While many good people are Jews, and many Jews are indeed good people, the Zionist experiment of the last seventy-five years is an apartheid venture based upon exclusion, oppression, and ethnic cleansing. A political entity for Palestinians was never Israel’s aim, as we latterly see from that state’s aggressive settlement policies. The two-state solution is now dead.
The only viable path forward is the one state solution. That state will not be religiously aligned but one in which Jews, Muslims, Christians, and others live together in peace and security. While both Jews and Muslims claim rights to the same land, the problem is not the claim but the exclusivity of the claim coming from either side. This exclusivity was never voiced by Arabs. It has only been voiced by Zionists, as we see in over-heated, even genocidal, statements by the current right-wing government in Israel.
All of us, regardless of our political and religious views, should be working towards the establishment of a truly democratic state in the land of Palestine. The establishment of such a state requires “the destruction of the State of Israel”—a fearsome phrase bandied about with little understanding—in the sense that the political entity between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea changes from a Jewish state to a truly democratic state. Such a change is not anti-Semitic (anti-Jewish), unless one claims that returning stolen goods violates the rights of thieves. A democratic state between the river and the sea will require secular institutions able to protect the rights of all citizens. This is the meaning of the “one state solution” and of the slogan “Free Palestine”—a place where both Jews and Palestinians can live in peace.
FREE PALESTINE
I fully agree with the position of Rene Salm as enunciated in his essay “In favor of the ‘one state solution’ in Palestine”.
Ever since 1948, the Palestinians have been forced to pay with land and lives for the crimes of the Nazis. However, Israeli policy, going back decades, remains in force. Drive the Palestinians in the West Bank east into Jordan and drive the Palestinians in Gaza west into Sinai. Justification for the Gaza expulsion was recently created by the Hamas attack launched from Gaza. Once the Gazans have been expelled, Israel will then turn its full attention to the West Bank. Governmental and historical investigations, yet to be undertaken, will ultimately reveal what prompted Hamas to attack Israel when the Israeli response and final outcome of the ensuing conflict is easily predicted.
The future state you describe already exists: it’s Israel, where all citizens, regardless of religious faith, have equal rights.
Since 1947, the Arabs have repeatedly rejected two-state solutions. It is they who claim exclusive rights to the land ‘from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea.’ It is Hamas that calls for the destruction of Israel and the expulsion or annihilation of the Jews, to be replaced by a muslim theocracy.
How you could get all this completely inverted, astonishes me.
Unfortunately, you’re not joking. In Israel, “all citizens, regardless of religious faith, have equal rights”? Tell that to the Palestinians who have been dispossessed of land *in Israel* over the last 75 years. And no (as you wrote in another comment that I needn’t post) the Jews did not just “take over land that was empty”! Even now, Israeli settlers are at the point of guns ejecting Palestinians from homes and land *outside* Israel in the West Bank. Wake up to the realities of brute force. And no, I don’t condone what happened on Oct. 7. But I do understand why it happened.