A new mass grave has been discovered at al-Shifa Hospital where a two-week siege by the Israeli army has turned the facility into a graveyard and put what was once Gaza’s largest medical complex out of service.
A new mass grave has been discovered at al-Shifa Hospital where a two-week siege by the Israeli army has turned the facility into a graveyard and put what was once Gaza’s largest medical complex out of service.
At what point do we start to have the discussion that the Israeli state, as it exists now, maybe doesn’t have a right to exist.
That’s not actually a viable solution though, in the same way as “deleting Germany” wasn’t a viable resolution to the second world war.
Their citizens won’t just magically disappear, forcibly displacing them would constitute a war crime, and transferring ownership of the entire region to a Palestinian state is just setting up the dominoes for civil war and extending the instability and suffering in the region.
Deleting Nazi Germany was absolutely a viable solution. Israel as a state not existing doesn’t mean the citizens go away, it means that as an institution it doesn’t exist, which means getting rid of the apartheid regime, the land grabs, the ethnic cleansing, the genocide, etc.
The country should not be based on a racial or ethnic identity, it should be a more fair system accounting for the diversity that is there, like it was back when it was known as Palestine.
All of the above are consequences of Israeli colonialism/imperialism, not a direct consequence of its existence as a state.
The German example is odd, because not only did Germany not cease to exist, but in fact the exact opposite of what you’re proposing was done. That equivalent would be if a victim of Nazi Germany - say, Belgium - annexed Germany in its entirety.
There isn’t a one-state solution that creates an environment where both Palestinian and Israelis can live peacefully, because Israeli citizens are unwilling to live under a Palestinian state, and Palestinians are (of course) unwilling to live under an Israeli state.
Israel’s founding principles are all those terrible things and the state was formed around them, just like how Nazi Germany was formed on fascism, racism, genocide, land grabs, etc. Nazi Germany is not the same as the Germany we know today or the Germany which existed before Nazi Germany. You’re tying the people to the state even though the state can change without forcing everyone out of it.
There was a one-state solution where Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived peacefully and that was Palestine long before the formation of Israel. Of course, there are always agitators who push for discrimination to grab power, but peace is a never-ending struggle that requires vigilance. If we can denazify Germany, we can deisraelize Palestine.
Nazi Germany is not, but it is still Germany nonetheless. Your proposal is equivalent to the elimination of the concept of Germany in its entirety.
Basing your solution on a state that last existed in 1516 is an awful approach, and ignores the Israeli people’s right to self determination.
Additionally, the number of people who identify as Israeli significantly outnumbers the number of those who identify as Palestinian, so your one state solution still involves a state in which Palestinians continue to be a minority in a nation where Israelis have political control.
And you haven’t even begin to consider how you’d actually make it happen - are you expecting netanyahu to volunteer to join Palestine, or are you proposing a full fledged invasion of Israel, a regional military superpower?
Really, this is one of those situations where an idea is so bad, that it’s not viable to list all the reasons why it’s a bad idea
Yea, the whole “Make Judea Great Again” idea holds no water, yet here we are.
I don’t know how you determined that to be my proposal, unless you think the people of Israel cannot exist without all the racism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, etc. Even when we defeated Nazi Germany, most of the people living there still lived there.
I’d say basing solutions on what worked in the past is a good approach, actually. I’m not saying that we turn back the clock since that’s impossible and not even optimal. What we should be doing is moving towards a society that promotes peace and harmony, using what worked and improving it with lessons learned in the modern age. Israel as it exists now does not do that at all, and in fact does the opposite in many cases.
The idea would be to combine Israel and Palestine to form a new country where everyone can participate democratically and the rights of the minority are protected.
That’s because we saw what happened to all the Jews living in other middle eastern countries. Hint: all expelled or killed
Plenty do. You just only hear about the ones causing terror or violence.
plenty of jews are fine living in a Palestinian state, you just don’t hear about them because they aren’t the “right” kind of jew, It wasn’t the Palestinians that segregated out dark skinned jews, nor ran sterilization campaigns for Ethiopian jews
Stop acting like you have a right to self determination but Palestinians do not.
Stop pretending like they won’t murder or expel every jew in Israel given a chance.
Jesus Christ, you racist bastard.
You’re spouting bullshit, you got bullshit. Next time come up with actual replies that aren’t accusing others of unfounded things.
Huge numbers of Jews (and Christians) were expelled from historic Palestine so this is not a very accurate assessment of history.
Different peoples were expelled from Palestine at different times. You’re going to have to be more specific.
Well rather than summarizing the entire history of the region, maybe you can specify which period you felt embodied this spirit of coexistence? Perhaps I am simply unaware but I cannot think of such a time period. Peace often exists in the gaps of history as we perceive it, because the noteworthy events are often quite violent. So it’s possible I am missing the full picture.
By the way, I fully agree that this should be the goal—I just don’t think the implication that things were totally peaceful and pluralistic prior to the advent of Zionism is accurate. That may not have been what you were saying, but I’ve seen it often enough that I feel it needs some pushback or clarification.
One could tenuously make an argument that it was somewhat the case under Ottoman rule, in that non-muslims were much less oppressed than minority religious groups in other countries at that time.
But the conditions for non-muslims even then would still be considered an apartheid state by modern standards.
I think they are referring to Israel existing as an apartheid state. In its place, a state with Equal Rights for all Israelis and Palestinians in historic Palestine.
More forced dispossession won’t solve the conflict or bring any justice; which is now the problem with any Two-State Solution due to the hundreds of thousands of settlers in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The Occupied Palestinian Territories are hundreds of enclaves divided by Israeli settlements, military bases, and checkpoints. To many New Historians like Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappe, settler colonialism has made a Two-State Solution with Palestinian Sovereignty not viable due to the facts on-the-ground, with a Binational One-state as an inevitable outcome.
How Avi Shlaim moved from two-state solution to one-state solution
‘One state is a game changer’: A conversation with Ilan Pappe
One State Solution, Foreign Affairs
I believe I understand what they’re proposing, as the same as your interpretation.
But my point is that whichever way you cut it, it’s really not a viable solution in practice. It’s lovely to imagine a country where Palestinians and Israelis live together in peace and harmony. But in practice, there’s no form of such a state that is an acceptable outcome for either side in the short or even medium term. The Israelis see themselves as Israelis and the Palestinians see themselves as Palestinians, and both of them have a right to self determination. Maybe some form of federal/confederate system would be somewhat possible, but the federal powers would have to be so weak that it would really be a unified state only in name.
But it’s somewhat viable to find a two-state solution that is somewhat mutually acceptable, and so pursuing that is the best bet for finding a way to end the conflict.
The Israelis that would threaten violence to resist a one-state solution are the same ones who are doing violence against Palestinians now. There’s no two-state solution that is an acceptable outcome for those pursuing Israeli dominance over the entire area. There were white South Africans who also found the end of apartheid unacceptable. Some people will just be unhappy with any solution that isn’t total dominance.
But Israelis and Palestinians already are semi-integrated. Israel has a sizable Arab minority and Palestinians from the occupied territories have been working in Israel. Gaza is undergoing famine now because almost all their food, power, and water come from Israel. Most people there aren’t rabid fundamentalists, they just want to live their lives, and that often involves trade or other interaction with people living just a few miles away.
It’s not easy to transition from apartheid to integration, but it’s been done before, in a place that also had terroristic resistance, brutal oppression, and hardliners that wouldn’t “accept” it. And a two-state solution isn’t radically more feasible. It sounds easy to just say “set the borders and stop fighting”, but there’s huge issues like the right of return and the status of east Jerusalem that make setting mutually acceptable final borders a tall task.
This is such a rainbows and butterflies way to describe the siege of Palestine.
What Two-State Solution are you proposing?
I’m not proposing any specific implementation, because I’m not a professional diplomat, and defining the terms of a specific two state solution is far outside my knowledge.
But the return of some amount of territory that includes settlements is well within the reasonable bounds of an agreement.
The major difficulty of a Two-State Solution is that there isn’t any reasonable way to give back Palestinian Land in the OPTs, because of how the West Bank has been divided and how many settlers there are. I consider Avi Shlaim and Ilan Papp experts on the history and details of Israel Palestine. I was also a proponent of a Two-State Solution until I learned the full reality of the settlements on-the-ground.
This wouldn’t be like the resettlement of the 8,000 Israeli settlers in Gaza in 2005, which got resettled into the West Bank. The forced relocation of up to nearly 700,000 of settlers, many militant, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem isn’t reasonable to me.
Alternatively, the de juro annexation of 60-88% of the West Bank also isn’t reasonable.
On the other hand, a Binational Secular State would also solve the issue of the Palestinian refugee crisis by giving Right of Return for all Palestinians.
I mean there is the one state solution. Israel coukd stop existing without being displaced
One of the nations trying to enforce a one-state solution is exactly the issue that got us here in the first place
It didn’t have a right to land so that’s how we are here. Not because of one-state solution.
So they get displaced after Israel stopped existing for a while? Look at other middle eastern countries for examples
Two state solution is probably the only way it’ll ever be over, like happened with Kosovo.
Well apart from letting them complete their genocide.