PALESTINE: TWO DIFFERENT ONE-STATE SOLUTIONS; ONE SHARING AND EGALITARIAN, THE OTHER RACIST AND EXCLUSIONIST.

The two-state solution as an answer to the Israeli-Palestine conflict is, as most the world learnt long ago, never, ever going to happen – and nor would it ever work. Even more to the point however, is the fact that neither side really wants a partitioned two-state solution.

Next month a few of the stake-holders who claim to have an interest in a resolution to the Israeli Palestine conflict will meet in the US to discuss, yet again, the possibility of a two-state solution. The plan at this initial meeting is simply to plan further meetings but for the participants it buys a little more time and makes it look good in the eyes of the world at large who will assume that at least some effort is being made to solve the problem.

The reality, however, is that the situation is no different today than it was immediately after the al-Nakba in 1948; the Palestinians want their lands back and the Israeli Zionists want to keep all that they have so far taken from the Palestinians. Not content with that, the Israeli Zionists also want to take from the Palestinians all of what little they still have left in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Talk of a two-state solution is a waste of time. What the Palestinians want are their lands returned to them; a goal a two-state solution will not be able to accommodate. The Palestinians also want a right of return for the original refugees and their descendents who were ethnically cleansed from Palestine when the Israelis took over; this is a subject that the Israelis will not even discuss. The Israelis want to keep their settlements inside the West Bank; an aspiration that the Palestinians could not possibly tolerate in a two-state solution.

The Israeli Zionist extremists, which includes the Israeli Likud Party, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, do not even want a Palestinian state of any kind to exist, and, indeed, would secretly prefer, though, for obvious reasons, wouldn’t publicly say so, that all Palestinians in the Gaza and the West Bank be transferred to Jordan leaving those areas entirely free for Jewish-Israeli settlement, full colonisation and eventual incorporation into a Greater Israel State based on Jewish occupation and excluding the Palestinian Arabs. This is the Israeli Zionist ideal of the one-state solution. It excludes entirely the participation of the Palestinian people and is therefore totally racist.

The only possible ultimate solution is a one-state solution whereby both Israelis and Palestinians live together in a secularly governed democratic and integrated single nation.

This is the solution that Dr. Ghada Karmi, the Palestinian academic, is promoting in her visit to Australia which culminated in last Saturday evening’s Edward Said Memorial Lecture which Dr. Karmi delivered at the Adelaide University in South Australia. It is the solution that the peoples of the world should insist upon because it is the only solution that will provide a lasting peace to both the Palestinian and Israeli people and, ultimately, the much needed stability that the region so desperately needs.

A world that supports the one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestine conflict will benefit because the successful outcome of a world-endorsed one-state solution will have far more influence in promoting the cause of stability and peace through democracy throughout the rest of the region and will be far more successful than the kind of false ‘democracy’ that is now being forced down the throats of the Arab and Central Asian peoples by the guns and bombs of the US and their allies.