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Home > The No-State Solution to the Israel-Palestine Conflict
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The No-State Solution to the Israel-Palestine Conflict
By Jeremy R. Hammond [1] / AlterNet [2]
July 9, 2016
Twelve years ago today, the International Court of Justice issued an
advisory opinion at the request of the United Nations General Assembly on
the legality of the wall Israel has constructed in the West Bank. The ICJ
affirmed that all of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East
Jerusalem, are "occupied Palestinian territory," and that Israel's wall, as
well as its settlements, violate the Fourth Geneva Convention.
The ICJ's ruling helps to underscore the prejudicial nature of the
discussion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Western mainstream
media and particularly in the U.S. The media never fail to elevate Israel's
policy aims to the same level of legitimacy as international law. For
example, we can frequently read in the New York Time or the Washington Post
that East Jerusalem or areas where Israeli settlements are located are
"disputed" territory-thus placing equal weight to Israel's position as the
entire rest of the planet, which recognizes Israel's settlements as illegal
and East Jerusalem as occupied Palestinian territory.
Needless to say, this is not balanced journalism, but extremely prejudicial
to the rights of the Palestinians living under foreign military occupation.
When the illegality of the settlements is alluded to by the mainstream media
(all too infrequently), they typically obscure it by saying something like:
"Most countries do not recognize the legitimacy of Israel's settlements."
This leaves readers with the impression that the matter is controversial,
that there is debate about it within the international community, that there
are two legitimate points of view. It affords validity to Israel's position
when it has none. Translated from newspeak, what that means is that every
single government on planet Earth other than Israel itself recognizes the
settlements as a violation of international law.
The media bend over backward to accommodate and attempt to legitimize
Israel's criminal policies. How can the media get away with such
outrageously biased reporting? Furthermore, why is the U.S. mainstream media
so prejudiced against the rights of the Palestinians?
The answer is simple: the policy of the U.S. government [3] is one of
unconditionally supporting Israel's violations of international law and the
human rights of the Palestinian people.
The U.S. Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
While the U.S. has long sought to characterize itself as an honest broker
between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the truth is scarcely concealed
beneath the thin veil of rhetoric. The U.S. supports Israel's violations of
international law financially, militarily and diplomatically.
Military aid to Israel tops $3 billion annually, which aid serves in part as
a U.S. taxpayer subsidy for the arms industry as Israel invests in US
military technology and hardware. US-supplied arms are routinely used by
Israel to commit war crimes, such as its deliberate targeting of schools and
hospitals in Gaza under the Israel Defense Forces' Dahiya Doctrine-a
reference to the leveling of the Dahiya district of Beirut during Israel's
2006 invasion of Lebanon and a policy designed to use intentionally
disproportionate force in order to punish the civilian population. This
policy was implemented during Israel's military assaults on Gaza in 2008-09
("Operation Cast Lead"), 2012 ("Operation Pillar of Defense"), and 2014
("Operation Protective Edge").
The world superpower also uses its weight to protect Israel from censure for
its perpetual violations of international law, acting to prevent Israeli
officials from being held accountable for their crimes. For example, in the
aftermath of "Operation Cast Lead," the U.S. sought to bury the report of a
U.N. fact-finding mission (the so-called "Goldstone Report") that found both
Israel and Hamas had committed war crimes. The U.S.' goal was to ensure that
the report's recommendations were not implemented-particularly the
recommendation to refer the matter to the International Criminal Court
absent credible investigations by the Israeli government and Hamas governing
authority into allegations of war crimes, which never occurred (the IDF's
self-investigations, needless to say, were rightfully recognized by the
international community as a whitewash).
For another example, in February 2011, the Obama administration-its own
rhetorical opposition to Israel's settlements notwithstanding-went so far as
to veto an uncontroversial U.N. Security Council resolution condemning
Israel for its continued expansion of illegal settlements in the occupied
West Bank.
The Mainstream Media's Complicity
The mainstream media in the U.S. serve the role of manufacturing consent for
government policy, with the intelligentsia acting as high priests of the
state religion, as dissident American intellectual Noam Chomsky has
described it. As before the U.S.' illegal war on Iraq, the media mindlessly
parrot government propaganda. It is axiomatic among academics and
journalists who have a voice in the mainstream that, while the U.S.
government might sometimes make mistakes, it only ever acts out of
benevolent intent. Voices that don't subscribe to this belief system are
excluded from the discussion.
"There is indeed something truly religious," Chomsky has observed, "in the
fervor with which responsible American intellectuals have sought to deny
plain fact and to secure their dogmas concerning American benevolence, the
contemporary version of the 'civilizing mission.'"
Far from serving the role of properly informing the public in order for
Americans to be able to make objective judgments about world affairs, the
media serve to indoctrinate Americans in narratives about the Palestine
conflict that fundamentally obscure its true nature.
This extends to the media's reporting on the conflict's origins. There are a
great many things that "everyone knows" about the conflict that in fact have
no basis in reality. For example, it is a widely believed myth that the U.N.
created Israel or otherwise conferred legal authority to the Zionist
leadership for the unilateral declaration of the existence of their "Jewish
state" on May 14, 1948. This claim is absolutely false.
Moreover, the U.N. plan to partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab
states called for expropriating land belonging to Arabs in order to
redistribute it to Jews. The representatives of member countries who drafted
this plan recognized that this prejudiced the rights of the majority
inhabitants, but the Arabs' rights were simply of no consideration to
policymakers still operating within a framework of racist colonialism, and
so they premised their plan upon the explicit rejection of the right of the
Arab majority to self-determination (notwithstanding how this violated the
very U.N. Charter under whose authority they were ostensibly operating).
Such minor details as this are never reported when the media fill the public
in on the conflict's origins.
Another thing "everyone knows" about the conflict is that the combined Arab
armies invaded Israel after the May 14, 1948 declaration of its existence,
in an effort to wipe the nascent state off the map. As the New York Times
and other major media report it, today's refugee problem is an unfortunate
legacy of Palestinians having to flee or being expelled by Israeli forces as
a consequence of this Arab aggression in 1948. Another minor detail
willfully omitted in reports by journalists like the Times' Ethan Bronner is
that by the time the neighboring Arab states managed to muster a military
response, 300,000 Arabs had already been ethnically cleansed from their
homes in Palestine.
By the time the armistice agreements were signed in 1949, over 700,000
Palestinians had been ethnically cleansed, never permitted to return to
their homes despite the recognition under international law that refugees of
war have a right to do. Although the Jewish community in 1948 owned less
than 7 percent of the land in Palestine, by the time the war was ended,
Israel had conquered territory beyond even that allotted to it under the
never-implemented U.N. partition plan (never implemented because the U.N.
Security Council recognized that the only way to do so would be by force,
and that it had no authority to partition Palestine against the will of the
majority of its inhabitants).
Then again in 1967, as the mainstream media tell it, Israel faced a
genocidal threat from its neighboring Arab states, and so launched a
preemptive attack against Egypt to defend itself and its citizens from
extermination. Never mind that, as no less authoritative a source as former
Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael B. Oren has documented, Israel's own
intelligence assessed that Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser had no
intention of attacking Israel-because he wasn't insane. Israel had already
invaded Egypt once before, in 1956, in collusion with Britain and France,
and the CIA observed that Egyptian forces in 1967 had taken up defensive
positions in the Sinai Peninsula and informed President Lyndon B. Johnson
that a war was brewing and that it would be started by Israel. Former
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, too, has acknowledged that this was a
war of choice, and that the Egyptian troop presence in the Sinai didn't
prove that Nasser intended to attack Israel.
During that war, Israel invaded and began its occupation of Gaza and the
West Bank, an occupation that persists today nearly five decades on. The
ethnic cleansing also continues incrementally as Palestinians' homes are
demolished or life is otherwise made so miserable for them that they are
forced to relocate in order for Jewish settlements to be built, "facts on
the ground" designed to prejudice the outcome of negotiations under the
U.S.-led so-called peace process.
And while the media report on the peace process as though the U.S. was truly
an objective mediator, the truth, also scarcely concealed beneath the thin
veil of rhetoric, is that it is the process by which the U.S. and Israel
block implementation of the two-state solution, in favor of which there is
otherwise a consensus among the international community.
This consensus is based upon the requirement, emphasized in U.N. Security
Council Resolution 242 (passed in the wake of the 1967 war), that Israel
must withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines (also known as the 1967 lines or
the "Green Line" for the color with which it was drawn on the map) in
accordance with the principle of international law that the acquisition of
territory by war is inadmissible. It is also based on the internationally
recognized right, reflected in U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 (passed
during the 1948 war), of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland.
While the U.S. professes to support a two-state solution, it is emphatically
not the same as the two-state solution. The latter is premised upon
international law and respect for the equal rights of the Palestinians,
while the former is premised upon the use of violence to coerce the
Palestinians into accepting Israel's demands to surrender their rights,
including by ceding even more of their land and renouncing their right of
return.
What Hope for Peace?
There is a popular view that the Israel-Palestine conflict is inevitable,
too complicated for a practical solution to ever be found, which leads to
resignation that it will just persist forever. This view is mistaken. There
is a solution, which is for international law to be applied. This is the
outcome that Israel and the U.S. have fought so aggressively to prevent
under the peace process, which is premised upon the rejection of the
applicability of such treaties as the U.N. Charter and the Geneva
Conventions, and instead, elevates Israel's wants over Palestinians' rights.
Hence the accommodative reporting in the mainstream media describing East
Jerusalem as disputed territory, etc., ad nauseum.
So what can be done about this situation? How can the Palestinians ever hope
to see justice done, and how can peace ever be realized?
The answer is simple. The citizens of the world simply need to stop waiting
for the governments of the world to solve the problem. There needs to be
wider recognition that the world's governments, far from being part of the
solution, are part of the problem. This includes the U.N. organization,
which played no small role in helping to create the conflict in the first
place, and which continues to play a duplicitous role-most specifically, the
U.N. Secretariat under Ban Ki-moon's leadership has been complicit in
Israel's oppression of the Palestinians (e.g., calling for negotiations
"without preconditions" in his role as Quartet partner, which is a euphemism
that simply means the Palestinians must cease demanding that Israel cease
its illegal settlement construction before rejoining talks under the guise
of the U.S.-led peace process-among numerous other gross abuses of the
authority of his office).
Israel is able to act with such impunity because it has the backing of the
world's most powerful government. The U.S. government, in turn, is able to
persist in its complicity in the oppression of the Palestinian people
because the media manufacture consent for its criminal policies. Most
Americans simply have a perception of the conflict that has no bearing on
reality. The mainstream discussion about the subject is fundamentally
misrepresentative of the conflict's true nature.
That needs to change. What is required is a paradigm shift. The public needs
to stop buying into the perpetually told lies and propaganda. Americans,
along with other citizens of the world, need to become properly informed.
There are those who will cling to their worldview regardless of the facts,
and those whose own prejudices will blind them to the truth. But those who
are honest and actually care about the victims of the violence-on both
sides, both Jew and Arab-have a responsibility to educate ourselves and take
an active role in sharing knowledge with others.
We need to reach a critical mass of knowledgeable citizenry, a tipping point
at which enough people are properly informed about the conflict's true
nature that it no longer remains feasible for the U.S. government to
continue its policy of trying to sustain the status quo of occupation and
oppression. This applies to citizens of other countries, too, whose own
governments-even those ostensibly supportive of Palestinians' rights-are
blinded to the reality that the peace process is designed to prevent a
peaceful solution and which thus act complicity by advocating the
continuance of this farce. This framework for negotiations needs to be
replaced with a real peace process, one which doesn't reject the
applicability of international law and isn't fundamentally prejudiced
against the rights of those who are living under an oppressive occupation
regime-in which the oppressed aren't forced to negotiate with their
occupiers over the extent to which they can retain their own land.
The world is moving in this direction, albeit not nearly quickly enough to
be of any comfort for the victims. The European Union, for example, has
revised its guidelines for trading with Israel to include the requirement
that goods produced in illegally constructed Israeli settlements be labeled
as such. The growing boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement can
claim some success in this regard, but there is another important factor
frequently overlooked that led to this development: the U.N.'s recognition
in 2012 of Palestine as a non-member observer state.
With the U.N.'s recognition of Palestinian statehood comes access to
international legal institutions such as the ICJ and ICC, to which the
Palestinian Authority may now turn in order to seek legal remedy for
Israel's violations of international law. So why hasn't the PA already done
so?
The Role of the Palestinian Authority
The answer to that question, too, is simple. The PA was established under
the peace process to serve the aims of the U.S. and Israeli governments. It
is, simply stated, Israel's collaborator regime in the occupied territories
that serves to keep the Palestinians in line by repressing popular uprisings
against the occupation regime.
This is not to say that the PA leadership under President Mahmoud Abbas-who
remains in office illegitimately, his term having long ago expired-is
entirely dedicated to serving Israel's interests. But the U.S. and Israel
have their ways of forcing his compliance, such as Israel's withholding of
Palestinian tax dollars it collects on the PA's behalf in the occupied
territories, or the U.S.' threats to cut off aid to the PA if it steps out
of line.
Of course, these are bluffs on the part of Israel and the U.S. since they
need the PA in order to sustain the status quo of occupation. Neither wants
to risk causing the collapse of the PA-least of all the Israeli military
establishment, which prefers to have a collaborator regime in place to do
its dirty work for it. While Abbas has taken an important step by
successfully submitting Palestine's application for a status upgrade in the
U.N. General Assembly, he has to date remained too cowardly to take the next
step by pursuing legal claims against Israel in the international
institutions now available to his government.
It is the risk that Palestine might eventually do so, no doubt, apart from
the influence of the BDS movement, that has prompted the EU to revise its
trade guidelines with Israel so as to take a modest step away from its
complicity in the wholesale criminal violation of Palestinians' rights.
A Global Intifada
This raises a conundrum for the Palestinians. The weight of the world's
governments, meaningless rhetoric to the contrary nothwithstanding, is
against them. Absent recognition as a state, they had no recourse to legal
mechanisms to compel Israel's compliance with international law. Yet even
with such recognition, they remain powerless given complicity of their own
government in their oppression. So it comes to this: if the PA-which has
been all too willing to lay Palestinians' rights on the negotiating table in
order to preserve the privileged status of its crony elites-will not act to
support the rights of its own people, then the Palestinian people must act
to rid themselves of its rule over them.
It is time for another popular uprising, an intifada grounded in the
principle of non-violent resistance to occupation and oppression. Hamas and
other armed groups must realize that, apart from being illegal and immoral,
committing acts of terrorism or engaging in war crimes such as
indiscriminate rocket fire into Israeli residential communities are a
strategic mistake since such actions serve to hand Israel the very pretext
it requires in order to preserve its occupation regime.
This is not to say that the Palestinians must renounce their right to
legitimate armed resistance against foreign military occupation, which, too,
is codified under international law; it is simply to recognize the futility
of trying to gain freedom in this particular case through the barrel of a
gun and to see that disallowing Israel even the slightest pretext for its
own incomparably greater violence is the surest path to creating the
conditions necessary for Israel's policies to no longer remain politically
feasible.
It is up to the rest of us to support the Palestinians in that struggle. We
must all rise up in solidarity with the oppressed and become active
participants in this Third Intifada. The governments of the world aren't
going to get the job done. It is up to the informed citizens of the world to
effect the paradigm shift required to compel state leaderships to cease
being part of the problem and to do what is right for the victims on both
sides.
That will require a change in the nature of the media's reporting on the
conflict, which, although a daunting task, in this age of the internet and
social media is foreseeable. It is up to each of us who cares about human
rights to take an active role in the discussion, to educate ourselves and
others about the true nature of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and to share
that knowledge with others by whatever means available. Enough people need
to be knowledgeable enough about the conflict-and the U.S. government's role
in it-that it no longer remains permissible for the mainstream media to
serve as the government's very own ministry of propaganda.
That is to say, it is time for the world's citizens to free themselves from
the indoctrination of the state religion and recognize that the state
itself-as an institution fundamentally grounded in the use or threat of
violence to compel desired behaviors-is the enemy of liberty and of peace.
Yet so long as these political institutions remain on this planet, they
ought to hold themselves to their own obligations under the treaties that
comprise the body of international law-and they ought to hold each other's
leaderships accountable when those laws are violated and especially when war
crimes are committed. It is toward this end that our collective efforts
ought to be focused.
Peace can be achieved. There is a path to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. But we shouldn't make the mistake of focusing so much on
establishing respected borders between conflicting parties that we fail to
realize what a peaceful, civilized world would look like: one without
borders.
Jeremy R. Hammond is an independent political analyst, author and founding
editor and publisher of Foreign Policy Journal [4]. His latest book is
Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict [5]
(2016). Read the first chapter free [3] and get an email primer course [3]
on the conflict.
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[2] http://alternet.org
[3] http://www.obstacletopeace.com/
[4] http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com
[5]
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Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > The No-State Solution to the Israel-Palestine Conflict
The No-State Solution to the Israel-Palestine Conflict
By Jeremy R. Hammond [1] / AlterNet [2]
July 9, 2016
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Twelve years ago today, the International Court of Justice issued an
advisory opinion at the request of the United Nations General Assembly on
the legality of the wall Israel has constructed in the West Bank. The ICJ
affirmed that all of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East
Jerusalem, are "occupied Palestinian territory," and that Israel's wall, as
well as its settlements, violate the Fourth Geneva Convention.
The ICJ's ruling helps to underscore the prejudicial nature of the
discussion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Western mainstream
media and particularly in the U.S. The media never fail to elevate Israel's
policy aims to the same level of legitimacy as international law. For
example, we can frequently read in the New York Time or the Washington Post
that East Jerusalem or areas where Israeli settlements are located are
"disputed" territory-thus placing equal weight to Israel's position as the
entire rest of the planet, which recognizes Israel's settlements as illegal
and East Jerusalem as occupied Palestinian territory.
Needless to say, this is not balanced journalism, but extremely prejudicial
to the rights of the Palestinians living under foreign military occupation.
When the illegality of the settlements is alluded to by the mainstream media
(all too infrequently), they typically obscure it by saying something like:
"Most countries do not recognize the legitimacy of Israel's settlements."
This leaves readers with the impression that the matter is controversial,
that there is debate about it within the international community, that there
are two legitimate points of view. It affords validity to Israel's position
when it has none. Translated from newspeak, what that means is that every
single government on planet Earth other than Israel itself recognizes the
settlements as a violation of international law.
The media bend over backward to accommodate and attempt to legitimize
Israel's criminal policies. How can the media get away with such
outrageously biased reporting? Furthermore, why is the U.S. mainstream media
so prejudiced against the rights of the Palestinians?
The answer is simple: the policy of the U.S. government [3] is one of
unconditionally supporting Israel's violations of international law and the
human rights of the Palestinian people.
The U.S. Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
While the U.S. has long sought to characterize itself as an honest broker
between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the truth is scarcely concealed
beneath the thin veil of rhetoric. The U.S. supports Israel's violations of
international law financially, militarily and diplomatically.
Military aid to Israel tops $3 billion annually, which aid serves in part as
a U.S. taxpayer subsidy for the arms industry as Israel invests in US
military technology and hardware. US-supplied arms are routinely used by
Israel to commit war crimes, such as its deliberate targeting of schools and
hospitals in Gaza under the Israel Defense Forces' Dahiya Doctrine-a
reference to the leveling of the Dahiya district of Beirut during Israel's
2006 invasion of Lebanon and a policy designed to use intentionally
disproportionate force in order to punish the civilian population. This
policy was implemented during Israel's military assaults on Gaza in 2008-09
("Operation Cast Lead"), 2012 ("Operation Pillar of Defense"), and 2014
("Operation Protective Edge").
The world superpower also uses its weight to protect Israel from censure for
its perpetual violations of international law, acting to prevent Israeli
officials from being held accountable for their crimes. For example, in the
aftermath of "Operation Cast Lead," the U.S. sought to bury the report of a
U.N. fact-finding mission (the so-called "Goldstone Report") that found both
Israel and Hamas had committed war crimes. The U.S.' goal was to ensure that
the report's recommendations were not implemented-particularly the
recommendation to refer the matter to the International Criminal Court
absent credible investigations by the Israeli government and Hamas governing
authority into allegations of war crimes, which never occurred (the IDF's
self-investigations, needless to say, were rightfully recognized by the
international community as a whitewash).
For another example, in February 2011, the Obama administration-its own
rhetorical opposition to Israel's settlements notwithstanding-went so far as
to veto an uncontroversial U.N. Security Council resolution condemning
Israel for its continued expansion of illegal settlements in the occupied
West Bank.
The Mainstream Media's Complicity
The mainstream media in the U.S. serve the role of manufacturing consent for
government policy, with the intelligentsia acting as high priests of the
state religion, as dissident American intellectual Noam Chomsky has
described it. As before the U.S.' illegal war on Iraq, the media mindlessly
parrot government propaganda. It is axiomatic among academics and
journalists who have a voice in the mainstream that, while the U.S.
government might sometimes make mistakes, it only ever acts out of
benevolent intent. Voices that don't subscribe to this belief system are
excluded from the discussion.
"There is indeed something truly religious," Chomsky has observed, "in the
fervor with which responsible American intellectuals have sought to deny
plain fact and to secure their dogmas concerning American benevolence, the
contemporary version of the 'civilizing mission.'"
Far from serving the role of properly informing the public in order for
Americans to be able to make objective judgments about world affairs, the
media serve to indoctrinate Americans in narratives about the Palestine
conflict that fundamentally obscure its true nature.
This extends to the media's reporting on the conflict's origins. There are a
great many things that "everyone knows" about the conflict that in fact have
no basis in reality. For example, it is a widely believed myth that the U.N.
created Israel or otherwise conferred legal authority to the Zionist
leadership for the unilateral declaration of the existence of their "Jewish
state" on May 14, 1948. This claim is absolutely false.
Moreover, the U.N. plan to partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab
states called for expropriating land belonging to Arabs in order to
redistribute it to Jews. The representatives of member countries who drafted
this plan recognized that this prejudiced the rights of the majority
inhabitants, but the Arabs' rights were simply of no consideration to
policymakers still operating within a framework of racist colonialism, and
so they premised their plan upon the explicit rejection of the right of the
Arab majority to self-determination (notwithstanding how this violated the
very U.N. Charter under whose authority they were ostensibly operating).
Such minor details as this are never reported when the media fill the public
in on the conflict's origins.
Another thing "everyone knows" about the conflict is that the combined Arab
armies invaded Israel after the May 14, 1948 declaration of its existence,
in an effort to wipe the nascent state off the map. As the New York Times
and other major media report it, today's refugee problem is an unfortunate
legacy of Palestinians having to flee or being expelled by Israeli forces as
a consequence of this Arab aggression in 1948. Another minor detail
willfully omitted in reports by journalists like the Times' Ethan Bronner is
that by the time the neighboring Arab states managed to muster a military
response, 300,000 Arabs had already been ethnically cleansed from their
homes in Palestine.
By the time the armistice agreements were signed in 1949, over 700,000
Palestinians had been ethnically cleansed, never permitted to return to
their homes despite the recognition under international law that refugees of
war have a right to do. Although the Jewish community in 1948 owned less
than 7 percent of the land in Palestine, by the time the war was ended,
Israel had conquered territory beyond even that allotted to it under the
never-implemented U.N. partition plan (never implemented because the U.N.
Security Council recognized that the only way to do so would be by force,
and that it had no authority to partition Palestine against the will of the
majority of its inhabitants).
Then again in 1967, as the mainstream media tell it, Israel faced a
genocidal threat from its neighboring Arab states, and so launched a
preemptive attack against Egypt to defend itself and its citizens from
extermination. Never mind that, as no less authoritative a source as former
Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael B. Oren has documented, Israel's own
intelligence assessed that Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser had no
intention of attacking Israel-because he wasn't insane. Israel had already
invaded Egypt once before, in 1956, in collusion with Britain and France,
and the CIA observed that Egyptian forces in 1967 had taken up defensive
positions in the Sinai Peninsula and informed President Lyndon B. Johnson
that a war was brewing and that it would be started by Israel. Former
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, too, has acknowledged that this was a
war of choice, and that the Egyptian troop presence in the Sinai didn't
prove that Nasser intended to attack Israel.
During that war, Israel invaded and began its occupation of Gaza and the
West Bank, an occupation that persists today nearly five decades on. The
ethnic cleansing also continues incrementally as Palestinians' homes are
demolished or life is otherwise made so miserable for them that they are
forced to relocate in order for Jewish settlements to be built, "facts on
the ground" designed to prejudice the outcome of negotiations under the
U.S.-led so-called peace process.
And while the media report on the peace process as though the U.S. was truly
an objective mediator, the truth, also scarcely concealed beneath the thin
veil of rhetoric, is that it is the process by which the U.S. and Israel
block implementation of the two-state solution, in favor of which there is
otherwise a consensus among the international community.
This consensus is based upon the requirement, emphasized in U.N. Security
Council Resolution 242 (passed in the wake of the 1967 war), that Israel
must withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines (also known as the 1967 lines or
the "Green Line" for the color with which it was drawn on the map) in
accordance with the principle of international law that the acquisition of
territory by war is inadmissible. It is also based on the internationally
recognized right, reflected in U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 (passed
during the 1948 war), of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland.
While the U.S. professes to support a two-state solution, it is emphatically
not the same as the two-state solution. The latter is premised upon
international law and respect for the equal rights of the Palestinians,
while the former is premised upon the use of violence to coerce the
Palestinians into accepting Israel's demands to surrender their rights,
including by ceding even more of their land and renouncing their right of
return.
What Hope for Peace?
There is a popular view that the Israel-Palestine conflict is inevitable,
too complicated for a practical solution to ever be found, which leads to
resignation that it will just persist forever. This view is mistaken. There
is a solution, which is for international law to be applied. This is the
outcome that Israel and the U.S. have fought so aggressively to prevent
under the peace process, which is premised upon the rejection of the
applicability of such treaties as the U.N. Charter and the Geneva
Conventions, and instead, elevates Israel's wants over Palestinians' rights.
Hence the accommodative reporting in the mainstream media describing East
Jerusalem as disputed territory, etc., ad nauseum.
So what can be done about this situation? How can the Palestinians ever hope
to see justice done, and how can peace ever be realized?
The answer is simple. The citizens of the world simply need to stop waiting
for the governments of the world to solve the problem. There needs to be
wider recognition that the world's governments, far from being part of the
solution, are part of the problem. This includes the U.N. organization,
which played no small role in helping to create the conflict in the first
place, and which continues to play a duplicitous role-most specifically, the
U.N. Secretariat under Ban Ki-moon's leadership has been complicit in
Israel's oppression of the Palestinians (e.g., calling for negotiations
"without preconditions" in his role as Quartet partner, which is a euphemism
that simply means the Palestinians must cease demanding that Israel cease
its illegal settlement construction before rejoining talks under the guise
of the U.S.-led peace process-among numerous other gross abuses of the
authority of his office).
Israel is able to act with such impunity because it has the backing of the
world's most powerful government. The U.S. government, in turn, is able to
persist in its complicity in the oppression of the Palestinian people
because the media manufacture consent for its criminal policies. Most
Americans simply have a perception of the conflict that has no bearing on
reality. The mainstream discussion about the subject is fundamentally
misrepresentative of the conflict's true nature.
That needs to change. What is required is a paradigm shift. The public needs
to stop buying into the perpetually told lies and propaganda. Americans,
along with other citizens of the world, need to become properly informed.
There are those who will cling to their worldview regardless of the facts,
and those whose own prejudices will blind them to the truth. But those who
are honest and actually care about the victims of the violence-on both
sides, both Jew and Arab-have a responsibility to educate ourselves and take
an active role in sharing knowledge with others.
We need to reach a critical mass of knowledgeable citizenry, a tipping point
at which enough people are properly informed about the conflict's true
nature that it no longer remains feasible for the U.S. government to
continue its policy of trying to sustain the status quo of occupation and
oppression. This applies to citizens of other countries, too, whose own
governments-even those ostensibly supportive of Palestinians' rights-are
blinded to the reality that the peace process is designed to prevent a
peaceful solution and which thus act complicity by advocating the
continuance of this farce. This framework for negotiations needs to be
replaced with a real peace process, one which doesn't reject the
applicability of international law and isn't fundamentally prejudiced
against the rights of those who are living under an oppressive occupation
regime-in which the oppressed aren't forced to negotiate with their
occupiers over the extent to which they can retain their own land.
The world is moving in this direction, albeit not nearly quickly enough to
be of any comfort for the victims. The European Union, for example, has
revised its guidelines for trading with Israel to include the requirement
that goods produced in illegally constructed Israeli settlements be labeled
as such. The growing boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement can
claim some success in this regard, but there is another important factor
frequently overlooked that led to this development: the U.N.'s recognition
in 2012 of Palestine as a non-member observer state.
With the U.N.'s recognition of Palestinian statehood comes access to
international legal institutions such as the ICJ and ICC, to which the
Palestinian Authority may now turn in order to seek legal remedy for
Israel's violations of international law. So why hasn't the PA already done
so?
The Role of the Palestinian Authority
The answer to that question, too, is simple. The PA was established under
the peace process to serve the aims of the U.S. and Israeli governments. It
is, simply stated, Israel's collaborator regime in the occupied territories
that serves to keep the Palestinians in line by repressing popular uprisings
against the occupation regime.
This is not to say that the PA leadership under President Mahmoud Abbas-who
remains in office illegitimately, his term having long ago expired-is
entirely dedicated to serving Israel's interests. But the U.S. and Israel
have their ways of forcing his compliance, such as Israel's withholding of
Palestinian tax dollars it collects on the PA's behalf in the occupied
territories, or the U.S.' threats to cut off aid to the PA if it steps out
of line.
Of course, these are bluffs on the part of Israel and the U.S. since they
need the PA in order to sustain the status quo of occupation. Neither wants
to risk causing the collapse of the PA-least of all the Israeli military
establishment, which prefers to have a collaborator regime in place to do
its dirty work for it. While Abbas has taken an important step by
successfully submitting Palestine's application for a status upgrade in the
U.N. General Assembly, he has to date remained too cowardly to take the next
step by pursuing legal claims against Israel in the international
institutions now available to his government.
It is the risk that Palestine might eventually do so, no doubt, apart from
the influence of the BDS movement, that has prompted the EU to revise its
trade guidelines with Israel so as to take a modest step away from its
complicity in the wholesale criminal violation of Palestinians' rights.
A Global Intifada
This raises a conundrum for the Palestinians. The weight of the world's
governments, meaningless rhetoric to the contrary nothwithstanding, is
against them. Absent recognition as a state, they had no recourse to legal
mechanisms to compel Israel's compliance with international law. Yet even
with such recognition, they remain powerless given complicity of their own
government in their oppression. So it comes to this: if the PA-which has
been all too willing to lay Palestinians' rights on the negotiating table in
order to preserve the privileged status of its crony elites-will not act to
support the rights of its own people, then the Palestinian people must act
to rid themselves of its rule over them.
It is time for another popular uprising, an intifada grounded in the
principle of non-violent resistance to occupation and oppression. Hamas and
other armed groups must realize that, apart from being illegal and immoral,
committing acts of terrorism or engaging in war crimes such as
indiscriminate rocket fire into Israeli residential communities are a
strategic mistake since such actions serve to hand Israel the very pretext
it requires in order to preserve its occupation regime.
This is not to say that the Palestinians must renounce their right to
legitimate armed resistance against foreign military occupation, which, too,
is codified under international law; it is simply to recognize the futility
of trying to gain freedom in this particular case through the barrel of a
gun and to see that disallowing Israel even the slightest pretext for its
own incomparably greater violence is the surest path to creating the
conditions necessary for Israel's policies to no longer remain politically
feasible.
It is up to the rest of us to support the Palestinians in that struggle. We
must all rise up in solidarity with the oppressed and become active
participants in this Third Intifada. The governments of the world aren't
going to get the job done. It is up to the informed citizens of the world to
effect the paradigm shift required to compel state leaderships to cease
being part of the problem and to do what is right for the victims on both
sides.
That will require a change in the nature of the media's reporting on the
conflict, which, although a daunting task, in this age of the internet and
social media is foreseeable. It is up to each of us who cares about human
rights to take an active role in the discussion, to educate ourselves and
others about the true nature of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and to share
that knowledge with others by whatever means available. Enough people need
to be knowledgeable enough about the conflict-and the U.S. government's role
in it-that it no longer remains permissible for the mainstream media to
serve as the government's very own ministry of propaganda.
That is to say, it is time for the world's citizens to free themselves from
the indoctrination of the state religion and recognize that the state
itself-as an institution fundamentally grounded in the use or threat of
violence to compel desired behaviors-is the enemy of liberty and of peace.
Yet so long as these political institutions remain on this planet, they
ought to hold themselves to their own obligations under the treaties that
comprise the body of international law-and they ought to hold each other's
leaderships accountable when those laws are violated and especially when war
crimes are committed. It is toward this end that our collective efforts
ought to be focused.
Peace can be achieved. There is a path to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. But we shouldn't make the mistake of focusing so much on
establishing respected borders between conflicting parties that we fail to
realize what a peaceful, civilized world would look like: one without
borders.
Jeremy R. Hammond is an independent political analyst, author and founding
editor and publisher of Foreign Policy Journal [4]. His latest book is
Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict [5]
(2016). Read the first chapter free [3] and get an email primer course [3]
on the conflict.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [6]
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[7]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/world/no-state-solution-israel-palestine-conflict ;
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/jeremy-r-hammond
[2] http://alternet.org
[3] http://www.obstacletopeace.com/
[4] http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com
[5]
https://www.amazon.com/Obstacle-Peace-Role-Israeli-Palestinian-Conflict/dp/0
996105816
[6] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on The No-State Solution to
the Israel-Palestine Conflict
[7] http://www.alternet.org/
[8] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
