Palestine: Two States?  History has moved on

There has been no “peace process” since at least 2000.  The “road map” to a supposed “Two State Solution” exists only as a fig-leaf to cover the continued expansion and consolidation of settler land grabs on the West Bank, the genocidal siege on Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem.  Yet these actions, however, whilst intended to create facts on the ground to the advantage of Zionism, in reality have cut the legs from under any further pretence that such a thing as a “Two State Solution” could ever now work.  Whilst increasingly Israel stands condemned by the world for its war crimes, the Palestinian people themselves remain defiant, closing ranks around their chosen militant Hamas leadership and facing down an ever more demoralised settler presence in their homeland.

So impossible to ignore have these new facts of history become that even the CIA has had to get real, as suggested by a leaked report noted by Iran’s Press TV on 13th March 2009. According to international lawyer Franklin Lamb the report, which casts doubt over Israel's survival beyond the next twenty years, predicts “an inexorable movement away from a two-state to a one-state solution, as the most viable model based on democratic principles of full equality that sheds the looming spectre of colonial Apartheid while allowing for the return of the 1947/1948 and 1967 refugees. The latter being the precondition for sustainable peace in the region.” The report also forecasts the return of all Palestinian refugees to the occupied territories, and the exodus of two million Israeli - who would move to the US in the next fifteen years.  Commenting on the report, Lamb noted that there are “over 500,000 Israelis with American passports”, whilst many more applications are in the pipeline.

The fact that the CIA is doing this kind of loud thinking about the limited life expectancy of the Zionist entity speaks volumes about the steadfastness of the Palestinian resistance, the demoralisation of Zionism and the splits emerging within US ruling circles over how best to maintain hegemony within the Middle East.  It’s hardly surprising then that the Zionist camp goes into overdrive in the attempt to discredit the story.

The Jewish Chronicle at first went into denial, huffing that the CIA report was a “ludicrous hoax”, but then hedged its bets, quoting one Patrick Clawson’s view that the CIA employed an enormous number of people, “many of whom are unsavoury characters, some of whom could hold every kook view in the world”. So you can take your choice: the report never existed, unless of course it did, in which case it must have been the work of some rogue element on the firm’s books! Clawson is himself a genuinely “unsavoury character”, employed as he is by a Washington think tank set up by the overtly Zionist American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in order to give a spurious gloss of academic objectivity to its campaigns of disinformation.

However, despite the best efforts of AIPAC and its hirelings to bury the truth, Lamb’s claim about thousands of demoralised Jewish settlers queuing up for passports is confirmed by no less than globe-trotting war criminal Tzipi Livni. Israel’s foreign minister at the time of the Gaza massacre, Livni was reported in Israel’s YNET News as saying “I see the despair of many Israelis. Hundreds of thousands see what is happening and arrange for a foreign passport, send their children to study abroad and even buy a house overseas”(12 August 2009).

For those who are so corrupted by the Zionist dream that they cannot contemplate yielding up their settler privileges, the future is bleak indeed.  But for all those who are prepared to work together to dismantle the Zionist state and build in its place a single democratic and secular state of Palestine, the future holds, not despair, but a great hope.

At the time of the Oslo Accords, the Palestinians, under enormous duress, made temporary concessions to the occupying forces which nobody had any right to demand of them, for the moment ceding 78% of their historic homeland in exchange for a promise of peace.  No Palestinian doubted the intolerable historical injustice represented in this tactical retreat, or believed that a piecemeal reversion to the pre-1967 borders could ever satisfy the legitimate demand for self-determination on the whole of the national homeland.  But those in the West who held the Palestinian cause dearest had respect for this agonizing choice made by the liberation movement, and understood the tactical considerations which underpinned it.

Now the world must recognise and respect a different choice made by the Palestinian people.  The mandate for the road of intifada represented first, by the landslide vote for Hamas, and second, by the continuing steadfast support for the Hamas and their call for unity in the face of all Israel’s subsequent crimes in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem, can leave no honest observer in doubt as to the will of the Palestinian people. As is well known, Hamas has not insisted on the immediate reversal of the Nakba, satisfied for the moment to keep the focus on the territories occupied in 1967.  But those in the West who would give solidarity to the Palestinian people need now to understand that history has moved on.  Those imperialist politicians who allow Gaza to burn and starve, who egg on the settlers’ fascist land grab on the West Bank, who promote the ethnic cleansing of arabs from Jerusalem, whilst all the time mouthing pious homilies about “road maps” leading to some fantasy “Two State Solution” – these fraudsters with blood on their hands must be exposed and denounced. 

Every day the Palestinians live under the shadow of imperialist guns, yet every day put their lives on the line in the struggle for freedom and justice.  We who live in the belly of the imperialist beast do not for the moment suffer the same consequences when we raise our voices in solidarity. The very least we can do is to challenge our hypocrite leaders (the Gordon Browns of this world) whose talk about “Two States” has no other purpose than to distract us from the blood on their hands.