Monday, December 25, 2017

Is the Two-States Solution 'Dead'?

The question being asked by Toufic Haddad in an article is Is the Two-States Solution 'Dead'? (h/t=MD)

And we will ignore the other question: was the Two-State Solution ever alive, as far as the Arabs were concerned?

Haddad phrases the problem so:

the logic embedded in the latest two-state obituary writing is dangerous, uninformed, and carries within it the seeds of future conflict, not binationalism or peace.

Why would people think it dead?

One aspect he notes is:

The number of settlers and the breadth of the settlement project since 1967 supposedly make it impossible for decolonization to occur. Somehow a magical threshold of irreversibility has been crossed,

 But he considers that


this position is baseless practically, morally, historically, and politically.

Why?  Because

the decolonization of French Algeria entailed the removal of 800,000 pied-noirs in the early 1960s. With roughly half a million Jewish settlers in the OPT, we are still far from such numbers. 

They went back to France, across the sea, to a different continent. We Jews residing in Judea and Samaria (and previously, Gaza) are in the regions of our historical national homeland.  The Arabs are in a territory that was the result of an imperialist conquest and which, until the 1920's and even later, they called Souther Syria and demanded that "Palestine" de dissolved.


Haddad continues his corruption of facts:

Was it practical to move half a million Jews to the OPT to begin with? The majority was implanted there on stolen land, using brute force...Israel is based on impracticability, but this has not stopped it from attempting to create a Jewish state, based on biblical notions of return and chosenness—notions that should be anathema to a secular Jew, let alone a Palestinian. 

We were not 'moved' but simply moved, even against government policies. No land was stolen (and if there were a few cases of improperly registered property, the courts set aright the situation). If any land is stolen it is the properties Jews owned prior to 1948 from which Jews were ethnically cleansed.

He has a demand:


Progressives therefore have an obligation to demand the full decolonization of the territory occupied since 1967. 

I, for one, would suggest a decolonization of Arab conquests and occupations.  If Jews need be removed from Judea and Samaria, forming an apartheid regime in a "Palestine", can then Arabs living in Israel be removed to "Palestine"?

I am shocked, shocked I tell you learn from Haddad that

Israel acts as a facilitator of the Zionist project, whose full objectives have not been met: securing, consolidating, and legitimizing a Jewish state throughout the whole of historic Palestine. 

Of course, I am of the Zionist Revisionist camp but the Zionist Organization accepted the 1922 removal of Transjordan from the Mandate, the 1937 Partition, the 1947 Partition, an Autonomy Plan, etc.  The Arabs are those whose full objectives is the total removal of any Jewish presence anywhere is a fictional "historic Palestine".

He ends with

Only a one-state reality—the product of social and political forces calling for equality and historical reconciliation—deserves to be considered. Unfortunately we are currently witnessing the lowest levels of such activity in the history of the conflict. 

There is a one-state reality: Israel.

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