Historical Palestine (or Israel within the borders it now controls including pre-1967 Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights) is one country with one water system, one electrical grid, one powerful military to defend and define its external borders, one monetary system, one telephone system, and one postal system. It is already one state, although half the population has lesser rights or none at all.
The current argument for creating two states is simply another attempt to carve out a Jewish state, called Israel, where Jews have by law superior rights to non-Jews.
It involves ethnic cleansing, segregation, and racism; it is definitely not a formula for lasting peace.
American support of a racist, apartheid state is contrary to what we Americans profess to believe. Yet we overwhelmingly endorse the idea of a Jewish state and ignore the basic human rights of half the population that is not “chosen.”
Americans claim to endorse equal rights of citizenship everywhere in the world, except Israel. We do so both out of conviction and out of fear of being smeared with the anti-Semitic tar brush. We are loath to even discuss Jewish power that compels us to deny self determination and equal rights for Palestinians.
Our government supports the ghettoization of Gaza and other Palestinian enclaves; it ignores Israeli concentration camps like Ketziot; it supports the building of illegal settlements in occupied territory; it turns a blind eye to nuclear proliferation by Israel; it defends a Jewish attack on an unarmed humanitarian flotilla, and it sends our military to fight wars demanded by Israel.
It is time for all Americans to support the de facto One State of Israel/Palestine and to demand that it treat all of its inhabitants as citizens with equal rights, regardless of religion or ethnicity.
Daniel McGowan
Professor Emeritus
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian
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