March 4, 2009 at 7:33 pm (Guest Blog, Israel, Palestine, Videos)
My dear friend Nola posted the following on her Blog today. The video is very informative and is a must watch…
Palestine - One State
Here is Virginia Tilley on the end of the two-state solution and on the challenges that lay ahead:
[I]t’s worrisome that people are pronouncing the final death of the two-state solution partly because of the imminent ascendance in Israeli politics of Netanyahu and Lieberman. We must be clear about this, too: regarding Palestinians, no shred of difference exists between their policies and those of Livni and Barak. In any case, Netanyahu is an opportunist and says whatever will sell. When the Obama administration pressures him, and the diplomatic climate changes, he will go for whatever new version of Annapolis is cooked up and fill our media with earnest phrases about Israel’s eternal innocence and laboured quest for peace. But nothing will change, whether he comes or goes, because Israel’s policy goes deeper than Israeli electoral politics. The only change we can anticipate is one of style. The ‘yes-but’ chicanery of the Peres/Livni/Barak camp will morph into the ‘no way’ rhetoric of the Netanyahu/Lieberman camp, both presenting their rejectionism as Israel’s tragic burden arising from Palestinian failures or betrayals. Whatever Palestinians do, neither camp has the slightest intention to do anything different in the West Bank except build settlements as fast as possible, take the land, shut the Palestinians behind the Wall, and finish the consolidation of Eretz Israel.
In fact, the idea that Livni and Barak ever meant to do anything different about the West Bank only falls for that famous old government ploy—Israel’s plausible-deniability myth—that fanatical religious settlers actually drive the settlement’s growth. The Israeli government has run the entire settlement operation—mapped, planned, funded, overseen, subsidised, and defended it — from the beginning. So let us not try to recreate that tinsel fiction for ourselves once again: that if only we had ‘moderates’ in the Israeli government we could ‘keep the diplomatic process alive’. The ‘moderates’ brought us the carnage of Gaza and their intentions remain entirely clear, so let us have no more clinging to their lies and lip service and war crimes.
And let us have no more foolishness about Israel’s security. Israel is overwhelmingly secure. It is as secure as the U.S. Army fighting Apaches on the western U.S. plains and crying foul at any white settler death. Where whites/Jews want the indigenous people’s land, have overwhelming military power and capacity to take it, and see no reason to stop, what is needed to stop the government from cramming the people into Bantustans/reservations is not ‘mediation’ so the two sides can gain ‘trust’ and see each other as human beings, or indigenous collaboration to make whites ‘secure’, or indigenous recognition that the dominant state has a ‘right to exist’. The only solution to such a power imbalance is to eradicate the state’s claimed moral authority to destroy and rob and brutalise the outsider by changing the very relationship between state and outsider into something else. Native Americans did this too late, after too much was destroyed and stolen. The Palestinians can do it in time.
But this means getting serious and it means acting now.
The one-state solution is not a ‘dream’. It is the only hope for real peace but it is also the grim reality we already face. The Israeli government knows this full well and also knows that the two-state façade is cracking. We see the bloody consequences of that knowledge in Gaza, where Israel deliberately created mayhem partly to derail Hamas and distract the world from the increasing transparency of the two-state lie. So there is nothing ‘utopian’ about this one-state reality. In South Africa, the one-state solution cost thousands of lives, particularly toward the end when the apartheid regime became desperate. As in South Africa, conditions in the one-state solution in Israel-Palestine are likely to get worse before they get better but also we have no guarantee that the struggle will come out well. It could go to ethnic cleansing and wars. It will come out well only if people shed their myths and get seriously busy.
[...] [Continue reading on The Myths That Must Go]
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