What is the perspective of Palestinians on two vs one state 1 ?
100 years into the war on the Palestinian people and their history, the illusion of the viability or popular support of a two-state solution in the land remains one of the greatest thorns in the Palestinians cause for liberation.
The Palestinian people do not come from just the West Bank & Gaza. Our people inhabited the entirety of the land - be they fellahin who lived off the land for millennia or our tribes and clans that forged their identity and diwans in the ancient cities & towns and their surrounding hinterland for generations.
The call for partition fundamentally misses the roots of the Palestinian cause. Our cry for independence and our bourgeoning nationalism was forged in the unity of the Palestinian people around a common struggle to preserve their freedom and right to dwell on the land of their forefathers.
Between the Mediterranean sea and the Jordan river empires came and went from the Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Caliphates, Crusader conquest and Ottomon rule – our people endured, and the history of this land was intertwined with our identity.
Our forefathers, built the villages destroyed in the Nakba & the Naksa, dwelt in and laid the stones of the walls and buildings of our oldest cities & towns.
At the heart of Zionism is an attempt to demographically reverse the land and divorce Palestinian people from their history, After 100 years of ethnic cleansing and settler-colonialism we find ourselves at the eve of the same Bantustan & apartheid politics of South Africa.
An attempt to marginalise and push the Palestinian people into Palestinian Bantustans and deny them the right to live in their ancestral homeland, that is giving legitimacy every time our so-called leadership engage with partition as a legitimate solution.
Putting aside the fundamental unfairness of the two-state solution, the fact that anyone maintains illusion that it is even a possibility, in 2021 is ridiculous.
Now with the forced disarmament of the Palestinian resistance in the West Bank, the assassination of our leaders, the brutal security co-ordination, the clampdown on free speech, and any form of resistance - the very idea that the Palestinian people have any bargaining chips to negotiate with Israel is laughable.
Today - 800k settlers later in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, our vapid rubber-stamp politics bar us from electing leaders who do not bend the knee to US-Israeli apartheid politics. Any Palestinian activist, charity or political party must pay homage to the farce of “negotiation” with no bargaining chips for a solution the people have never once provided a mandate for.
In the wake of further Arab government normalisation with Israel and our leadership’s continued willingness to bow to Israel’s every demand, and the censorship of Palestinian media, news and rhetoric that falls outside the accepted “two-state” paradigm, an air of deep hopelessness exists amongst Palestinian people that any change to the permeant “temporary solution” that is the oppressive status quo.
The idea that the conflict is any more complicated, than Israel’s state ideology of ethno-nationalism and Jewish supremacy between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean is furthered by the illusion the rest of the world lives under that “Palestine” & “Israel” are somehow two states at war that must negotiate for Peace.
The “two-state solution” is Israel’s attempt at legitimising the destruction of 1000 villages, and the ethnic cleasning of a million Palestinians from the land to create their ethno-national majority and to bury the history of racism and settler-colonialism as some kind of consensual population exchange.
The “two-state solution” allows Israel to deny the existence of an apartheid in historic Palestine. As our politicians willingness to engage with Oslo betrays the history of steadfastness and defiance that has defined the Palestinian struggle, resistance and our long legacy of Palestinian unity, and our people’s refusal to compromise on our civil and political rights.
There is a clear and obvious objective to Israel and modern Zionism’s fear of the de-oslofication of Palestinian politics and insistence on the two-state framework that political Zionists have leveraged since the first partition plans were drawn up.
It's goal is to hide from the Palestinian people the obvious roadmap to liberation presented by South-Africa’s anti-apartheid movement, which rallied the international community and the local populace on both sides of the apartheid fence around basic principles of human rights: one-person, one-vote, and a democratic state from the river to the sea that is non-sectarian and does not discriminate between it’s citizens based on race, creed or religion.
The two-state paradigm must end in order for Palestinians to rekindle the essential root of the Palestinian cause. This conflict is not about Jews and Arabs or Israeli security. It is about the right of all the people of this land to freedom & fundamental human rights, regardless of their ethnicity or religion.
I quote the words of the WCAR in Durban South Africa in 2001:
“We declare Israel as a racist, apartheid state in which Israel’s brand of apartheid as a crime against humanity has been characterized by separation and segregation, dispossession, restricted land access, denationalization, ‘bantustanization’ and inhumane acts.”
Our cause is an anti-colonial struggle against a vicious ideology of settler-colonialism, racism and apartheid and our liberation requires a coalition that unifies the Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, the refugees in the diaspora and the Palestinian citizens of Israel under a common banner, and invites as an ally all those who believe in the universal principles of freedom, equality and human dignity to join our movement.