One state or two? Boycott of Israeli goods or goods from the settlements? Is the lobby the genesis of American wrongdoing in Palestine or is it imperialism? The questions -- regarding vision, strategy, and analysis -- produce sharp cleavages on the Left. Indeed, generally ones much deeper than they need to be. And they remain stubbornly unsettled.
They also congeal in the person of Norman Finkelstein, who has taken some unpopular positions -- his insistent call for a two-state solution, his references to "cultish" aspects of BDS -- as well as more popular ones, like blaming the occupation solely on the Israel lobby. For that reason he has become a lightning rod, attracting furious bolts of criticism and support. The core issues, however, remain obscured amidst a charged atmosphere of extravagant denunciations (catcalls of Zionism and worse) from one side and fierce defenses from the other.
From one perspective, it's an odd contretemps. Finkelstein has spent decades fighting for Palestinian dignity and a place for Palestinians to live free of the occupation's suffocating violence and capricious indignities. He is the maverick scholar who exposed the American intellectual community as a gaggle of hacks by dissecting Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial, showing it to be a hoax intended to deny the Palestinians peoplehood by painting them as peripatetics who had fabricated a "Palestinian" identity to ride the wave of Israel's successful nation-building project. And his forensic dismantling of Israeli scholarly mythologies in Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict remains one of the very best primers on the prejudices that surround the conflict.
For all that time his fight has been for a two-state settlement: something that seemed reasonable in 1988 and in the early 1990s. But what seemed possible twenty years ago -- with the Israeli electorate temporarily shaken by the savage repression of the 1st intifada and Israeli capital needing to recover from the aftermath of the destabilizing military-industrial accumulation patterns of the 1970s and 1980s, break through the sectoral envelope of domestic accumulation, and globalize -- seems less possible now, with militarized accumulation again on the rise in the Middle East and elsewhere. In some ways, the argument for two states has become a relic when so much of the discourse (less so the organizing) of the radical pro-Palestinian Left in the West and the Palestinian Left in the Occupied Territories is oriented towards one single state.
Furthermore, the constituency for partition is far from a majority of the Israeli population. Those accepting removal of all settlements totaled 18 percent of the population in 2006 and declined to 14 percent in 2007. So, the Israeli state is in sync with the sentiments of the Israeli people. Rejectionism is consensual, while disagreements are technical, niggling about how tight should be the noose around Palestinian society's neck. Thus a program for a forced withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders is a challenge to Israeli power. Two states with a just resolution of the refugee question and UN SC 242 borders is rabidly rejected by not only Israel but also America. It makes little sense to speak of "selling out" when the two-state solution is so stolidly rejected by those who must consent to its implementation for it to have meaning.
For that reason, Finkelstein's two-state program, on which his left-wing critics' attention has lately centered, is a secondary problem in his analysis. The primary one is elsewhere: an idealism matched with an odd moral rationalism. Combined, they make for an analysis bleached of power -- where it resides in Israeli and American society and who benefits from the occupation. Yet such an analysis must be the point of departure for any organizing strategy, whether it is oriented towards two states or one.
Finkelstein's latest book, "This Time They Went Too Far", is ostensibly about the massacre in Gaza that Israel carried out in the winter of 2008-2009 and its cultural and political aftermath. The book is mainly a collection of facts, culled and collated from endless human rights reports, and the facts paint Israel in a very poor light. But it is only partially about its titular topic. It is also a launching pad for Finkelstein to re-tender his argument for two states: Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 Green Line and a just resolution of the refugee problem.
Finkelstein's recipe for peace is simple: truth combined with Palestinian non-violence might compel the moral majority of the West, the angry liberal ex-Zionist Jews and non-Jews who in the past stabilized Israeli oppression, to put enough pressure on the American government to put enough pressure on the Israeli government to stop the occupation.
Despite Finkelstein's championing of Palestinian non-violence, he does not fall into the familiar trap of fetishizing it, and he insists on the Palestinian right to self-defense. His stance on Palestinian resistance is admirable in a context in which it is increasingly fashionable to decry the barbarism of Israeli oppression only to cluck sternly at the Palestinians when in weak reply they send a rocket skyward, the overwhelming majority of which crash blindly into Israeli fields and deserts. He asks the question that needs to be asked: can one in good conscience utter the words that demand that the Palestinian people die on their knees?
The resort to the voluminous collected works of Mahatma Gandhi to substantiate claims about what the Palestinians should or shouldn't do is less convincing, having nothing necessarily to do with Gandhi's reflections on violence and non-violence. Gandhi did not categorically reject violence as he is often thought to have done by modern-day popularizers. (The effect of Gandhian satyagraha on breaking the rule of the raj over India is not so much an object of scholarly debate as it is of scholarly dismissal.) More relevant are the facts of Indian history: non-violence worked only alongside widespread violence, including riots, across the subcontinent; and independence only came after mutinies within the Royal Indian Navy and the armed resistance of the Indian National Army (not to mention several world wars that overtaxed the British treasury and destroyed the fiscal basis for direct empire).
Mining the Mahatma's collected works to substantiate this or that position on Palestinian violence would be a quixotic endeavor even had Gandhi's methods alone worked to liberate India. Given that they did not, the séance with Gandhi's ghost -- in comments like "it is still not certain that Gandhi would have disapproved" of Hamas rocketry -- is more than a little odd: Why is it always Gandhi who is invoked as the éminence grise of resistance in the global South? Why not Fanon or Ho Chi Minh, given that Algerian and Vietnamese violence actually threw off the imperial boot?
In any case, the issue facing the Palestinian resistance is not the textual question of what Gandhi did or did not say. It's how to devise a strategy for effectively confronting Israeli oppression, and that requires a material analysis of its concrete mechanics. The relentless focus on ideas, exemplified in the odd use of Gandhi, speaks directly to the broader problem of Finkelstein's analysis: without a discussion of power and political economy, it becomes very difficult to discuss a plausible resistance strategy and the nature of the social movement that could implement it.
For example, South African apartheid was vulnerable to strategic economic disruption in a way that Israeli apartheid is not. South African capitalists were dependent on black labor. Israeli capitalists have undertaken over the past two decades to reduce their dependency on Palestinian labor through the closure policies that have diminished Palestinian labor movements to Israel, wholly cutting off the flow from the Gaza Strip. That Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid should not be used to conflate two different regimes of oppression.
Finkelstein's emphasis on the facts ends up an article of faith. One gets the sense that, for him, ending the conflict is a simple matter of telling the truth -- as though a superior, better crafted, more articulate, more widely disseminated argument is what the Palestinians lack (a position Edward Said often took as well); as though there are not multiple truths jostling for prominence, each of which has different political consequences. One can see this as Finkelstein writes of Goldstone that his conclusions were "politically consequential." The former saw the report of the latter as a stepping stone to a situation in which there would be "a settlement enabling both parties, everyone, to live proud, productive, and peaceful lives." Of course Goldstone famously recanted, but, even had he not, the question would be if the political conclusions which the Goldstone Report symbolized were what Finkelstein roughly imagined them to be: the pincers of slight establishmentarian disquiet with continued occupation and shifting enlightened opinion closing in on a wavering power elite, overcoming the Israel lobby and US rejectionism and forcing the US state to order Israel to pull back the settlements.
The problems of this approach should not be reduced to its conclusions, particularly the currently unpopular two-state solution. Finkelstein's facts are not problematic, and his admission that of course one state is, all else being equal, a more just solution than two states makes his advocacy of the latter seem reasonable. All of Palestine used to be available to the Palestinian people. Through a series of enclosures, just fractions of it are now available. Israeli settler-colonialism was a wrong that the Jewish settlers and their imperialist enablers perpetrated against the Palestinian people. The question is how to address this wrong: whether it can be remedied in steps, whether victories in struggles to end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza serve as stages for waging the next struggle. In this, he and his antagonists are at loggerheads. Finkelstein, following the line of his mentor, Noam Chomsky, argues that the route to one state goes through two states. The response from those arguing for one state is generally that, given the entrenchment of the occupation and the nil likelihood of Israel giving up on it, one might as well go all out for more justice -- justice meaning full rights of both peoples to the land.
One has to agree with Finkelstein that this is not a convincing argument: the occupation is not so much the physical infrastructure of apartheid but the people living in the settlements and the soldiers who go along with them. It is the violent denial of Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza. The militarized settler population is the expression of that denial. The settlers could be forced into leaving through a political settlement that took the form of a two-state solution, and borders could be secured. Such a settlement would be a concrete defeat of Israeli power. The question is one of mounting a credible challenge to Israeli-American power such that somehow Israelis are forced to leave the land.
The one-state/two-state arguments remain at loggerheads for another reason: they contain different assumptions about the reaction of the rulers of Israel to external pressure. At the moment, the occupation appears impregnable because external pressure is only starting to wax. If it mounts high and does so soon, however, Israeli elites are far more likely to opt for ending the occupation than accepting political democracy in Israel-Palestine. Perhaps in 10 years, the matrix of costs and benefits will shift. But not necessarily to the benefit of a one-state struggle -- with militarization and racial hatred intertwined in an escalating and destructive spiral, the situation in Palestine could get even worse if Israel itself is not defused. If there is not a holistic solution -- a solution that cannot but take on Zionism and Israel's arms-based accumulation pattern -- the time bomb that is Israeli society will eventually explode.
By now the entire structure of Israeli society is invested in the occupation and the militarization it both relies on and reproduces. Different fragments of Israeli power may have different levels of investment in it, but surely no one wishes it to stop, except the wizened carcasses of Peace Now and the NGO-ized Israeli liberal class who itinerantly gather in poorly attended demonstrations in Tel Aviv, huffing about the two-state solution scarce few fought for when it mattered. Meanwhile the lower classes -- the Mizrahi Jews domiciled in the subsidized settlements and serving in the IDF, the Russian strata who do the same -- are aligned with the Ashkenazi elite at the top of Israeli society who get fat off Israeli militarism and the occupation which is a nearly ineluctable part of it. The extremist settlers compound these obstacles, and they represent increasing portions of both the army and those living in the settlements. They are also generally armed. The constituents of the old liberal Zionist organizations in Israel won't confront them, and those who could -- the real rulers of Israel -- have little incentive to do so.
Under pressure, perhaps the Israeli elite would drop the occupation. But the pressure which would be required would be tremendous, not least because the deep restructuring of Israeli society that ending the occupation would entail might tear the state apart as the right wing of Israeli society recoils and the upper class gets suddenly forced to provide new homes for hundreds of thousands of people and do so not on the stolen land of the West Bank but on the land it took over in 1948. Why give from your own when you can take from the Palestinians?
The empty space vacated by analysis of the political economy of the occupation is bordered by a series of ironies. The first is that Finkelstein finds himself on shared ground with many of his detractors. Many who call for one state, as well as Finkelstein, don't realize, or refuse to acknowledge, the degree to which America has fundamentally assented to the occupation since support for Israeli irredentism became official policy under the Nixon-Kissinger administration, when the latter realized the massive profits to be made from a militarized Middle East: excellent for arms merchants, the oil conglomerates, and, behind it all, finance, heavily invested in recycling the petrodollars and profiting off the high prices theprice-setting petroleum firms could fraudulently pass off as the result of regional chaos.
Finkelstein argues that the American establishment has no vested interest in the occupation, an argument that is only literally true: the American establishment only cares about the integrity of the Israeli state, and only insofar as the latter feels that the safest route to ensure social stability is to maintain the occupation -- the rating agencies agree that the status quo is fine -- the American government will echo that policy. Oddly, he then finds himself on the same ground as one-staters like Ali Abunimah, who has argued that "Israel is, in many respects, a burden and an obstacle to smooth U.S. control of the region" and that thus not merely the occupation but Israel itself hinders the exercise of imperial power. Thus, for both, at least the occupation is easily expendable. Being easily expendable, slight disquiet on the domestic front should make the ruling class drop it.
Of course, they are both dead wrong. Rejection of substantive Palestinian statehood is a shared policy of Israeli and American elites, and beyond speculative gestures and the confessional autobiographies of disgruntled Congresspeople and State Department functionaries, no one has ever established otherwise. There are, of course, differences of opinion not only within the American and Israeli establishments, but also between them, with the Israel lobby generally lining up behind the Israeli ruling class, with which it shares so much, especially investments. Indeed, there have always been currents within the oil sector and elsewhere pushing not for an end to the occupation but for a settlement that at least limits the settlement project to existing facts on the ground. But they never push particularly hard.
More globalized segments of American power wrangled Israel into the Madrid talks in 1991, when the elder Bush and Yitzhak Shamir had their showdown (the latter lost the prime ministership). And at the same time as the lobby mounted in strength, Barack Obama attempted to get Israel to agree to a temporary settlement freeze and talks on a final settlement as had been proposed at Annapolis: perhaps something resembling the Camp David farce of 2000, when the proposed plans turned the West Bank into a set of urban islets isolated by bypass roads; perhaps something closer to the Geneva solutions, with the unacceptable (to the Palestinians) proposal of a "demilitarized" state.
Such a plan would have been a compromise between various interests. First, the Israeli ruling class's simultaneous and contradictory desires for holding onto most of the land so as to provide space for the settlement project to continue, thereby palliating the land-hungry Israeli right wing, while also allowing for normalization, and thus normal trade relations, with the surrounding Arab states so that Israel could become a kind of regionalhigh tech entrepot. Second, the need to maintain Israel's military spending, its relationship with the Pentagon, and its flourishing arms exports industry, all of which compose the spine of domestic capitalism. Third, securing the basis for the Israeli ruling class's domestic legitimacy, grounded in consensus on the rightness of the Zionist project. And fourth, the American ruling class's mounting interest in re-subordinating its Israeli counterpart, expressed, for example, in Thomas Friedman's recent fulminations against the Israel lobby and the Netanyahu administration for their gracelessness and lack of finesse in their rejectionism (America could get along fine with the couther rejectionism of Israeli liberals), because the rawness of the right's rejectionism has brought fractures out into the open: the US is seeking a settlement of the conflict in the framework of regional normalization -- and the lobby has helped block that settlement.
In that respect, Obama's half-hearted pushes have failed. But even had they succeeded and succeeded wildly, they would not have achieved anything resembling even minimal Palestinian national demands. There is no question that the Israel lobby narrows the parameters of debate on Israel, but nor is there a question that, even without the lobby, negotiations would be about the dimensions of the Palestinians' cage. Freedom is not on Washington's agenda.
The charade is hard to face head on. As with any con the only solution is not to play. So when prominent supporters of BDS fudge the question of whether the implementation of the Right of Return means in effect a one-state solution, the reason for that fudging is not shadiness or mendacity. Many Palestinians may indeed support a genuine two-state solution, or would accept one if it were to be placed on the table, but to adopt two states as a formal political platform plays into the peace process farce of the power elites that has meant two decades of summits and unremitting violence and horror in the Occupied Territories. By insisting that the issue is the occupation and the system of apartheid enforced by the Israeli state, the BDS platform dances nimbly through the peace process trap which has placed the Palestinian push for statehood in permanent stasis.
That is why the BDS campaign argues for a rights-based approach to Palestinian liberation rather than a state-based approach to Palestinian liberation. The rulers of the Gulf States, Egypt, Europe -- none of them care about Palestinian freedom. Some feel the need to posture at support for a two-state settlement as in the Saudi Peace Plan of 2002. But they are all in thrall to Washington, and Washington is so tightly tied to and invested in the Israeli ruling class's interests and so resolutely inhumane when it comes to the Palestinian future that only under great pressure will it budge from its rejectionism.
However, Finkelstein is correct in his argument against those who suggest that fighting for one state is a shortcut around ending the occupation. Any one state settlement would mean an Arab-majority democracy in Israel-Palestine. Can one imagine the Israeli or American ruling classes agreeing to that without a revolutionary threat to their power? Indeed, it is hard to imagine one democratic state without regional revolution. Because these realities are not widely known -- one could argue that they are deliberately suppressed -- it is underappreciated that even the intermediate goal of ending the occupation means anti-systemic struggle: a struggle that will lead to a more democratic and egalitarian world and hence by definition a struggle against unaccountable power.
This takes us to the knotty core of the question: who will fight longest and hardest to end the occupation, cut off military aid, and end the Special Relationship?
The core is those who own the revolution by birth and blood: the Palestinians in the camps of the Middle East, in the West Bank and Gaza, in Israel, and in the Diaspora. Finkelstein claims that the Palestinian right of return will never be implemented, and it is true that its implementation would require revolutionary change. But the ease with which he drops it is alienating -- never mind that it's not his to drop. The dream of return suffuses Palestinian iconography. Teenagers know the name of the villages from which their grandparents were cleansed and speak of precisely those villages as where they are from. Keys to the homes from which they fled and to which they still hope to return grace political posters and are passed down within families, even when the tumblers they unlock are no longer inserted into physical architecture but into the symbolic architecture of suffering and redemption that covers the landscape of Palestinian memory. The violation of Palestinian dwelling on the land, the wrenching destruction and dislocation of a peasant society -- the anger as well as memory of the erasure of Palestinians from so much of Palestine is not merely unforgotten. It is often exactly that anger which animatessumud (steadfastness), which fuels the will to resist. There is something self-defeating about an eagerness to take the temper out of such steel.
If Palestinians at some point wish to give up their rights, or accept a partial implementation of them, which will be temporary -- in the shifting mosaic of states that is the Middle East, there's no reason to think the current imperial set-up will last forever -- it is their choice, because it is their struggle. They will be the ones risking death in that struggle, and so they must be the ones to choose. One can agree with Finkelstein that the trend in America and Europe is to underplay the degree of Palestinian support for a substantive two-state settlement in the West Bank and Gaza. (Palestinians who support it do so not because it's ideal but because in the inky night few reject even dim light.) But that determination must be made by those who will be affected by it. Moreover, with the Palestinian populace fractionated and in political disarray, the near-consensus embodied in the 1988 Algiers Declaration accepting a two-state settlement has dissipated. Perhaps there will be a return to that. Perhaps not.
But that is not the point. One does not set conditions for supporting a liberation struggle. Quite the reverse. But nor should those sympathetic to the struggle dilute its moral force to merely gather raw numbers in the short term. That is not a problem exclusive to Finkelstein. At the level of cultural production -- less at the level of daily organizing -- one sees a more-than-occasional pandering to the lowest common denominator of liberal and conservative anti-Zionism. That is a harmful turn. It will be the dispossessed, not the frustrated intermediate social layers prone to scapegoating, who will pose enough of a threat to the Israeli-American ruling classes to force them to cede Palestinians a place to live their lives in safety and peace.
This may seem obvious, but the dispossessed are linked in that they live under capitalist oppression. On-the-ground organizing reflects a consciousness of this fact. Discourse too frequently does not, pretending that a militarized European settler-state in the Middle East is not a core elite policy. Indeed, to again take Abunimah, the upshot of the (incorrect) argument that Israel is a "burden and an obstacle" to US power is that the movement should simply be pitching its appeals to those segments of US power that are harmed by Israel. What is missed is that such an argument razes the moral and political grounds for solidarity: why, for example, should Occupy the Hood, or the Bolivarian Revolution, take up the issue of Palestine if in so doing they will strengthen imperial power? It is not clear that those making such arguments realize that they are not only analytically wrong but the logical political conclusions of their arguments are suicidal.
On that score, Finkelstein does better, recognizing the centrality of Israel to American imperialism. However, based on that recognition, he recently went on to suggest that Americans shouldn't even be arguing for aid cutoffs. In this, he has the political economy correct but the political mobilizing awry. Is there any reason that Americans can't be mobilized to demand that their tax dollars not be used to send F-35s to Israel and billions of dollars of cash to Lockheed Martin?
Furthermore, the argument that waters down radical demands -- for aid cut-offs, for one democratic state -- to palliate liberal opinion supporting two states is self-defeating. Radical demands allow moderates to present their reformist ones as reasonable, and, sometimes, such demands help produce victories. Besides, a program for two states aimed only at mobilizing liberal opinion won't even attain the Geneva Accord or the Saudi Plan. Instead, it will get something in between them and the positions pushed by Israeli "doves." In that light, the argument that one should drop one-state advocacy looks riddled with cracks.
In Finkelstein's explicit demands to water down the struggle lies a tacit recognition that his battalions of disaffected liberals, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, are not the ones capable of fighting an anti-systemic struggle. In another irony, they are not so different from the battalions that those who pin the blame for the occupation merely on the lobby and the foreign influence on our government -- and it cannot be stated strongly enough that this is a raw appeal to racist white-power jingoism -- assume will liberate Palestine. Both camps appeal to the middle class to liberate Palestine: the former to its Democratic component, the latter to its Republican one, the former to liberalism, and the latter to nativist nationalism. Rejecting anti-systemic struggle, both refuse to embrace an insurrectionary politics of bottom-up mobilization. Both look for a quick solvent to melt the chains shackling the Palestinian people. That solvent is snake oil. There are no short cuts.
One can understand the urge to find one, but this is no moment to sell short the struggle. Insurgencies in a myriad of global city squares -- not least the heroic sacrifices of the Egyptian people -- have brought us to new political terrain. Political horizons long blocked by mountainous apathy, quiescence, disillusionment, despair, are suddenly in view. Mahmoud Darwish, in an interview towards the end of his life, noted that "The Palestinian people feel that they are living the hours before dawn." That dawn is on the cusp of sight. The debate between two solutions will have its moment, in the right time and, most importantly, in the right place: in Palestine, in the surrounding camps, amongst the Diaspora. At the moment it has taken on the air of a spectacle. That spectacle and the liberalism that is its partner arose in a historical moment marred by the absence of mass politics. To that extent it is understandable. That moment is dead, as dead as those who by their sacrifice have killed it.
I didn't write of Egypt to envelop the argument with the cheap, distracting mystique of revolution. If in the aftermath of early tremors the Arab revolts lead to stronger upheavals, they will further restructure the political topography of Palestine-Israel. Those revolts need solidarity. And solidarity is made of blood and sacrifice, not pandering in an effort to conjure up the chimera of a liberatory right-populist movement or a liberal-realist coalition coming together to defend the American 'national interest,' nor the opportunistic illusion that the route to liberation runs through the corporate headquarters of Exxon. The animating fire shouldn't be resignation but redemption. This is the Palestinian position. We should make it our own.
So we have a question before us.
It is if we will honor the moment in which we have the rare luck of living.
How shall we answer?
This post originally appeared at MRZine.
You guys posted this the other day…….
If Washington holds the world in thrall (as settlers hold Israel in thrall and Israel holds USA in thrall, the settler-dog wagging Israel, then AIPAC, then USA, then the world, as power multiples wonderfully!) — then there will be no progress until Washington or Tel Aviv collapses — and Palestinians must continue SUMUD until then.
Might the USA fall? Well, Iran wants to sell oil for non-dollars, and maybe other countries as well (Libya wanted to and fell in a USA-supported “revolution”; but how will they sell their oil tomorrow?).
Might Israel fall? Well, an attack on Iran might backfire.
But, as the article says (I think) 1SS has no magic over 2SS because if Israel is intransigent the current apartheid 1SS, satisfactory to Israel and USA, will prevail.
If USA or Israel or both “fall”, the UN and EU and BRIC could presumably decide to enforce I/L and force the removal of settlers and wall and settlements and siege. And an end of occupation and return of exiles of 1948 and 1967. With a little hard work that could result in the 2SS (apparently) imagined in UNSC-242. I cannot imagine anything resulting in a decent 1SS with a Palestinian voting majority, but perhaps my imagination is simply too weak.
I could be wrong but looks to me that ajl doesn’t see a bottom-up insurrectional struggle to sever the u.s.-israel special relationship as anti-systemic, especially if taking on the IL is a key component of this effort. So we’re to drop this approach for fear of feeding into racist white power jingoism (including antisemitism)? But since the IL is made up more whites (mostly Christian evangelicals) than Jews, no reason why attacking the IL has to degenerate into antisemitism. Instead, it could be the lead-in to a revolutionary platform that’s antiwar, anti-the ruling elite and pro-people power, among other positions yet to be determined. Meanwhile the Palestinian people do their thing, which is to creatively throw off the Zionist chains, and in so doing, as per the ongoing Arab Uprising, continue to inspire the rest of the world towards change.
Norman Finkelstein always logically says that a one state solution at this point in time is not supported by any of the states of the UN or by any other manifestations of World opinion, neither is it by any political party in Israel or Occupied Palestinian Territory, so in that sense it is an idealistic and quite frankly fringe activity, this is not to say we may not arrive at a one state solution by default, the Israelis will not allow a two state solution based on 67 lines, the idea that they would agree to a one state solution in which their Jewish majority may be wiped out is not being realistic. Pressure from the Palestinians through the UN and separately through the ICC is in my opinion the best way to go at this stage, there are no guarantees with this option but they must be tried and if found wanting would only make the one state option more justified. The Israelis want to keep every square inch of ‘The Land of Israel’ and wish to consign Palestinians to Bantustans, I would think Prisons would be a better word, they will not give this up until compelled to by outside pressure be it through war or other economic pressure, until they realise that the game is not worth the candle, unfortunately there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth until that happy day comes along.
I kinda agree. Play the cards they have dealt. From the outside looking in, I can’t exactly say that they haven’t done this. I did read some of the Palestinian Papers though, and maybe some of those idea were acts of desperation. They shouldn’t compromise for anything less than they deserve.
The UN resolutions, international law, and majority consensus (in theory) approve of a Palestinian state based on the green line as the border. They should give it their all without compromise (territory swaps should be 100% equal in quality without swapping citizens, state should be contiguous, pull out of Jordan Valley, etc.). Forget about Jerusalem for the time being and forget about the complicated refugee problem for the time being also.
That’s basically what Obama said last May and Israel balked on. Israel deliberately wanted all of this to be settled at the same time. Because if they settle borders, they would be actually making progress.
Maybe push for a third-party investigation on the settlement project. Common sense proves that it was to deliberately sabotage any outcome involving a Palestinian state. Israeli leaders have said such. Bibi himself has gone on records saying his interpreted the Oslo Accords in a way that deploying troops on the Jordan Valley would end it. There is a plethora of evidence that Israel is the one who won’t compromise, Israel is the one dragging it’s feet, and while this has all gone on, Israel has dramatically increased settlement activity. Of course, Israel is held to a higher standard even with the UN. But IMO it’s important to at least keep trying.
I do not expect Israel to ever concede territory or there to ever be a 2SS at this point. But the world needs to be convinced and the UN needs to be convinced. And if the US is the only one left thinking it is worth saving, that needs to be exposed so that the US has no say in the matter. Easier said than done, I know.
I agree that all the attention that’s been given to the 1ss/2ss divide has detracted from the fundamental issue, which is the ongoing palestinian struggle to break free of the Zionist chains. Upon returning home from the U.S.-backed Israeli war on Lebanon that I first became aware of this. As a witness fresh from the conflict I was invited to speak at several local and regional universities. So recent and so inspiring was the experience that it was if I still was in Beirut. I told my audiences that there was no doubt in my mind that the Palestinian people would never settle for anything less than the full return of the birthright that is their homeland, along with their right of return. Afterwards I was taken aback when several of the event organizers approached me and asked me to tone down such statements because a two state solution was in the works. Imagine, I thought, at a time when Palestinians (and Lebanese) are being slaughtered, they wanted me to downplay the reason why Palestinians are accepting of martyrdom? Whenever I notice people being carried away with the details of the 1ss/2ss imbroglio, that feeling of something being off key returns.
this was part of the response to goldstone: tone it down, because we’re trying to pull off the 2ss
this was part of the response to goldstone: tone it down, because we’re trying to pull off the 2ss
That’s the standard scripted response. The US has only paid lip service to a 2 state solution since 1947. It has torpedoed the idea at every opportunity. In November of 1976, the General Assembly invited the PLO to take part “on an equal footing” with other parties in any Mideast peace conference. Years before Danny Ayalon snubbed the Turkish Ambassador by offering inferior seating arrangements, Patrick Moynihan created a furor in the Security Council by issuing a challenge over the legality of even permitting the Palestine Liberation Organization to sit in during its sessions. Both the Jewish Agency and Arab Higher Committee had been invited to participate in the Security Councils discussions in the past, but the US claimed that was suddenly a right reserved for a member state. He also advanced the absurd idea that including the Palestinians in talks would harm the peace negotiations: “my government is not prepared to go along with an act that will undermine the negotiations for peace.” link to archive.jta.org
Compare the reaction of the United States when Israel annexed the territory of other UN member states to its behavior when Iraq annexed Kuwait. The General Assembly was ready to abandon the ludicrous resolution 242 and 338 “negotiations” and act to isolate and sanction Israel. The US has adopted crippling sanctions against other UN member states for much less, but never against Israel:
8. KIRKPATRICK (United States of America): The draft resolution before this emergency special session of the General Assembly is profoundly objectionable to the United States. We oppose it because it does not contribute to peace in the Middle East: it will make peace harder to achieve.
9. We oppose the end it seeks-which is revenge and retribution, not conciliation and compromise.
10. We oppose the means it recommends, which are unreasonably punitive and ill-suited to accomplishing any constructive purpose.
11. We oppose the use of the United Nations involved here, because this body was and is meant to be devoted to building peace and security, and this draft resolution seeks neither. Instead it uses this body as an instrument to deepen divisions and exacerbate conflicts.
12. We oppose this draft resolution because, like any other cynical use of power, it will leave this body weaker than it already is, less fit to achieve its noble purposes.
13. By damaging the prospects for peace, this draft resolution undermines the integrity-indeed, the very raison d’etre-of the United Nations.
14. Last month in the Security Council the United States voted against a draft resolution on Israel’s Golan Heights legislation because, as we stated at the time, the draft resolution constituted "a perversion of the very purpose which the Security Council, is called upon by Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations to perform". That purpose is to prevent "an aggravation of the situation". The draft resolution before us today, like the previous draft resolution, does not prevent an aggravation of the situation; it is itself a source of aggravation. It is also procedurally flawed in that it seeks to assign to the General Assembly responsibilities that Chapter VII of the Charter properly and solely invests in the Security Council.
15. The United Nations has discussed the Golan Heights legislation now for nearly two months. As my delegation made clear at the outset, we opposed this legislation because it purported or appeared to alter unilaterally the international status of the Golan Heights. Therefore, on 17 December, the United States joined other members of the Security Council in adopting resolution 497 (1981), thereby making clear our disapproval of the Israeli Government’s action in extending its civil law over the Golan Heights. We communicated the same message in our bilateral relations.
16. As we have stated often, the future of the Golan Heights, like that of all the occupied territories, can be resolved only through negotiations pursuant to Security Council resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973). Accordingly, we called upon Israel to rescind its legislation and-most importantly-to reaffirm its commitment to a negotiated solution. In its letter of 29 December 1981 to the Secretary-General,” Israel did, in fact, reaffirm its readiness to enter into unconditional negotiations with the Syrians over the international legal status of the Golan.
17. At that point, the only constructive role for the United Nations was to facilitate such negotiations, in accordance with resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973). But the draft resolution before the Security Council did not even mention those resolutions and, needless to say, the current draft resolution does not either.
18. We must go back to basics. Israel is accused of threatening peace. Yet peace is not the situation that prevailed between Israel and the Syrian Arab Republic before Israel’s Golan Heights legislation was adopted. Security Council resolution 338 (1973), which was the basis for the 1973 cease-fire, called upon the parties to “start immediately” to negotiate the implementation of resolution 242 (1967) so that Israeli withdrawal could be effected in exchange for recognition of Israel’s existence within “secure and recognized” borders. But no such negotiations took place.
19. There is no one in this hall who does not know which party has refused to negotiate peace or even to accept resolution 242 (1967). Yet the draft resolution before us today and the speeches we have heard take no account of this reality.
20. The United States greatly desires to have cordial, co-operative, good relations with all the States in the region. My country has devoted enormous effort, in this Administration and under previous Administrations, to finding a basis for peace and reconciliation. We also want very much a strong United Nations acting in fidelity to the principles of its Charter. For these very reasons we are appalled by this draft resolution, which distorts reality, denies history and inflames passions.
21. The draft resolution before us calls the Israeli legislation an act of aggression. But no shots were fired, no soldiers were brought into place. And the future of the Golan Heights is no less negotiable than before.
22. It describes the Israeli legislation as an annexation. It is not. The United States has not recognized it as such. The Security Council in resolution 497 (1981) did not recognize it as such. To call it annexation now only creates an artificial obstacle to negotiations.
23. This draft resolution calls for comprehensive sanctions against Israel and for Israel’s total isolation from the rest of the world. But can anyone truly believe that such proposals, advanced in a spirit of vindictiveness, will make a constructive contribution to peace?
24. The United States objects to this draft resolution because it makes the search for peace more difficult and because it weakens this body. We also object to it for less disinterested reasons: we object to the barely veiled attack on the United States present here in the paragraph that “strongly deplores the negative vote by a permanent member . . .“.
. . . & etc. ad nauseamlink to un.org
the first or 1982 u.s.-backed israeli war on lebanon, that is
Brilliant analysis!
Whether Abunimah or Finkelstein are correct in efficacy and/or outcome is entirely secondary to what the Palestinian PEOPLE can stand in their day to day struggle, casualties, and summud for ANY reasonable outcome. The TSS is more readily achievable but deeply flawed in the sovereignty sense, but the OSS is way over-the-horizon, but the most likely to result in long-term justice.
I can’t imagine having a 16-year old ready for college (or work, or whatever) and having to make the choice between those two (near-term/long-term) economic v. political options.
What’s really sad is that the name Palestinian invokes such negative images not only among Israel, Zionists, and Israel-Firsters, but also on ordinary Americans who take their news at face value and don’t have time (or care) to think otherwise.
In Israel especially, Palestinian=Terrorist (to many people). It invokes visions of suicide bombings and Hamas firing rockets, etc. To be fair, I doubt that Palestinians are crazy about the name Israel. For the most part, the name Palestinian has unfortunately more of a negative image than Israel’s (See the Ben Hurr review debacle for example).
As much as I’d like to see it on the map (and not in the form of an occupied territory) it’s sad that their chances might be better if they called themselves by a different name. Not advocating that in any way at all, I just saying.
His stance on Palestinian resistance is admirable in a context in which it is increasingly fashionable to decry the barbarism of Israeli oppression only to cluck sternly at the Palestinians when in weak reply they send a rocket skyward, the overwhelming majority of which crash blindly into Israeli fields and deserts.
Couple of thoughts.
First, I don’t understand Finkelstein’s romanticizing of Hezbollah and Hamas. I would understand his calling them a necessary evil, or what you get when the West interferes too much. But depicting them as unqualifiedly positive forces in the struggle for Palestinian nationhood is way too much for me to stomach.
We (he and I, and I believe many others analyzing this conflict) are supposed to be rational. We’re atheists. No party or faction with a religion-driven agenda should get our full sympathy, and we should be very careful in the support we give them.
My second point is that I don’t believe the right to resistance can in any way be compatibilized with the firing of missiles at civilian targets, however imprecise the devices. This is not to say that a completely peaceful approach should be used. Rioting in the West Bank and throwing rocks at heavily armored vehicles are acceptable kinds of low-level violence that disrupt daily life and convey a message while not affecting innocent people. It is when random violence is deployed against noncombatants that a red line is crossed. Supporting such tactics is a disaster, both PR-wise and on moral grounds.