda, and the U.S. and Britain in Israel) was responsible for creating death and misery for many millions of innocent victims.