Hands off Gaza - one state the only solution

The latest Israeli assault on Gaza is the act of a state with nothing to offer but the politics and economics of war and terror. With an election coming up in January, Netanyahu’s Likud government is killing Palestinians with the aim of creating fear at home to help them hold on to power.

Netanyahu’s regime has turned once more to state terrorism to find a distraction for an Israeli population burdened by debt and devastated by spending cuts. In July, mass protests once more erupted on the streets of Tel Aviv and two men died after setting themselves on fire in protest at social conditions.

Inequality in Israel is amongst the highest in the world, according to the OECD. One in five Israelis live in poverty, one in three children. But between 2008 and 2009, the number of millionaires increased by 43%, largely from hi-tech start-ups in the weapons, security and communications sector.  

As usual, the world’s media slavishly follows the Israeli line that increased rocket attacks from Gaza led to the current assault, but an open letter from ten leading academics, including Noam Chomsky, is eye witness to a different chronology.

On November 5, a 20-year old Gazan man with a learning disability was shot when he wandered too close to the border. It was six hours before Israeli troops would let medics reach him, so he died. On November 8, a 13-year old boy playing football in front of his house was killed when the Israeli Defence Force made an incursion into Gaza.

By November 11, five Palestinian civilians including three children had been killed in 72 hours. Four deaths occurred when shells were fired at a football match. Some 52 civilians had been wounded, including six women and 12 children.

A Canadian doctor working in Gaza reports wounded arriving at Shefa hospital with shrapnel wounds – brain, neck, throat, intestinal and bone injuries leading to “traumatic amputations”, carried out with “very little morphine for analgesia.”

These were deliberate provocations against a relatively defenceless people armed with a few home-made rockets who live in what has been dubbed the world’s biggest prison camp. Cut off from their fellow Palestinians on the West Bank, most Gazans are registered refugees dependent on help from United Nations agencies and conditions are deteriorating.

Not one Israeli civilian died before the IDF attack began – today three are dead as Hamas stepped up rocket attacks. Netanyahu has to answer for them, too.

Increasingly desperate violence is the Zionist state’s only response to the massive changes in the region. Iran has announced new advanced drones, more sophisticated than those they gave Hezbollah in Lebanon which were sending satellite pictures of Israel’s military and nuclear bases.

The Egyptian government, formerly a supine supporter of US policy in Israel, has recalled its ambassador from Tel Aviv. Its border with Gaza is open and Egyptian hospitals are preparing to accept casualties. Israel has been exchanging fire with Syrian artillery batteries on the Golan Heights, where anti-Assad rebels are located.

Later this month the United Nations will discuss a request from the Palestine National Authority for observer country status, a de facto recognition of statehood. The Israeli government has warned that if this happens, they will invade the Palestinian area and topple the government of Mahmoud Abbas.

The Zionist state is in a profound, existential crisis. It has nothing to offer the Israeli people, but the same could be said of the Hamas and Fatah leaderships – and the Iranian government with its military adventurism.

The only people offering a way forward are those from both sides of the Arab/Israeli divide who propose a one-state solution in place of the doomed two-state approach which becomes more impractical each day that Israeli settlement building continues.

Surely the aim has to be remove all the walls and checkpoints and to create a single democratic, secular state with equal rights for all its citizens, whatever their religious or ethnic background. That is the only way to rally Israelis and Palestinians against their common enemy.

Penny Cole

Statehood bid opposed by Palestinian activists

Key Palestinian organisations have united to denounce the attempt by president Mahmoud Abbas and his supporters to achieve a chair at the United Nations for a so-called Palestinian state.

His attempt to have a chair at the UN for his little fiefdom would be at the expense of the only body which truly has the right to represent the WHOLE Palestinian people.

The great achievement of the generation of Yasser Arafat and his supporters was the transformation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation into a unified representative body, with a Charter and the support and affiliation of all Palestinian organisations, inside Israel, in the occupied territories and in exile.

Then in 1974 they achieved recognition for the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people at the United Nations, where it still has observer status.

Abbas’ move would replace the PLO with his own Palestine National Authority. That is turning the clock back to the time when a series of sheikhs and faction leaders of the old generation were patronised by Western leaders and permitted to speak for Palestine in international forums.

Abbas returned from the UN to his headquarters in Ramallah, through a series of Israeli army checkpoints, to declare that the "Palestinian Spring" has begun. But the rally he addressed had the orchestrated style of a New Labour conference. The carefully constructed UN “chair” held above the heads of the crowd was not made by an enthusiastic citizen, but commissioned by an advertising executive.

Ali Abunimah, editor of Electronic Intifada and a leading proponent of the one-state solution, points out that there is little support for this move, either inside the occupied territories or in the diaspora. The movement for an international boycott BDS, the Palestinian Youth Movement and many others are entirely against enshrining a fake government of a fake state in the UN to represent their interests.

The Palestinian Youth Movement declares itself "steadfastly against" the UN bid because it could jeopardise "the rights and aspirations of over two-thirds of the Palestinian people who live as refugees in countries of refuge and in exile, to return to their original homes."

The legal obstacles that Abbas is attempting to ignore are highlighted in an opinion written by Guy Goodwin-Gill, a professor of public international law at Oxford University. He says:

“Within the constitutional structure of the PLO … the Palestinian Authority is a subsidiary body, competent only to exercise those powers conferred on it by the Palestinian National Council. By definition, it does not have the capacity to assume greater powers, to 'dissolve' its parent body, or otherwise to establish itself independently of the Palestinian National Council and the PLO.”

Of course the Netanyahu government in Israel is ranting and bullying, threatening violence as usual. Foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, warned of "tough repercussions" if the UN backed the Palestinian move. To underline his point, West Bank paramilitary “settlers” promptly made a punitive raid into a Palestinian farm near the West Bank village of Qusra, where they tore up 400 olive trees.

Abbas may claim that his move is the start of the Palestinian Spring, but this is nothing of the kind. The Arab Spring was a leap forward by the people of Egypt and Tunisia and elsewhere towards something new. It has entirely disrupted all the conspiracies and corrupt diplomacy that have dominated Middle East politics for decades.

Much more in tune with its spirit is the demand put forward in June by youth from all the different Palestinian parties in both Gaza and the West Bank for a renewal of the PLO, as a united voice for Palestinians everywhere.

The Israeli Summer shows that there too the social and political structures that supported Zionist ideology are increasingly under threat, as a result of their inability to deliver a decent life to citizens. The challenge for everyone in the region is to take a leap over the heads of Abbas, Liebermann and Netanyahu, and talk to each other about a common route to a shared future within a single, secular state.

Penny Cole