Intro by Iznogood: The Daily Beast piece below brings up serious challenges and considerations that both the Palestinians and the Israelis have to accommodate if peace is to ever settle in Palestine. But there is one element that needs to be said bluntly:
One sentence in the piece, "All Israelis have known since their miracle of statehood is the curse of conflict" has my blood gurgling. What did they expect when they steal another people's land and kick them out by sheer violence? Should the indigenous Palestinians have welcomed racist criminal invaders with flowers?
What miracle? The birth of Israel was - and its existence still is - one gigantic episode of Great Replacement, of a barbaric ethnic cleansing of one people, the native indigenous Palestinians, by a foreign people, the European Jews who migrated to Palestine illegally both before and after WWII and the Holocaust. This illegal migration was carried out under the protection of the colluding crooked English colonials and aimed at violently creating a fake new colony where a nation had stood for millennia.
The fact that some Jews arrived to Palestine later after WWII as refugees from German barbarity does not negate the original colonialist idea (pre-WWI) for creating Israel to serve as a forward western base in the Near East: To displace one people and create an otherwise foreign state in the heart of Palestine.
Now I don't buy - and reasonable rational people shouldn't either - the religious argument of a "return" by the world's Jews to Palestine. The story of the Hebrew people as related in the torah-bible was written as a self-serving fictional saga and should not be taken seriously. Furthermore, even if the biblical account is taken as historically true, the Hebrews themselves did perpetrate a huge ethnic cleansing campaign when they took the land from its Canaanite owners and slaughtered every man, woman, child and animal. Therefore, as far as back as one wishes to go in trying to find a justification for Hebrew-Jewish property rights in Palestine, one must admit that the Promised Land was promised by the Hebrews to themselves; no one, except ultra-religious barbarians, believes that a god named Yahweh talked to Moses and "gave" him and his people the land of Canaan-Palestine.
I have made these points repeatedly in my postings:
- The "returning" Jews are not the genetic descendants of the original Hebrews. They are for the most part Caucasian-Europeans who relatively recently (Mid-1500s or thereabouts) converted to Judaism. As such they cannot invoke a biblical justification to real estate rights in Palestine. If any Jew around the world has a right to Palestine, then any Christian should have the right to invade and conquer Rome, including the Vatican, and also Jerusalem. If any Jew around the world has a right to Palestine, then any Muslim should have property rights to Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. The absurdity of the Zionist "return" argument is unequaled in human history.
- It has been 2,000 years since we last heard of Jews in Palestine. Contrary to the standard assumption, the Hebrews were not expelled from Palestine after the Jewish rebellion and the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD: They stayed, then converted to Christianity around 350 AD, and then again to Islam around 638 AD. In other words, today's Palestinians are the direct descendants of the original Jews of Iron Age Palestine.
There ought to be statutes of limitation on such large population and land claims. Otherwise, our world would sink into more violence than we currently see. Imagine if every empire - Romans, Persians, Greeks, Turks, Italians, Arabs, Indians, native Amerindians, Aborigines, Crusaders, colonial european empires etc. - were to reevaluate whose land was taken by violence and who is responsible and who should today own the land. If every people on earth starts demanding long-ago rights to property belonging today to someone else, where would such claims end?
Israel's problem is insoluble insofar as the creation of Israel is reasonably unjustifiable by the fact that it was created at the cost of utter harm and prejudice to an indigenous people already existing on the land. Just like Lebanon was assigned to the French mandate, Palestine was assigned to the British mandate: The word "mandate" is important because it meant that the League of Nations deemed the inhabitants of Lebanon and Palestine as sufficiently advanced not to warrant a long term colonial occupation: All that the Palestinians and the Lebanese needed in the aftermath of a devastating World War I and a long 400-year Turkish occupation was to be guided into establishing state institutions and becoming independent fairly quickly. This worked in Lebanon: The French helped the Lebanese draft a constitution, create a parliament and define the modalities of governance of the country. Two decades later, in 1943, the French withdrew from Lebanon which became independent.
The same process should have taken place in Palestine. The British should have assisted the Palestinians in creating their new state institutions to replace the Turkish ones, leading eventually to an independent Palestine. Just like Lebanon. But what wrecked the process was the sudden influx of European Zionist settlers who were bent on establishing a Jewish colony in Palestine. By all means necessary - bribes, threats, financial enticements, terror and warfare - the Zionists slowly expelled the Palestinians from their lands, villages and towns, a process that became a civil war between the poorly prepared Palestinian population and the super wealthy and armed European settlers, a war that culminated in the 1948 catastrophe when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were chased out of Palestine into refugee camps by way of plunder, massacres, rapes and other refined Jewish European methods of "civilizing" the natives.
Given this background, Israel will always suffer from the brand of illegitimacy. Israeli statehood is not a miracle: It is a gigantic act of violence perpetrated by an aggressive Germanic and eastern European cabal with money and weapons against another innocent and unsophisticated people with no money and no weapons. Israel's creation was perhaps one of the easiest geopolitical crimes to commit. But it is only now that the world has taken conscience of the Palestinian tragedy. Forget the fake heroism of the Jewish terrorist organizations (Haganah, Stern, Lehi, etc.) who plundered Palestine to create their foreign colony. There is nothing heroic in taking advantage of an unprepared people (Palestinian) as it emerged from one occupation (Turkish) ready to organize its state under the protection of what should have been a friendly occupation (the English), but which turned out to be a treacherous perfidious behind-the-back sale to a bunch of wealthy colonial German Jewish land-grabbers.
As long as Israel rejects this factual account of its birth, no one, let alone the Palestinians, will accept its existence as a fait accompli. The only path forward, short of one people annihilating the other, is for recognition, forgiveness, repentance, and atonement. Israel must officially apologize to the Palestinian people, just like Germans apologized to the Jews, and compensate the dispossessed Palestinians for the loss of their homes, villages, towns and cities, and the disintegration of their normal existence. Then, and only then, can the two parties perhaps reach a modus vivendi of coexistence, either as two neighboring separate states or one binational country (like Mandela's South Africa).
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Opinion
U.S. and Western Recognition of a Palestinian State Would Ultimately Make Israel Safer
Daniel Bral
Fri, March 8, 2024
Jaded by failed peace talks and content with a relatively static status quo, Israel had been in no rush to finish eating the cake it was also having. That is, until Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack savagely transcended (and Israeli bombardment cemented) the “Palestinian cause” from a patronizing talking point to a global crisis and unresolved injustice.
Perhaps the single universal point of agreement about what must come is that there can be no return to what was. Gazans, of course, quite literally can’t go back to what was—as the enclave lies largely in ruins. And beyond that starting point, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been largely relegated to an intransigent spectator as international consensus crystallizes around the idea and imperative of recognizing the State of Palestine.
Unilateral recognition of the State of Palestine—a radical action in a pre-Oct. 7 world—is a necessary and just measure to preserve the possibility of a two-state solution precisely at a time when the bleakest chapter in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has seemingly delivered a death knell to the prospect of peace between the two peoples.
Recognition is an act of restorative justice. It rectifies a generational wrong—not the establishment of the State of Israel itself, but the failures of the international community, Israel, Arab leaders, and, yes, Palestinians themselves, to establish a concomitant Palestinian state.
But dwelling on past failures, the appropriate apportionment of blame, and even the specificities of recognition risk obscuring an inescapable truth: Palestinians are a people in need of independence.
The apocalyptic scenes from Gaza couldn’t paint a more vivid testament. Tens of thousands dead, starving, orphaned, maimed, homeless, and hopeless. And then there are the daily indignities of the West Bank—the unrestrained settler violence, settlements, unjust evictions, home demolitions, etc. Combined, Gaza and the West Bank tell a stark story about how unsustainable and unjust statelessness has become and will continue to be.
That’s not to infantilize Palestinians or absolve Hamas, as their past rejectionism and terrorism have undoubtedly contributed to today’s realities. It is to suggest that recognition could unlock the conditions for a saner paradigm because it would offer Palestinians an alternative they’ve largely lacked: hope.
Lagging behind nearly 150 other countries, the West’s recognition would symbolize their sincerity toward redressing the Palestinians’ plight by transcending the mere lip service of a “two-state solution.”
Righteous in its own right, recognition and eventual independence would provide a measure of liberation—a second independence—for Israelis, too. Not liberation from Palestinians, but liberation from the psychological shackles of past traumas, present crises, and future bloodshed.
Israel’s very name, existence, and reputation would no longer be defined by nor tethered to its treatment of the Palestinians. Anti-Israel attitudes and outright antisemitism wouldn’t be cured, of course, but Palestinian sovereignty could rehabilitate Israel’s international standing that—thanks to Bibi and extremist members of his ruling coalition like Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich—is steadily progressing toward outcast status.
Recognition would trigger broader regional acceptance, and the safety, economic, and cultural benefits that will follow.
For all the concern about the threat an independent Palestine would pose to Israel, the cruel irony is that Palestinian statehood represents a lifeline that would actually save Israel from its greatest existential threat: itself.
Kicking the can down the road can support Israeli hubris for only so long until reality beckons with an inconvenient truth: it is impossible for the State of Israel to remain both Jewish and democratic without the establishment of the State of Palestine.
Perhaps most importantly for Israelis, recognition and eventual independence would allow Israel to credibly honor its founding promise and raison d’être: being a safe haven for the Jewish people. The attacks of Oct. 7 didn’t bring to light the irrationality or inherent dangers of Palestinian statehood, they proved that the strategy of containment was nothing more than a house of cards.
All Israelis have known since their miracle of statehood is the curse of conflict. Not by choice, of course. Parents—Israeli and Palestinian—could finally raise the first generation of children who truly know peace. Bouts of violence or lone wolf attacks wouldn’t cease, as is the case elsewhere, but the foreseeable tragedies of endless conflict would be rendered a relic.
Recognition is, therefore, the most “pro-Israel” thing President Joe Biden and Western leaders can do.
The understandable anxieties of traumatized Israelis notwithstanding, Netanyahu’s protestations should be taken with Dead Sea-size grains of salt.
The same man who shamelessly brags about preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state cannot, out of the other side of his mouth, convincingly claim that unilateral actions like recognition would taint the sanctity of the very direct negotiations he’s made a mockery of for his entire political career. It is precisely Netanyahu’s unwillingness to engage in good faith negotiations that leaves the Biden administration and the West with no choice but unilateral recognition to catalyze the unavoidable peace process.
Bibi’s feigned outrage is particularly rich, considering one need only look at the West Bank to appreciate his contempt for unilateralism. Legitimizing such naked bad faith would thus grant veto power over vital United States foreign policy to an admitted saboteur.
Equally disingenuous are claims that recognition would be tantamount to “rewarding” terrorism. Such a talking point overlooks the definitional premise: Hamas doesn’t want a two-state solution. “Giving” someone something they don’t want isn’t a reward, it’s a punishment.
Further baked into that faulty premise is the conflation of Hamas with all Palestinians, the belief that the Palestinians’ primary motivation is not sovereignty but the genocide of Jews, and the illusion that the occupation is a sustainable phenomenon whose bloody effects stop at Israel’s borders.
The perversity of rock bottom is that it has the power to resurrect hope in what has been a hopeless situation. Recognizing the State of Palestine—an overdue moral, ethical, safety, and strategic imperative for Palestinians and Israelis—is the starting point to a path of peace that cannot be bypassed. It may be our final chance.
