The War on Gaza: The Case for the Only Durable Solution: One Democratic State from the River to the Sea. Amir Nour
Part XII
[Links to Parts I to XI are provided at the bottom of this article.]
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” —(George Santayana)[1]
Bad Students of History
General Vo Nguyen Giap, the great military strategist[2] and political leader who led Vietnamese communist forces to victories in successive wars against Japan, France[3], South Vietnam and the United States, once famously said:
“the imperialists are bad students. Yes. We taught them the right lessons, didn’t we? But they learn the lessons badly, although they are lessons of historical significance: the debacle in Algeria, in Cuba – the stinging debacle in Vietnam. Well, these are events that herald and have contributed to the collapse of colonialism and also to the inevitable collapse of neocolonialism. However, these students, bad students, want to repeat grades”.[4]
Later on, in the same vein, Gideon Rose argued in a penetrating look at American wars over the last century[5] that time and again American Presidents and their advisers have focused more on beating up the enemy than on the need for careful postwar planning. Such a phenomenon, which challenges the Clausewitzian dictum that war is simply a continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means[6], led them to blindly stumble into turmoil during the final stages of almost each and every major conflict from World War I to Iraq and Afghanistan.
The latter experiences were the most prominent examples of this phenomenon, not an exception to the rule. As U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) commander Tommy Franks put it to the deputy Secretary of defense on the eve of the second Iraq war, “you pay attention to the day after, I’ll pay attention to the day of”[7]. In reality, though, history will recall that nothing of the sort has come about.
Likewise, after its year-long genocidal war on Gaza – which now threatens to become a full-scale regional conflict, or worse, after Netanyahu’s decision to assassinate Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah[8] and wreak havoc on Lebanon, a country Israel hopes to colonize as well, as part of its messianic or irredentist Zionist folly of an “Eretz Yisrael Hoshlema” (Greater Israel)[9] – Israel finds itself in the exact same above-mentioned predicament of its American closest ally, supplier of deadly arms, and unconditional diplomatic shielder. As Gideon Rose rightly pointed out, “lessons from previous wars can serve as cognitive blinders, narrowing the way officials think about the situations they face, and power can be a trap, underwriting hubris and folly”. In 2001, Benjamin Netanyahu said:
“We must beat them up, not once but repeatedly, beat them up so it hurts so badly, until it’s unbearable.”[10]
Precisely because the notion of “war-as-combat” is deeply ingrained in the thinking of both American and Israeli militaries and peoples at large, and the essential political aspects of the war are often neglected, if not lost in the fog of war, it is more than doubtful that current American and Israeli policymakers think clearly about what they are doing today and how to ward off a looming doom; and notwithstanding the fact that their two countries are the strongest powers in the world and in the Middle East region respectively, they will likely stumble miserably once again, and will therefore have nobody to blame but themselves for failing to understand that there’s no military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Only a political settlement – one characteristically off the beaten track, or once discarded as illusory or too radical – can achieve this desired goal.
Israel/Palestine: One State, or Two States?
So, if the two-state solution proposed by the Oslo Accords has failed and seems more remote than ever, if not definitely dead 30 years on, isn’t it about time to consider alternatives to the prevailing untenable status quo, or even worse, to endless war? All the more so since the illusion that the conflict can be ignored or “managed” has been shattered in a resounding manner in October 2023. The current bout of fighting is forcing the U.S., the EU and regional powers to reassess their old approaches and reappraise the wrong and costly assumption that they can safely ignore the conflict.
Nowadays, it appears that the old/new idea of a “one-state” between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River – a democratic state, with full and equal rights for the populations residing in Israel, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, as citizens – is the best workable option and, most importantly, the only durable solution to an intractable conflict that has lasted too long and cost too much blood and treasure.
After all, if we properly take stock of past experiences, can’t we justifiably ask what if self-determination for both Palestinians and Israelis is not necessarily based on territory but on citizen’s rights?
This idea of a single state is not new. Back in 1930 already, rabbi, scholar and political activist Judah Leon Magnes wrote an essay[11] in which, in contradistinction to the then Zionist leadership, he expressed his strong preference for the establishment of a bi-national, Jewish and Arab state through an agreement with Palestine’s Arab population[12]. And when the Peel Commission made its 1937 recommendations about partition and population transfer for Palestine, Magnes sounded the alarm by saying:
“With the permission of the Arabs we will be able to receive hundreds of thousands of persecuted Jews in Arab lands […] Without the permission of the Arabs even the four hundred thousand [Jews] that now are in Palestine will remain in danger, in spite of the temporary protection of British bayonets. With partition a new Balkan is made”[13].
And in an article in Foreign Affairs magazine in January 1942, he suggested a joint British-American initiative to prevent the division of mandatory Palestine. This move was followed, pursuant to the Biltmore Conference[14], by the foundation – with Henrietta Szold[15] – of a small bi-nationalist party called “Ihud” (Unity). In 1946, Magnes again opposed the partition plan before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in Jerusalem and submitted 11 objections to partition to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine[16]. Finally, by mid-1948, when the conflict between the Jews and Arabs of Palestine was in full swing, Magnes expressed the hope that if a Jewish state were declared, the United States would impose economic sanctions; and also supported a 1948 U.S. trusteeship proposal, in which the UN would freeze the partition decision and force both sides into a trusteeship with a temporary government ruling Palestine, until conditions suited another arrangement. During the 1948 War, he lobbied for an armistice, and proposed a plan for a federation between Israel and a Palestinian state which he called the “United States of Palestine”, under which the two states would be which he called the “United States of Palestine”, under which the two states would be independent, but operate joint foreign and defense policies, with Jerusalem as the shared capital. Magnes predicted that even if a Jewish state was established and defeated the Arabs, it would experience a never-ending series of wars with the Arabs[17].
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February 1956 Map of UN Partition Plan for Palestine, adopted 29 Nov 1947, with boundary of previous UNSCOP partition plan added in green. (From the Public Domain)
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The notion of a one state in all of historic Palestine was espoused by Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in its original charter[18] in 1964, which called for the establishment of a single, democratic, and secular state for Jews, Muslims and Christians. The PLO only abandoned the idea in the context of the diplomatic negotiations within the framework of the Oslo Accords; hence fundamentally swinging its ideological compass and reorienting its political struggle and efforts toward the realization of the two-state path to peace.
With the benefit of hindsight, one can say that the PLO’s historic choice was a huge sacrifice, incommensurate with the petty initial “rewards” of a peace process which eventually led nowhere but to an equally historic, and furthermore tragic, impasse.
As the peace process started to show signs of fraying at the edges in the late 1990s, an increasing number of analysts started to suggest acknowledging a “one-state reality”[19] – an ambiguous reference to the continued entanglement of Israelis and Palestinians on the ground – as the starting point for negotiating a workable solution.
Thus, the Palestinian-American academic Edward Said wrote:
“It is time to question whether the entire process begun in Oslo in 1993 is the right instrument for bringing peace between Palestinians and Israelis. It is my view that…real peace can come only with a binational Israeli-Palestinian state.”[20]
In 2003, as we referred to earlier[21], Tony Judt stated that:
“The time has come to think the unthinkable. The two-state solution – the core of the Oslo process and the present “road map” – is probably already doomed. With every passing year we are postponing an inevitable, harder choice that only the far right and the far left have so far acknowledged, each for its own reasons. The true alternative facing the Middle East in coming years will be between an ethnically cleansed Greater Israel and a single, integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians.”
In the same year, Ari Shavit wrote an insightful article[22] in which he quoted two popular Israeli figures. Meron Benvenisti was one of them. Deputy mayor of Jerusalem from 1971 to 1978, a columnist and author, Benvenisti said:
“We are living in a binational reality, and it is a permanent given. What we have to do is adapt our thinking and our concepts to this reality”. “The conclusion is that the seemingly rational solution of two states for two nations can’t work here. The model of a division into two nation-states is inapplicable. It doesn’t reflect the depth of the conflict and doesn’t sit with the scale of the entanglement that exists in large parts of the country. You can erect all the walls in the world here but you won’t be able to overcome the fact that there is only one aquifer here and the same air and that all the streams run into the same sea. You won’t be able to overcome the fact that this country will not tolerate a border in its midst.”
The other figure was Haim Hanegbi, a journalist for the Israeli daily Maariv. He argued that if Israel remains a colonialist state in its character, it will not survive. Maybe, he added, “in the end we have to create a new, binational Israel, just as a new, multiracial South Africa was created.”
Prof. Joel Kovel[23], who approaches the subject from an Israeli perspective, argued that “Israel is an incorrigible human rights offender because, by discriminating against Arabs, it is guilty of state-sponsored racism”. Considering that Zionism and democracy are essentially incompatible, Kovel concludes that a two-state solution is fundamentally hopeless as it concedes too much to the regressive forces of nationalism, wherein lie the roots of continued conflict, and believes therefore that the best hope for peace in Israel is to return to the idea of a one-state solution, where Jews and Palestinians can co-exist in a secular democracy.
Speaking presciently about the future of Palestine[24] back in 2010, John Mearsheimer said:
“The story I will tell is straightforward. Contrary to the wishes of the Obama administration and most Americans – to include many American Jews – Israel is not going to allow the Palestinians to have a viable state of their own in Gaza and the West Bank. Regrettably, the two-state solution is now a fantasy. Instead, those territories will be incorporated into a “Greater Israel,” which will be an apartheid state bearing a marked resemblance to white-ruled South Africa. Nevertheless, a Jewish apartheid state is not politically viable over the long term. In the end, it will become a democratic bi-national state, whose politics will be dominated by its Palestinian citizens. In other words, it will cease being a Jewish state, which will mean the end of the Zionist dream”. In sum, “there are great dangers ahead for the Palestinians, who will continue to suffer terribly at the hands of the Israelis for some years to come. But it does look like the Palestinians will eventually get their own state, mainly because Israel seems bent on self-destruction.”
Even the Israeli strategic analyst Yossi Alpher, who does not agree with the one-state option, noted that:
“By 2017, Israel and Palestine were slowly sliding down a slippery slope towards a single political entity.”[25]
Making or Breaking Hope for Peace in the City of Peace
It is against this bleak backdrop that, on 1 March 2018, a new initiative based on the old idea emerged when the “One-State Foundation” was launched.[26] The initiative holds:
“first, that the current situation in Palestine and Israel is untenable; second, that the negotiating process that emanated from the Madrid Peace Conference and Oslo Accords on the basis of a two-state solution has reached a dead end as the final status issues degraded to become effectively non-negotiable; third, that this obstructs the realization of the hopes and aspirations of the Palestinian and Israeli peoples; fourth, that the time has come to rethink the question in its entirety; and, fifth, that any new thinking has to reflect realities on the ground and, above all, the reality that more than fifty years after the Israeli occupation of the whole of Palestine, a form of unity over political, economic, and security matters already exists.”[27]
In recent years, and particularly since the resurgence of the polemical issue of annexation, beginning in the fall of 2019, a substantial debate over the One-State reality has raged between proponents of the two-state “international consensus” and those of the one-state “alternative”, both among and between Palestinians and Israelis, and on the global stage. In the West, the one-state alternative has been boosted over the years by quite knowledgeable academics and militants such as Edward Said, Tony Judt, John Mearsheimer, Ian Lustick, Virginia Tilley, Ilan Pappé, Avi Shlaim, Shlomo Sand, and Ali Abunimah, the Palestinian-American co-founder of Electronic Intifada.
A significant milestone in this regard was registered when four well-known professors published an article in Foreign Affairs magazine entitled “Israel’s One-State Reality.”[28] In this essay, the authors argue that the two-state solution is dead because there is already a one-state reality, no matter what anyone thinks. In other words, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, only one state, namely Israel, controls the entry and exit of people and goods, oversees security, and has the capacity to impose its decisions, laws, and policies on millions of people without their consent. A one-state reality, the academics go on to say, could, in principle, be based on democratic rule and equal citizenship, but such an arrangement is not on offer at the moment. Forced to choose between Israel’s Jewish identity and liberal democracy, Israel has chosen the former; it has locked in a system of Jewish supremacy, wherein non-Jews are structurally discriminated against or excluded in a tiered scheme: some non-Jews have most of, but not all, the rights that Jews have, while most non-Jews live under severe segregation, separation, and domination. They, therefore, see no real prospect of negotiating a Palestinian state, and are of the opinion that the United States should acknowledge this reality, denounce it, impose sanctions on Israel, while putting an end to its efforts against BDS movement and refraining from leading those aiming at normalization of relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
Reacting furiously to this essay, well-known pro-Zionist Elliot Abrams published an article[29], which he concluded by saying that by publishing this article, Foreign Affairs has “served only one useful purpose: to show us the state of academia. There, the view that one Jewish state is one too many is widely and indeed increasingly popular”, and that those who believe otherwise are “well-advised” to learn from this article that “the goal of many of today’s academic critics is not to reform the state of Israel. The goal is to eliminate it.”
Asked by his Aljazeera interviewer[30] to give his opinion about this debate, and on his own preferred solution, six months before the outburst of the ongoing war on Gaza, Noam Chomsky indicated that there was something wrong with that debate, because it’s omitting a third alternative, namely the one that is being systematically implemented by Israel, ever since 1969 or so: the creation of a ‘Greater Israel’, which will take over. If you want to talk about long-term outcomes, he added,
“you can’t just talk about one state and two states. You have to talk about what’s happening, ‘Greater Israel’. I understand the reasoning of the one-state advocates, but I think … it’s almost inconceivable that Israel will ever agree to destroy itself and become a Jewish minority population in a Palestinian-dominated state, which is what the demography indicates. And there’s no international support for it. Nothing.”
So, his own personal feeling is that the real options are ‘Greater Israel’, or move towards some kind of two-state arrangement. It’s often claimed, he concluded, that that’s now impossible because of the enormous settlement project. Maybe, maybe not. I think if the United States insists, decides to join the rest of the world in supporting some kind of two-state settlement, not just rhetorically, but in practice, Israel will be faced with a very serious decision.”
As for Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, he sees signs that the ideological hold of Zionism is weakening, and a freer, more democratic Palestine may be possible, telling DemocracyNow!:
“I think we are seeing processes, important processes, that are leading to the collapse of the Zionist project. Hopefully, the Palestinian national movement and anyone else involved in Israel and Palestine would be able to replace this apartheid state, this oppressive regime, with a democratic one for everyone who lives between the river and the sea and for all the Palestinians who were expelled from there since 1948 until today.” He added: “I am really hopeful that there will be a different kind of life for both Jews and Arabs between the river and the sea under a democratic, free Palestine.”[31]
Although polls differ greatly on how Palestinians view the one-state solution, it seems that a half century of crushing Israeli occupation is convincing more and more people in Palestine that the one-state reality is an unbearable fact of everyday life that is not likely to change in the foreseeable future, hence pushing them to support bi-nationalism.
Abdel Monem Said Aly has probably summed up correctly what Palestinians and Israelis alike think about the idea when he said that Palestinians who oppose the idea of a one-state solution argue that a state based on full and equal citizenship between Arabs and Jews could never really exist and that a single state for both would merely be an extension of the current one in which, after seven decades, Israeli Arabs remain second-class citizens. Indeed, the Palestinians have long resisted the Israeli concept of the single state, which in the current de facto version translates into occupation with apartheid on top of it. The Palestinians are also well aware that no Israeli government – let alone the current most far-right and racist one in the whole history of the “Jewish state” – would consider a binational alternative in which they were in the majority.
On the other hand, Israeli opponents, who are more numerous, hold that the Zionist project was and remains the establishment of a state with a Jewish majority – something that could not be sustained given current Palestinian population growth rates, which would reduce Jewish Israelis in the future to a minority status.
As a matter of fact, the feeling that another day of conflict will ultimately bring victory continues to prevail on both sides. Still, the many objections do not diminish the fact that the status quo and ongoing occupation create a volatile situation with all the conditions for uprisings, resistance, and at times full-scale war.
On account of the above, if the two-state alternative to the status quo is unreachable, then the one-state alternative could be laid out with solutions for the different objectors on both sides. This would involve a broad restructuring of the existing political system, whether beginning with the Israeli government’s conferral of citizenship on Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip or beginning with the creation of a new state altogether. Moreover, mechanisms such as subjecting legislation on vital or constitutional issues to a two-thirds majority vote, or to a minority veto, or some combinations thereof, have been floated to prevent a majoritarian state in which the demographic majority, whether Jewish or Arab, would govern unilaterally.
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Demonstration against Israeli annexation of the West Bank, Rabin Square, Tel Aviv-Yafo, June 6, 2020 (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)
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Some other proponents advocate a binational or consociational arrangement where a federation or confederation would jointly manage economic matters, security, and Jerusalem as a common capital, but maintain separate political structures for Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs on some matters of civil law.
While confederation reflects the existing realities of a multifaceted interdependence between the two sides, it also resolves the citizenship crux of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the Israelis would always have majority status in their own state and its security, and the Palestinians would have their state with a legitimate place in the Council of Jerusalem, which would be the capital of the confederation. Both the Israeli and Palestinian states would be in a position to interact with their Arab neighbors without animosity for Israel or dependency for the Palestinians. Both would have all symbols of the state from the flag to the seat in the UN, and above all their chosen identities along with the privileges of peace and space throughout historic Palestine.[32]
In the conclusion of her powerfully argued recent book[33], Palestinian-born Academic Ghada Karmi says that the tremendous obstacles facing the “one democratic state solution” may be daunting to some of those who support it in theory, but the fact that something is difficult to realize does not make it any less the right thing to do; nor does the attainment of this solution hinge solely on the wishes of Israel and its supporters. Other factors, she believes, “though now unforeseen or thought improbable”, could intervene and alter the situation dramatically. If and when they do, such events “will merely dictate the pace and timing of the one democratic state solution. But the concept itself must have been established long before, not as an immediately attainable goal perhaps, but as a vision, an aspiration and a belief in the ultimate humanity of Palestinians and Jews and all who wish them to prosper”.
This “humanity” was precisely the subject of a groundbreaking book[34] in which Richard Forer said:
“The real enemy is not someone or something outside us. The real enemy is the unexamined mind that unconsciously projects its suffering onto the other and then blames or scapegoats the other for its suffering (…) If defenders of Israel want to distinguish the source of conflict and find peace as much as they want to be right, they must inquire within. If they do, they will find that just as the real enemy is not someone or something outside us, the real conflict is not Israel versus the Palestinian people or Israel versus a hostile world. The real conflict is the fear of integrating the hard-to-believe but unmistakable reality of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with unquestioned loyalty to the Jewish state. One consideration recognizes Israel’s dark side. The other denies it exists.”
All in all, if History is any guide – and it is indeed – we must retain its most overarching principle, which is highlighted in the epigraph: “Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.” And if we do remember history – and we must indeed – then the following key considerations should always be duly taken into account in any reflection or negotiation about peace in the Middle East. They all stand in opposition to partition and division of the Holy Land, and point in the direction of the one democratic state from the river to the sea as the only genuinely durable solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Primo: There is no military solution to the conflict. Wars, uprisings and permanent political instability have been the distinctive features of the whole Middle East since WWI. And today, for the first time ever, we’re witnessing the coming into the picture of a new and mighty regional power in a conflict which has so far involved only Arabs and Jews. Interestingly enough, Iran, a Muslim but non-Arab country, is where the oldest Jewish diaspora has been dwelling since king Nebuchadnezzar took the inhabitants of Jerusalem into captivity in 587/6 BCE.
Secundo: In the aftermath of WWII, the world has seen an irresistible wave of decolonization that led to the emancipation of almost all former Western colonies. Israel was thus established against a historical trend of mass decolonization, thence constituting an equally historical anomaly.
Tertio: The only white settler colonies that have not been dismantled are those where the native populations have been effectively eliminated, or demographically overwhelmed by foreign settlers (chiefly in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). Israel, which is also a settler colony, clearly doesn’t belong to this category of settlements. It is more like South Africa, Algeria, Rhodesia, Kenya, Angola, Mozambique, or Namibia, whose native population outnumbered the white settler population, and ended up gaining their independence. As Ari Shavit observed in his article, “The Zionist dream was maimed from the outset. It didn’t take into account the presence of another national group. Therefore, from the moment the Zionist movement decided that it was not going to exterminate the Arabs, its dream became unattainable.”
Quarto: The Israel/Palestine problem has been created by Western powers – be it because of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of WWI, the secret Sykes-Picot Accords of 1916, the failed British mandate for Palestine, the refusal to accept Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany before, during, and after the Holocaust[35], or the Western-sponsored and ill-advised 1947 UN partition resolution. It’s then only fair and imperative that they should resolutely shoulder their moral and political responsibilities in the search and implementation of a fair solution, in the spirit of restorative justice. As for the rest of the “international community”, it has consistently supported such a solution, as evidenced by the deliberations and positive votes in the United Nations General Assembly and other international fora.
Quinto: Throughout the ages, Arabs – who, like the Jews, are Semites and descendants of Prophet Abraham, hence equally legitimate heirs to the “Holy Land”[36] – have almost always provided protection and refuge to the Jews in Arab/Muslim lands. They have lived peacefully with one another as epitomized by the “Pact of Umar” of 638 AD, the “Golden age of Jewish culture” in Muslim-ruled Al-Andalus, Saladin’s “Announcement” of 1187, the settlement of Jews in Arab/Muslim territories after the Reconquista in the 15th century, and their physical protection by Muslim rulers and individuals during WWII. But Zionism ruined everything, as recounted by Orit Bashkin[37], Michael Warchawski[38], and Avi Shlaim[39]. It is therefore in Israelis vital and vested interest to understand that if they are to be accepted, once again, in the Arab world, they have to belong to it by integrating in it at all levels. Michael Warchawski was spot on when he said that “I believe that Israel will only be able to be at peace with the Arab world, to create relations of coexistence and neighborliness when it accepts the geopolitical reality that it is situated at the heart of the Arab world…We have made the choice to settle in the Arab world and we must assume this choice and learn to be part of it, even if it takes time.”[40]
Sexto: Jerusalem is considered a “holy city” by all three monotheistic religions, and frightening eschatological narratives and announcements about it are also present in all three of them. Fortunately, there is a growing number of religious groups[41] and organizations promoting peace through integration in Israel/Palestine. One of them is “Christians for a Free Palestine”.[42]
Perhaps the best and most candid contribution to the debate on the One-State solution is the one made by Shlomo Sand.[43] The Austrian-born to Polish Jewish survivors of the Holocaust Israeli Emeritus Professor of History at Tel Aviv University published a book in French in January 2024, translated as “Two Peoples for One State? Rereading the History of Zionism”. Although the book was written before 7 October, the professor told Middle East Eye[44] he would not have “changed a theoretical line” if he had published it after the Hamas-led attack on Israel and the subsequent war on Gaza. “Perhaps I would have specified that 7 October is a confirmation of my fears”, he clarified. Sand had this to say about the One-State solution: “We can only move towards a political organization of the two peoples in a federation or confederation. Otherwise, there will always be more disasters like 7 October and its consequences in Gaza”, and further cautioning: “Before reaching this historic compromise between the two peoples, we will experience other disasters that will make this political solution indispensable.”
In a previous interview[45] Sand answered the question “You are no longer in favor of the two-state solution?” by saying: “Eight hundred and fifty thousand Israelis, including six ministers, live in the West Bank, and these people will not be torn from the place where they live. Two million Arabs are integrated into Israel. I do not see how we can be separated. I am in favor of a kind of federation such as that advocated by Menachem Begin. People on the left bristle at the name of Begin, who is less of an extremist than Netanyahu! In his speech to the Knesset in 1977, he declared that Israel, in order not to become Rhodesia (which practiced radical apartheid), had to integrate the Arabs of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, offering them the possibility of acquiring Israeli nationality, and even land in Israel. He did not aim for a binational state, but a democratic one, which would lead to an ‘original cultural mix’”. The proposal has sparked fear among the Israeli right and rejection from the left. He concluded the interview by declaring: “I am not ‘for’ a binational state, I say that we have no other solution. There is no future here for my grandchildren without the Palestinians. So I am for a federation, a confederation, whatever (…) We must recognize the tragedy of 1948, and partially correct the injustice suffered. It is a painful process but we have no choice.”
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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War
Amir Nour is an Algerian researcher in international relations, author of the books “L’Orient et l’Occident à l’heure d’un nouveau Sykes-Picot” (The Orient and the Occident in Time of a New Sykes-Picot) Editions Alem El Afkar, Algiers, 2014 and “L’Islam et l’ordre du monde” (Islam and the Order of the World), Editions Alem El Afkar, Algiers, 2021.
Notes
[1] Said by George Santayana (b. Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás) in his book “Reason in Common Sense”. He was a Spanish-American philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist born in Spain and raised and educated in the United States from the age of eight. At the age of 48, he left his academic position at Harvard University and permanently returned to Europe. “The Life of Reason”, subtitled “The Phases of Human Progress”, is a book published in five volumes from 1905 to 1906. (Source: Wikipedia). This oft-quoted aphorism has been incorrectly attributed to Edmund Burke and Winston Churchill, among others.
[2] Giap was also the author of “People’s War, People’s Army: the Viet Cong Insurrection Manual for Underdeveloped Countries”, a manual of guerrilla warfare based on his own experience, published in 1961. To download the book as reproduced by the U.S. Armed Services Technical Information Agency: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/AD0292744.pdf
[3] Especially the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu on 7 May 1945, which – together with the Algerian War of Liberation of 1954-1962 – brought the French colonialist regime to an end.
[4] Watch related video: https://x.com/nxt888/status/1691124304300363777
[5] Gideon Rose, “How Wars End: Why We Always Fight the Last Battle, A History of American Intervention from World War I to Afghanistan”, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2010.
[6] See Amir Nour, “Towards Palestine’s Independence Despite the Doom and Gloom”: https://www.globalresearch.ca/war-gaza-towards-palestine-independence-despite-doom-gloom/5848373
[7] Tommy Frank with Malcolm McConnell, “American Soldier”, HarperCollins, 2004.
[8] Ben Norton, “Hezbollah leader Nasralllah defeated ISIS, protected Lebanon’s Christians, fought Israeli colonialism”, Geopolitical Economy Report, 29 September 2024: https://youtu.be/sxYAn-Ci4jE?si=5EXXhLMfwB58egTa&sfnsn=wa
[9] The concept of “Greater Israel” has been a cornerstone in the ideological and strategic development of the Zionist movement. This idea envisions a Jewish state extending far beyond its modern borders, rooted in biblical descriptions and historical claims (“On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram and said ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the Wadi [or river] of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates” and “Every place on which the sole of your foot treads shall be yours. Your territory shall be from the wilderness to the Lebanon and from the River, the river Euphrates, to the western sea”. Source: Bible Gateway, Genesis 15:18 and Deuteronomy 11:24). It stretches from the “River of Egypt [the Nile] to the Perat River [the Euphrates]”, thus including parts of Egypt, modern-day Israel, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. Central to this vision are three influential figures: Theodor Herzl, Rabbi Fischmann, and Oded Yinon. Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism, laid the groundwork with his pragmatic and diplomatic efforts. Rabbi Fischmann expanded on Herzl’s vision, emphasizing the religious and historical significance of the Promised Land. Oded Yinon introduced a strategic dimension, proposing a plan to secure Israel’s dominance through the fragmentation of neighboring states. Together, their visions and strategies have profoundly shaped Israeli policy and regional dynamics. For further information on this subject, read:
- Douglas C. Youvan, “Herzl, Fischmann and Yinon: The Greater Israel”: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/382108240_Herzl_Fischmann_and_Yinon_The_Greater_Israel
- Amir Nour, “Quand Oded Yinon s’allie avec Sykes-Picot le résultat c’est le chaos” (When Oded Yinon Allies with Sykes-Picot, the Result Is Chaos): https://algerienetwork.com/blog/quand-oded-yinon-sallie-avec-sykes-picot-le-resultat-cest-le-chaos-when-oded-yinon-allies-with-sykes-picot-the-result-is-chaos/
- Oded Yinon, “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties”: https://archive.org/details/astrategyforisraelinthenineteeneighties
- Anshel Pfeffer, “‘Lebanon, Part of the Promised Land’: Israel’s Messianic Right Wing Targets New Territory for Settlements”, Haaretz, 18 June 2024.
- Mark Fish, “Is Lebanon part of Israel’s Promised territory?”, The Jerusalem Post, 25 September 2024. The concluding paragraph of this article reads: “If one looks at a map, they will be astounded by how far north this river [Euphrates] extends and how vast the Land of Israel truly is. While we may not be able to reclaim all of it in our time, Hashem will surely return it to us soon”. This article was quickly taken down, but is luckily archived: https://archive.ph/2024.09.29-103032/https://www.jpost.com/judaism/article-821680#selection-753.448-753.481
- Jerusalem Post staff, “Israeli Rabbi calls for Israel to conquer Lebanon and settle it”, The Jerusalem Post, 25 September 2024.
[10] In a video filmed in 2001, in which he makes a series of unguarded admissions about his first period as prime minister, from 1996 to 1999. It follows him during a visit to the West Bank settlement of Ofra to meet with the family of a man killed in a Palestinian shooting, as described in 2010 by the London-based, Middle East-focused outlet The National: “The film was shot, apparently without Mr. Netanyahu’s knowledge, nine years ago, when the government of Ariel Sharon had started reinvading the main cities of the West Bank to crush Palestinian resistance in the early stages of the second intifada. At the time Mr. Netanyahu had taken a short break from politics but was soon to join Mr. Sharon’s government as finance minister”. To watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvqCWvi-nFo&t=63s
[11] Judah Leon Magnes, “Like All the Nations?”, Weiss Press, 1930.
[12] Ben Reiff, “Mandate 100, ‘Neither a Jewish State nor an Arab State’: How Zionist Bi-Nationalism Tried and Failed to Change the Face of the Middle East”, Fathom Journal, April 2020.
[13] Quoted in The New York Times edition of 18 July 1937.
[14] The Biltmore Conference was called by the Extraordinary Zionist Conference, and was held from May 6 to May 11, 1942 in New York. Due to the war, no Zionist Congress could be held that year. The Extraordinary Zionist Conference was thus called to serve a similar purpose of forming Zionist policy. The joint statement issued at the end of the session was known as the Biltmore Program. It reiterated Zionist demands for unrestricted Jewish immigration to Palestine and that Palestine should serve as a Jewish Commonwealth. (Source: The Jewish Virtual Library)
[15] Henrietta Szold was an essayist, editor, social and communal worker, and Zionist organizer. In 1912, she created “Hadassah”, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, which later became the largest and most powerful Zionist group of the United States.
[16] Henrietta Szold was an essayist, editor, social and communal worker, and Zionist organizer. In 1912, she created “Hadassah”, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, which later became the largest and most powerful Zionist group of the United States.
[17] Ofri Ilany, “1948 Diaries: Saving the Jews from Themselves”, Haaretz, 5 May 2008.
[18] The first version of the “Palestinian National Charter” was adopted on 28 May 1964. It was then extensively amended, with the addition of seven articles in 1968. And in April 1996, many of its articles which were deemed inconsistent with the Oslo accords were wholly or partially nullified, as is stated in the following letter from the Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat to the Israeli Prime minister Shimon Peres: http://www.pna.gov.ps/Government/gov/The_Amendment_of_the_Palestinian_National_Charter.asp
[19] David Remnik, “The One-State Reality”, The New Yorker, 10 November 2014.
[20] Edward Said, “The One-State Solution”, The New York Times magazine, 10 January 1999.
[21] See Amir Nour, “The Twilight of the Settler Colonialist Project in Palestine”, Globalresearch.ca, 17 August 2024.
[22] Ari Shavit, “Cry, the beloved two-state solution”, Haaretz, 6 August 2003.
[23] Joel Kovel, “Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine”, Pluto Press, New York, 2007.
[24] John J. Mearsheimer, “The Future of Palestine: Righteous Jews vs. New Afrikaners”, at Palestine Center, Washington, D.C., 29 April 2010.
[25] Yossi Alpher, “Two States or One? Reappraising the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse”, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 18 September 2018.
[26] To read the Democratic State Manifesto: https://onestatecampaign.org/all/en-manifesto/
[27] Abdel Monem Said Aly, “The Case for the One-State Solution”, The Cairo Review of Global Affairs, Winter 2019.
[28] Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami, “Israel’s One-State Reality: It’s Time to Give Up on the Two-State Solution”, Foreign Affairs magazine, May/June 2023.
[29] Elliot Abrams, “As Israel Turns 75, ‘Foreign Affairs’ Publishes a Call to Eliminate It”, Council on Foreign Relations, 9 May 2023.
[30] Eliyahu Freedman, “Q&A: Noam Chomsky on Palestine, Israel and the state of the world”, Al Jazeera Media Network, 9 April 2023.
[31] Edward Carver, “Israeli Scholar Sees Hope for Democratic Palestine ‘To Replace This Apartheid State’”, Common Dreams, 21 May 2024.
[32] Abdel Monem Said Aly, “The Case for the One-State Solution”, op. cit.
[33] Ghada Karmi, “One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel”, Pluto Press, London and Las Vegas, 2023.
[34] Richard Forer, “Wake Up and Reclaim Your Humanity: Essays on the Tragedy of Israel-Palestine”, MindStir Media, 2020. Boulder County, CO – The NYC Big Book Award recognized Forer as the winner in the Cultural and Social Issues category. His book tells the true story of a lifelong supporter of Israel who underwent a remarkable spiritual awakening in which he realized he was as much Muslim or Christian as Jew, and as much Palestinian as Israeli or American. Recognizing that endless conflict only leads to alienation from our true selves, Forer encourages readers to look at the documented history of the Israel-Palestine tragedy and get in touch with how they view and interpret that history. He also offers readers a path that leads to freedom from false beliefs, enemy images, and the illusion of identity to equal rights for all people and a just peace between Palestinians and Israelis.
[35] Read, among others, David S. Wyman, “The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945”, Pantheon Books, New York, 1984; and Erin Blakemore, “A Ship of Jewish Refugees Was Refused US Landing in 1939. This Was Their Fate”, History.com, 4 June 2019. For the period during and after the Holocaust, read:
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs’ article “The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict Zionism and the Holocaust”, posted on 15 March 2015, and
About the “Évian Conference”, which was convened 6–15 July 1938 at Évian-les-Bains, France, to address the problem of German and Austrian Jewish refugees wishing to flee persecution by Nazi Germany. It was the initiative of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and agreed upon by Western European countries. The Roosevelt Plan suggested to take in 100% of Jewish Holocaust survivors. However, the World Zionist Organization refused to participate in the Conference, and other Zionist organizations, including in the US, as well as David Ben-Gurion himself, vehemently opposed it, fearing that resettlement of Jews in other states would reduce the number available for Palestine.
[36] Read in this regard, Naomi Wolf, “On the meaning of ‘God has given us the land’”, Facebook, 25 July 2014.
[37] Orit Bashkin, “New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq”, Stanford University Press, 2012. In this elegantly written chronicle of the last years of the Jewish presence in Iraq, viewed mostly through the writings of Jewish intellectuals in Iraq at the time and later in Israel, and through interviews with them, Bashkin says that the relatively numerous Iraqi Jewish community was, for the most part, well integrated into Iraqi society, and many of its members consciously identified with Arabic culture, language, and literature as well as with aspects of Arab nationalism and anti-imperialism.
[38] Michael Warchawski, “Ils ont oublié ce que c’est qu’être Juif…” (They have forgotten what it is to be Jewish…), Le Peuple Breton, 21 December 2017. In this article Warchawski argues that “The Crusades, the Inquisition, the Dreyfus Affair and the Nazi Judeocide were not the work of Muslim culture, and in Arab countries the Jewish minority experienced nothing similar…The genocide of the Jews of Europe is 100% ‘made in Europe’, the product of nearly two millennia of Christian civilization. The so-called ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’ is a racist mystification, and as Jeannette Mandouze, my extraordinary classics teacher and courageous anti-Nazi resistance fighter, used to say, a hyphen often excludes a third party: Judeo-Christian excludes Muslims from the so-called ‘civilization’. Now, the link between Judeo and Christian, what has it been made of for nearly two thousand years? Of blood. If we want to talk about a civilization in which the Jews were an essential and legitimate component, let’s talk about the four centuries of Andalusia, the summit of medieval Western civilization, or the Iraqi civilization until Zionism came to rot Jewish-Muslim relations in this country… This has nothing to do with Jewish existence in Europe, where moments of calm and relative harmony are the exception and not the rule, and this continued until the twentieth century”.
[39] Avi shlaim, “Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew”, Oneworld Publications, 2023. In this book, Avi Shlaim tells the story of his family’s idyllic existence in 1940s Iraq, and also claims to possess “undeniable proof of Zionist involvement in terrorist attacks” targeting Jewish sites in Baghdad. He argues that these attacks were orchestrated by the Zionist underground within the country, with the aim of pressuring the hesitant Jewish community to participate in the “Aliyah” (Jewish emigration) to the newly established state of Israel.
[40] Dimitri Nicolaidis, Anne Le Strat, and Hugues Jallon, « Dépasser le sionisme ? Débat avec Ilan Greilsammer et Michel Warschawski” (Going Beyond Zionism? Debate with Ilan Greilsammer and Michel Warschawski), Mouvements 2004/3-4, 2004. To read the document: file:///C:/Users/USER/Downloads/depasser-le-sionisme.pdf
[41] See Roger Copple, “Christians, Muslims, and Jews for a Secular One-State Solution in Palestine-Israel”, The International Movement for a Just World (JUST), 28 May 2024.
[42] They present themselves as “Christians mobilizing against the weaponization of our theology and our tax dollars by Christian Zionists to perpetrate the genocide of the Palestinian people”. Christians, they say, “have a responsibility to use our voices as powerfully as possible for the cause of peace and justice”.
[43] Shlomo Sand is also the author of the best-seller book in English “The Invention of the Jewish People” (Verso, 2009), originally published in Hebrew (Resling, 2008) as “Matai ve’eich humtsa ha‘am hayehudi?” (When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?). This book has generated a heated controversy, not least because, according to Sand’s critics, it presents “dubious theories” regarding Jewish identity as historical facts. One such provocative theory espoused by Sand is the hypothesis that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Khazars, who purportedly converted to Judaism in the early Middle Ages. Khazars are a multi-ethnic conglomerate of mostly Turkic peoples who formed a semi-nomadic khanate in and around the northern and central Caucasus and the Pontic–Caspian steppe. The hypothesis also postulated that after the collapse of their empire, the Khazars fled to Eastern Europe and made up a large part of the Jews there. (Source: Wikipedia)
[44] Hassina Mechaï, “Israeli academic Shlomo Sand: ‘Jews and Palestinians will have to live together’”, Middle East Eye, 22 August 2024.
[45] Vincent Remy, “Shlomo Sand, historien israélien: “Je ne suis pas ‘pour’ un état binational mais on n’a pas d’autre solution” (“Shlomo Sand, Israeli historian: “I am not ‘for’ a binational state but we have no other solution”), Télérama, 5 January 2024.
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