Novelist Robin Yassin-Kassab has a fine piece at Al Jazeera touring the political landscape of the West Bank and showing how remote is the possibility of creating a viable Palestinian state. I was struck particularly by the insult of the “economic peace” idea; Americans threw the tea over the gunwhales when the English offered us this. Also by the indomitable resistance to occupation. Palestinians didn’t want Jewish emigration and they didn’t want a Jewish state in their lands. How do Americans deal with these long-suppressed truths? We can seek to divide and crush Palestinians, but this project has been going on for more than 60 years and has sown global rage. Legal scholar John Strawson has written that partition had a legal basis but required imposition, and still does. But it has never been imposed; and the Palestinian share of the land continues to be chewed away, mocking fairness, and leaving an obvious question, When do we try democracy? Yassin-Kassab:
Popularly known as Jabal an-Naar, the Mountain of Fire, the Nablus area has lost 1,600 martyrs in the last decade. Each quarter has a plaque listing local names, and the faces of fighters adorn the Old City walls.
…After one Friday’s prayers I visited the grave of a friend’s mother, Shaden al-Saleh. Shaden was a teacher and community organiser. She was executed by Israeli soldiers while embroidering on the step at home. After we had paid our respects, her son and I brushed the needles from the grave of Jihad al-Alul, who was shot in the head on the first day of the Second Intifada, ten years ago.
The 20-year-old had been part of an unarmed crowd confronting soldiers at the Hawwara checkpoint which blocks the city’s southern exit. As we swept the needles from Jihad’s memorial we chatted with Abu Fadi, whose two martyred sons are nearby. A warm, mournful man, Abu Fadi has made a garden of their tombs. My friend knows him well, as he knows all the families who visit these graves. He says that when his mother died he became part of the great family of the martyrs….
I saw Haneen al-Zoabi giving a lecture. She is the Knesset member who sailed with the Gaza Flotilla and was so shabbily abused while attempting to give her account of events to Israel’s parliament. In Nablus, she spoke emotionally about the situation of Palestinian-Israelis, the descendants of those few who escaped ethnic cleansing in 1948.
Citizens but not nationals of the state (nationality is for Jews only), Palestinian-Israelis receive a fraction of the services offered to Jews, are forbidden from teaching Palestinian history in schools and are as likely to be victims of land confiscation as fellow Palestinians in the West Bank. Ninety-three per cent of Israel’s land is off-limits to non-Jews and half of Palestinian-Israeli families live below the poverty line…
Meanwhile, as Neta Golan, a West Bank national of Jewish origin, told me: “They’ve made it very easy to get loans. People in Ramallah have bought cars. The rents are sky high. For the next few years a lot of people are just going to be pleased to pay off the loans.”
This is the Tony Blair-Salam Fayyad plan for the West Bank reservations. In the words of political geographer Saed Abu Hijleh the message is “eat, drink, go to the toilet and shut up”.
The landscape tells anybody who lives here, squeezed between towers, checkpoints and red-topped Jew-only housing, that it is far too late for two states.
For the refugees caged in camps, still holding the keys to their destroyed coastal homes, two states never sounded like a solution anyway. Palestine-Israel has always been one country.
