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.
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.