Palestinians start campaign for one state for all citizens

Momentum for a one-state solution for Palestine is building up just as the Israeli state is destroying even a remote chance of success for any Saudi-US Arab peace plan.

Last week, Palestinians marked the 65th anniversary of the Nakba, the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians from their homeland in 1948. It was also the day chosen by 22 senior Palestinian figures to announce “a popular movement project for a single democratic state in historic Palestine”.

Those calling for the creation of one democratic country between the Mediterranean Sea and the river Jordan were leading members of Fatah, the movement originally led by Palestine Liberation Organisation founder Yasser Arafat.

Their document, issued after a meeting held in the town of El Bireh in the West Bank, was the result of a two-year discussion. It declared that “the racist Israeli policy of separation and segregation has made the two-state solution ‏(based on pre-1967 borders‏) unrealistic”. Therefore, the most desirable option” left for the Palestinian people and the one that will allow the right of return is, they say:  

“[A] democratic state for all its citizens, which will be based on a democratic constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and will guarantee freedom and equal rights, without discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, religion, gender, skin colour, language, nationality, political opinion, social origin and place of birth.”

Professor Uri Davis, from Al Quds university’s Israel studies department, explained that the concept for such a state was still under discussion, but that he personally was in favour of one state for both Israelis and Palestinians.

The announcement came only a few days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dedicated Route 20, a new highway connecting Jewish neighbourhoods in northern Jerusalem.

Former Israel Defence Forces leader, Shaul Arieli of the Council for Peace and Security, said the new roads undermined the prospect of the re-division of the city and the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. All peace plans put forward so far were based on a division of Jerusalem and transfer of portions of the city to a Palestinian state.

An Israeli expert on Jerusalem’s demography, Danny Seidemann, said that “the purpose of these highways is to clearly integrate the [Jewish] settlement blocs into the national highway network of Israel and thereby place East Jerusalem and the settlement blocs within Israel’s de facto borders”.

Their views were published in the liberal Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, which notes that road could be “the nail in the coffin for plans to re-divide the capital and attach its Arab areas to a future Palestinian state”.

In other words, the road project completely scuppers the notion of a two-state solution for Israel-Palestine, which the extensive Zionist settlement programme on the West Bank had already made unviable.

The highway has been denounced by United Nations Special Rapporteur Richard Falk who is calling on the Israeli government to halt its construction immediately. He says it will ruin the livelihoods of the 9,300 Palestinian residents. 

Netanyahu’s road-building is hardly surprising considering that the Israeli Prime Minister’s aides have denounced the Arab peace plan as “trick” intended to entrap Israel.

And, as Jonathan Cook, a distinguished journalist writing for the Israeli Occupation Archive, notes, Netanyahu’s government demanded that Google should not use the word “Palestine”, claiming it was damaging the peace process.

Wikileaks has disclosed documents proving that Netanyahu is only the last of many Israeli leaders with total contempt for peace negotiations. In cables from 1975, US diplomats describe Israel as “hell-bent on self-destruction”.

The Fatah leaders’ support for a one-state solution is a crucial break from the conciliatory position taken for years by PLO president Mahmoud Abbas and Arab League negotiators who, under American pressure, conceded Palestinian territory in the hopes of a deal. A World to Win welcomes the initiative, which opens up a way forward for Palestinians and Israelis alike.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

         

Angry Israelis ask Palestinians who they should vote for

As Israeli right-wing nationalist/religious parties try to outdo each other in their reactionary appeal in the run up to this month’s general election, a remarkable online action is offering Palestinians in the Occupied Territories a proxy “vote”.

On a Facebook community called Real Democracy, disillusioned Israeli citizens are offering their votes to Palestinians on the West Bank who live under military law and have no say in their future. They have agreed to take instructions from Palestinians who respond as to how they should vote on February 22.

Earlier today, Shahaf Weisbein wrote: “I am an Israeli citizen and have the right to vote. Acknowledging the fact that millions of Palestinians are affected directly the decisions and acts of the government I am given the ‘opportunity’ to choose, I hereby give my vote to any Palestinian who wishes to use it. This is not a democracy, it is an apartheid regime.”

Mousa Maria replied to her: “Just this month, 25 people were arrested in my village by the Israeli army for participating in non-violent demonstrations… We are not anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish. We only oppose the policies of the Israeli government. Our goal is to free our land, from settlers and soldiers. Our goal is freedom.”

There’s an anonymous message from a serving Israeli soldier, who came to Israel from Texas three years ago as a committed Zionist. The soldier says her views have “changed dramatically and is supporting the campaign.                        

Bassam Aramin, who lives in East Jerusalem, tells Ofer Neiman that he is a bereaved father, his 10-year-old daughter having been killed by an Israeli soldier in 2007. He says Neiman should use his vote in favour of the left-wing Hadash Party.

East Jerusalem and the West Bank now have an estimated 500,000 Israeli settlers, as a result of the illegal construction programme pursued by successive governments. Their very existence has made it impossible to continue with the so-called peace negotiations, which have been stalled since 2010.

Politically, it looks likely to get a whole lot worse inside Israel itself. Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government has accelerated settlement building and launched repeated attacks on Gaza, is now facing an even more right-wing opponent in the shape of Naftali Bennett. This millionaire, ex-commando favours outright annexation of large parts of the West Bank.

Polls show that Bennett's far-right, Bayit Yehudi (Jewish Home) will finish third in the parliamentary election and have to be included in any future coalition. He has dismissed as a “dead end” efforts to achieve a two-state solution.

His party is cashing in on the widely-held view that there is no apparent solution to the conflict with the Palestinians. This is actually the case as far as the Zionist political elite is concenred. It is determined to give nothing at all when it comes to an independent Palestinian state.

However, there is also deep uncertainty about the direction Israel is heading in, with over half the electorate saying the country’s path is wrong. And, just as dramatically, an astounding 31% of voters remain undecided with two weeks to go to the election.  

               

The Israeli-Palestinian electoral rebellion launched last month being conducted through social media has over a 1,000 supporters and finds a growing response among the Palestinians. It neatly exposes the hollow claim that Israel is the “only democracy” in the Middle East simply by showing that oppressed and occupied Palestinians have no say in an election in which the main candidates have them in the firing line.

With the settlements in West Bank making it impossible to conceive of two states living side by side from a geographical yet alone political point of view, a bi-partisan single country where Israelis and all Palestinians have the vote must force itself on to the agenda sooner rather than later.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

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

Arab Spring meets Jewish Summer

The rhythmic Hebrew slogans used at many of the protests are strikingly similar to punchy Arabic lines that have reverberated throughout the Middle East since January: "Ha'am doresh / tzedek chevrati" ["The people demand social justice"], one observer noted.

On Saturday night, more than 150,000 people – out of a population of seven million – gathered in 12 cities across Israel as part of the biggest social movement the country has witnessed.

Small-scale actions that started with tents being pitched in Tel Aviv and other cities over soaring housing costs have grown into a mass movement against the right-wing Netanyahu government, unemployment, the ruling families who own most of the economy and deep inequality.

Recent demonstrations have included marches against the prices of petrol, boycotts of expensive cottage cheese that forced manufacturers to lower prices and lengthy strikes by social workers and doctors over pay and working conditions.

Middle-class Jews and Israeli Palestinians have come together in local encampments in a way that seemed unimaginable only a few weeks ago. And they have shaken the country’s ruling economic and political elites to their core. There were reports that Bedouin tribesmen had joined the marchers in outlying towns. A poll by showed that 87% of Israelis support the tent city protests.

In echoes of the movements in Tunisia, Egypt and Spain, many on the march demanded fundamental change. It was a moment when the Arab Spring met the Jewish Summer. One of the placards read: “Mubarak, Assad, Netanyahu!”

Activist Daphni Leef, who initiated the first tent village protest in Tel Aviv against housing prices two weeks ago, told a crowd of 70,000-100,000 Israelis gathered outside the city's main art museum that "we don't want to replace the government, but to do more than that. We want to change the rules of the game".

A steady influx of wealthy diaspora Jews from New York, Miami and Paris who bought up flats in Israel's big cities has driven up prices in many affluent neighbourhoods along the Mediterranean coast in cities such as Tel Aviv and Netanya, in addition to Jerusalem.

Since 2008, the price of an average apartment has gone up by 55% rent by 27%, far in excess of wage increases.

Many protesters say they do not want to live in the distant suburbs, where rent is cheap but amenities are far. Public transport is notoriously bad in Tel Aviv, where people joke that "the Messiah will arrive before the new light rail is built".

Efraim Davidi, a political scientist at Ben Gurion University, says there is a simple reason why the vast majority of Israelis support the protesters against the government. "The situation of working families is getting worse and worse. It's very difficult to buy an apartment, car, food," says Davidi. "Prices here are like in Europe, but salaries are like those in the Third World."

The Arab Spring is making itself felt in this unlikely context. The regimes being challenged are quite different, but the impulses are similar – corruption, inflation, unemployment, inequality and a failure of the existing political system.

In Israel, the Zionists who dominate a nationalist state founded on a single ethnic group have used the threat of an external “enemy” in the shape of Arab regimes to hold sway over a seemingly pliant population.

The shattering of the Mubarak regime and the heroic uprising by the Syrian people in the face of a murderous assault by the Assad dictatorship has served to loosen the Zionist grip. As The celebrated author David Grossman told the crowd: "The people are loyal to the state, but the state isn't loyal to them."

The idea that the Jewish state represents all Jews equally is being exposed and blown apart and with it will go the raison d’être of the Zionist regime itself. Class rather than ethnic and religious questions are now coming to the fore in Israel, with the nature of capitalist rule on the agenda. A real unity of Jewish and Arab workers in the region, leading to self-determination for the Palestinians, is a greater possibility now than it was before the Arab Spring.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Obama's warning to Israel falls on deaf ears

President Obama’s latest speeches on Palestine, like his visit to Ireland and to London, are arousing a whole range of emotions and reactions.

Anti-war protesters will gather tomorrow outside Buckingham Palace against the three wars currently being fought by the United States under Obama’s leadership – Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

As the Stop the War Campaign points out, Israel continues to enjoy unflinching support from its US Big Brother – large scale arms sales, aid and political support.

But simply to note this would be to miss out on new realities unleashed by the revolutions of the Arab Spring and its effects on the struggle of the Palestinians for self-determination.

Thousands took part in the May marches throughout the Occupied Territories to mark the Nabka, "catastrophe" in Arabic, that refers to the destruction of Palestinian villages and expulsion of their residents that accompanied Israel's declaration of independence.

Israeli border police troops fired on protesters in an attack which drew international condemnation. Despite 11 fatalities and scores of injuries, Palestinians are continuing to prepare a large-scale march for June 5.

This, combined with the demand for statehood which the Palestinians are taking to the United Nations in September, is the tumultuous background to Obama’s call on Israel to “make the hard choices”.

After meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week and the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Obama refused to back down from his insistence that peace negotiations must focus on Israel’s pre-1967 war borders.

While this is not a new position for US presidents, with Obama proposing “mutually agreed land swaps” in support of a two-state solution, it has nonetheless aroused fury in the Zionist camp.

A US official described Netanyahu’s arrogant, hostile response to Obama as “over the top” while in the United States itself, Zionists and the Republican right have launched a ferocious tirade. Some, suggested one website, consider Obama a “pro-Palestinian Marxist, Islamophile, anti-white bigot, anti-American Marxist and a tyrant in the making”.

While Obama is desperately trying to adapt to the Arab Spring, at the same time fearing its consequence in countries like Syria where he wants Assad to lead changes rather than go, his reference to pre-1967 borders is already looking decidedly shaky.

Palestinian leaders from Hamas and Fatah do not themselves agree on the proposal to return to the 1967 borders. And they currently face a boycott against their monopoly of politics by eight Palestinian groups affiliated to the PLO who have withdrawn from the negotiations to form the unity government recently agreed in Cairo.

The head of Fatah’s press office, Issam al-Halabi has rightly noted: “Politicians are following the people. They don’t have much say, the people are doing everything and this is a turning point in the Palestinian struggle to return, which has recently surprised everyone.” Palestinian negotiators should take advantage of these popular movements to “back up their stance during negotiations”, he believes.

Two things need to be said. One is that Netanyahu’s immediate rejection of Obama’s reference to pre-1967 borders killed off negotiations before they began. Secondly, exploiting the sacrifices of Palestinian youth in Gaza, the Golan Heights and throughout the Occupied Territories as a negotiating ploy is quite treacherous and cynical.

When Obama told the AIPAC that “we cannot afford to wait another decade, or another two decades, or another three decades to achieve peace” because the world “is moving too fast”, he was actually keenly aware of the truth.

He was, in effect, warning the Israeli ruling class that its days – similar to the position that the apartheid regime in South Africa found itself in - are numbered. The renewed Palestinian uprisings, like the incredibly courageous movements in Syria and Yemen, are part of a global movement against the status quo. It is mobilising countless youth from Tunis to Tahrir and now in the Spanish May 15 occupation movement. It is impossible to imagine this process succeeding without an independent Palestinian state.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

The Palestinian street has spoken

Perhaps the most serious evidence that the reconciliation agreement signed last week in Cairo by Fatah and Hamas, the two main Palestinian organisations, upsets the global status quo is the chorus of denunciation by Israeli leaders.

The Arab spring – from Tunisia to Egypt – has inspired and driven on young Palestinians themselves and the speed of events has surprised everyone. And since Fatah and Hamas signed the deal, which was endorsed by 11 smaller Palestinian groups and brokered by Egypt’s new government, Israeli leaders from Prime Minister Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and opposition leader Tzipi Livni have all expressed their hostility.

The outbursts from Israel politicians and intelligence agencies, who have worked might and main to divide and rule, are backed up by the withholding of $89 million worth of tax revenues which the Palestine Authority needs to pay 170,000 civil servants and their dependents. This is an illegal act to undermine unity and economically starve the Palestinians, which even the ever-so-tame United Nations general secretary Ban ki-Moon has criticised.

Israeli leaders are terrified that the reconciliation deal that follows years of bitter conflict between Fatah and Hamas – one controlling the West Bank and Hamas the Gaza Strip – will gather momentum for a sense of real Palestinian unity and strength.

Their anger is in sharp contrast to the jubilant feeling in Palestinian refugee camps in the occupied territories and in places like the Ain al-Hilweh camp, the largest in Lebanon, where Fatah and Hamas flags fluttered together and people celebrated over the weekend.

The cessation of hostilities between Fatah and Hamas goes some way towards realising – at least on paper - the demands raised by thousands of Palestinian youth in the March 15 Movement. Two months ago, Palestinian youth under occupation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank - who make up over 65% of the population there –as well as those living as second class citizens in Israel, took to the streets with 20 of them going on hunger strike. Via Facebook and other means, they issued a call to the governments of the West Bank and Gaza, demanding:

• the release of all political prisoners in the prisons of the Palestine Authority and Hamas
• an end to attacks by one organisation on the other
• the resignation of the governments of Haniyeh and Fayyad to re-build a government of national unity agreed by all Palestinian factions representing the Palestinian people
• the restructuring of the Palestine Liberation Organisation to contain all Palestinian factions and get back to its initial aim: Palestine’s freedom from illegal occupation
• the end of all forms of security co-ordination with Israeli occupation forces.

This new generation seeks national unity independently of political factions. Students and school children on the protest, said they were inspired by movements in other parts of the Arab world to initiate a political movement that would go on until unity was reached.

But as night fell, armed groups in civilian clothes were backed up by the Hamas authorities who then sent in the police. The peaceful youth and many women, journalists and photographers were beaten with sticks and clubs, facts backed up by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.

Nevertheless, their discredited leaders have been forced to respond to their “street”. And the Palestinian street, is, as rights campaigner Noura Erakat Erakat has noted, a global one. Perhaps the most significant factor, however, is the ongoing Egyptian revolution. The overthrown Mubarak dictatorship worked with the Israeli regime to turn Gaza into the world’s biggest prison camp. Now Egypt is preparing to open the Rafah border crossing into Gaza, which the Israelis have said they won’t allow.

Many Palestinians interviewed on the streets of Gaza after the deal was signed, are keenly aware that the reconciliation has been made out of a position of weakness by both Hamas and Fatah. Neither the pursuance of a two-state “solution” by Fatah, nor the militant Islam demonization of all Jews by Hamas, has paid dividends. A secular, one-state approach is required. For that to succeed, new leaders will have to come forward.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Netanyahu endorses a ghetto

Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday became the sixth Israeli prime minister to utter the words “Palestinian state” – and yet the Palestinians are no nearer their goal after his speech. The conditions set out by the right-wing Israeli leader are so draconian that they effectively rule out self-determination for the Palestinians as the outcome of any negotiations before they have even started.

Netanyahu simply ignored pressure from President Obama, who had called for an immediate end to settlement building on the West Bank, making no mention of these. He shut down options about the future status of Jerusalem and blocked any prospects of a return to the area by five million exiled Palestinians by insisting on recognition of Israel as an exclusively “Jewish state”.

And to top it all, Netanyahu insisted that any future Palestinian state would have to be “demilitarised” – having no control over its borders or air space. No wonder Palestinian MP Mustafa Barghouti said Netanyahu had “endorsed a ghetto" and a “a state that would be subject to Israeli control”.

The fact is that even before Netanyahu’s Zionist vision of a Greater Israel to the exclusion of all other people in the area, a two-state “solution” like the one favoured by the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas is simply unworkable and ought to be abandoned. You don’t have to look hard to see why.

Nearly 500,000 Israeli Jews live in settlements built since Israel's 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem – 280,000 in the West Bank and a further 190,000 in East Jerusalem. There are a further 102 unauthorised outposts in the West Bank which are not officially recognised by Israel but which the authorities turn a blind eye to. Over 40% of the West Bank is taken up with Israeli infrastructure.

The settlements are illegal under international law, but Israeli governments don’t give a damn about this. The United Nations and the United States have declined to act for more than 40 years, giving the Israelis confidence to go on with their carving up of Palestinian territory. In addition to the settlements, there is the geographical fact that the West Bank and Gaza are not contiguous areas, making it extremely difficult to conceive of them as part of a viable Palestinian state. In any case, Gaza is surrounded and under siege, entirely cut off from the West Bank.

So if two states can’t and won’t work, what about having just one? As Israel’s rulers have no intention of allowing Palestinians to form a viable state, their bluff should be called. As writer and noted academic Joel Kovel has argued, it is urgent to “envision Israel beyond Zionism”. The Zionists fear a movement for a one-state solution beyond anything Hamas can throw at it. Former prime minister Yehud Olmert once admitted: “We are approaching the point where more and more Palestinians will say: ‘There is no place for two states between the Jordan and the sea. All we want now is the right to vote’. The day they get it we will lose everything.”

Israeli Jews have more to gain than to lose from a one secular state solution. Today they live in a militarised, divided society which is far from the co-operative paradise promised by the early Zionist founders. A new generation of leaders on both sides is needed to take this project forward. They have to find ways of making a principled appeal to Israeli Jews, including the settlers, to Israel’s Palestinian citizens and to the Palestinian masses to come together to establish a peaceful future for the region.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor