Some Palestinian intellectuals have criticized a British Green Party’s call for one democratic Palestinian state in all of Palestine, arguing that it denies Palestinians agency to decide what their post-colonial future will look like, even though the motion has long been a core vision at the heart of the struggle for Palestinian liberation, is supported by intellectuals and activists within the Palestinian community, was written by a woman with Palestinian roots, exposes the colonial nature of the two-state “solution”, and whose adoption in the imperial core could weaken the insuperable obstacles that currently stand in the way of Palestinian self-emancipation.
27 October 2026
By Stephen Gowans
The Green Party of England and Wales recently called for one democratic Palestinian state in all of Palestine (ODS). My support for this position provoked a backlash from two quarters. 1) Jewish Zionists who object to the fact that ODS would mean that they would have to live with Palestinians as equals. 2) Some Palestinian intellectuals, working within the paradigm of subaltern studies, who said that it is up to Palestinians to decide what post-colonial political arrangement they want, not a British political party. They added that non-Palestinians should limit their solidarity to support for decolonization, full stop. Pronouncements on what a Palestinian state ought to look like after decolonization should be left, they said, to Palestinians alone to decide.
I’m not going to address the first objection, other than to condemn it as the expression of a family of ethno-nationalist political projects that include Nazism, South African apartheid, and the KKK. MAGA, Germany’s AfD, France’s National Rally, and other anti-immigrant nationalist movements are the contemporary expression of this reactionary ideology. Israel has established ties with many of these ethno-supremacist movements, even though some of them have histories of anti-Semitism. A shared commitment to ethnic homogeneity and antipathy to Islam and Arabs bind Israel to white nationalism.
I will address the second objection in greater detail, because I believe its claim that the Green Party is denying Palestinians agency is wrong and because it ignores important political realities.
The obstacles to the decolonization of Palestine are, at the present moment, insuperable, and likely will remain so for some time. The obstacles are Israel, its Zionist project, and the massive support the Jewish state receives from the United States and its wealthy allies. Also relevant is the almost total absence of any meaningful support for decolonization from the world community of states. Most states and political parties around the world support the two-state solution. Two national states, existing side-by-side, in Palestine, is not a project of decolonization. It is a project of legitimizing the Jewish colonization of the greater part of Palestine and the permanent dispossession of the land, homes, and property of the majority of Palestinians.
This means Palestinians cannot decolonize Palestine without the removal, or at least, the significant reduction, of these obstacles. The key obstacle, indeed, the linchpin, is US imperialism. Without staying the support of the United States and its allies for the Zionist project in West Asia, attempting to decolonize Palestine will forever run into Jabotinsky’s infamous iron wall. There are too few Palestinians, and they are too weakly armed, to counter US imperialism in West Asia without the aid of anti-imperialist allies in the imperial core. There may be a rough parity between Palestinians and Jews between the river and the sea, but every fight against Israel is a fight against the world’s most powerful imperialist state and its formidable coalition of allies. It’s not a struggle Palestinians, unaided, have even the remotest chance of winning.
Palestinians have no material support from any country that could make a difference. Iran helps, but there’s only so much it can do. Its resources are limited, and are miniscule against the assets (mainly US) Israel can mobilize. Moreover, the country’s own struggles for survival limit its support. China, a supporter of the two-state solution, is neither interested in decolonization nor willing to stick its neck out for the world’s 15 million Palestinians. As for Russia, it has its own problems to deal with, without going to bat for the Palestinians, which it wouldn’t do anyway, since it values its friendly relations with the Israelis, who have far more to offer Russia than the Palestinians do.
In short, US foreign policy (which shapes that of its allies) is the main obstacle to Palestinian decolonization. Without US support for Israel, the ability of the colonizer to maintain its colony is seriously compromised. And it’s only by seriously comprising Israel’s ability to defend its Zionist project, that the Palestinians can emancipate themselves. Hence, the key question in any discussion of how to bring about the liberation of Palestine, is: How can US foreign policy be changed to allow Palestinians to carry out the decolonization of their country?
Of course, withdrawal of US support for the colonial project in Palestine in no way guarantees that another power won’t step in. So, it is important that, whatever is done to end support for the Zionist colonization of Palestine, that it be done internationally, and not simply in the United States alone. Still, the United States is the key. It’s difficult to conceive of decolonization becoming possible with Washington continuing to support Israel, even if every other state, per impossibile, doesn’t.
I should say that it’s probably the case that most people in the world are, at the moment, against Israel. At the same time, it’s probably fair to say that this is so, not because Israel is a colonizing country, but because it is carrying out a genocide that’s easy to see. Indeed, it’s probably true that most people don’t think of Israel as a country of colonizers. At best, if they think about Israel in colonial terms at all, it’s as a colonizer of the West Bank. I suspect few people realize that the “occupied territories” include not only the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, but what we call Israel, as well. All of Palestine is occupied.
Zionists have been engaged in an attempt to efface the Palestinians as a people for the past century. They have done so for the simple reason that the Palestinians are the legitimate owners of the land and it was stolen from them. So long as Palestinians exist as a people, they will try to recover their country, their land, their homes, and their property. But while the process of eliminating a people as a people is genocide, popular awareness of 1) the process and 2) the reality that the process constitutes genocide as scholars and international law define it, is very low. Since genocide is popularly understood as the mass killing of a group, and Israel has engaged in the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023, Israel is widely seen as, if not a perpetrator of genocide, then a perpetrator of mass violence. It is for this reason that the world has turned overwhelmingly against the state.
Shock at Israeli-perpetrated violence against Palestinians has set the stage for popular discussion of a political arrangement that would ameliorate the condition of the Palestinian people. The dominant proposal, backed by almost every state and major political party around the world, is the so called two-state “solution”. Owing to its almost universal backing, most people tend to think that two national states, existing side by side, is the best solution to what is termed the “Israel-Palestine conflict.”
I think it can be said without prejudice that the two-state solution is poorly understood by ordinary people outside of West Asia and North Africa. Most people outside these regions equate it with support for the Palestinian cause, when, in fact, it is really support for the Zionist cause. To see this consider the baseline two-state proposal. It accepts the Jewish colonization of 78 percent of Palestine (the territory Zionist Jews conquered up to the point the final armistice was signed in the 1948-1949 Israel-Arab War.) Palestinians would be granted the remaining 22 percent (the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.) And while the proposal allows for the return of Palestinians from exile, most would be returning to a Jewish state, in which they would become second-class citizens. Result: A Jewish colonial state covering four-fifths of Palestine is legitimized, along with apartheid rule over Palestinians who choose to live within the colonized part of what was once their homeland.
Clearly, then, the two-state solution does nothing to lift the obstacles Palestinians face in decolonizing their country. Moreover, while the US government, and almost every other state, pays lip service to the two-state solution, none are willing to do anything meaningful to bring it about. But even if they did, the end result wouldn’t be decolonization.
In order to decolonize Palestine, not only must Palestinians act to liberate themselves, but their allies outside of Palestine must also act to create the conditions that favor Palestinian success. In other words, non-Palestinians must pressure their governments to 1) renounce the status quo of one Jewish supremacist colonial state in all of Palestine; 2) reject the two-state solution as an alternative; and 3) allow the Palestinians to bring about the decolonization of their country.
There are, it seems to me, two possible decolonial projects which allies must pressure their governments to accept. The first can be called decolonization, without specifying the nature of the post-colonial state. This is an approach expressed in the slogan “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.” Norman Finklestein criticized the slogan for being vague about its implications for Jewish settlers, to which Briahna Joy Gray scolded, “It’s not about the Jews, Norman!” A second approach is to say that what is needed is one democratic Palestinian state in all of Palestine, with equal rights for all, regardless of ethnic or religious identity. This is a proposal for a certain type of decolonization, one in which the character of the post-colonial state is specified in advance.
Some prefer the first approach because it does not tell Palestinians what a decolonized Palestine should look like. Maybe Palestinians would prefer an ethno-nationalist Palestinian state in which Jews are not welcome, or an Islamic state. Insisting that a decolonized Palestinian state must include Jewish settlers denies the Palestinians agency.
The argument against decolonization as an open-ended approach is that it’s far less likely to mobilize the support of non-Palestinians, especially in the critical United States, compared to an approach which appeals to liberal democratic values, as ODS does. Citizens of liberal democratic countries are more likely to respond favorably to the idea of a democratic state, in which all peoples are equal, than they are to an unspecified decolonization that may include expelling the Jews and turning Palestine into the Arab or Islamic version of the Jewish ethno-state.
The objection here is that it’s not up to non-Palestinians to say how Palestinians should construct a post-colonial Palestinian state, and that’s true, but it is unlikely that non-Palestinians will be moved to support anything but a liberal democratic postcolonial Palestinian state, and the support of non-Palestinians is a sine-qua-non of achieving conditions that make Palestinian success possible.
One is, thus, thrown onto the horns of a dilemma. If you call for a post-colonial Palestine as a liberal democracy you deny Palestinians agency. If you insist on Palestinians having the freedom to choose whatever kind of state they want—including an ethno-nationalist, Islamic, or anti-Jewish state—you sabotage any chance of galvanizing Americans and citizens of the other liberal democracies that prop up Zionism to pressure their governments to withdraw their support for a settler colonial Jewish state in Palestine.
As to the agency question, those who claim the Green Party is talking over Palestinians are tilting at windmills. Palestinians are free to accept or reject any idea their allies present, and do. It’s very likely that Palestinians don’t care overly much about what other people think, except insofar as what they think helps them advance their cause.
More importantly, the idea of one democratic Palestinian state in all of Palestine was not invented by the Green Party of England and Wales. On the contrary, ODS is “the historical Palestinian vision for liberation” articulated by such Palestinian liberation leaders as George Habash, Osama Hamdan, Ahmad Saadat, Nayef Hawatmeh, Leila Khaled, Raja Eghbarieh, Musa Abu Marzuk and Ghassan Kanafani.
Far from chiding the Green Party for calling for ODS, the One Democratic State Initiative (ODSI), a Palestinian-led group that advocates what its name suggests, welcomed the Green Party motion. The motion, it should be pointed out, was spearheaded by a Green Party member with Palestinian roots, Lubna Speitan.
ODSI contested, in The Palestinian Chronicle, an online journal led by Palestinian journalists and editors, the subaltern studies objection that the Green Party is denying Palestinians agency. “This accusation,” Alain Alameddine and Saman Hassan, two of ODSI’s principals wrote, “is based on the premise that it is Palestinians, not a political movement in the UK, that must decide the proper solution to the occupation of Palestine. Although it might sound reasonable or possibly even anti-colonial at first glance, it is fundamentally flawed. Standing against the establishment of a democratic Palestinian state in all of Palestine in the name of Palestinian self-determination is a laughable contradiction. Democracy is, by definition, rule of the people. Democratic states are precisely the tool that allows peoples to self-determine.”
ODS had been the dominant position of the Palestinian liberation movement from it’s very beginning. To be sure, the Palestinian Liberation Organization departed from the longstanding Palestinian ODS position in 1988 in favor of accepting the Jewish colonization of 78 percent of the Palestinian homeland. It did so because the organization had been severely weakened, the international situation had become unfavorable to achieving Palestinian ambitions, and it appeared—wrongly as it turned out—that a pis aller Palestinian state within the two-state paradigm was achievable. A Palestinian state on 22 percent of the Palestinian homeland, given that circumstances at the time had become very unfavorable to achieving liberation, was one the Palestinian leadership was willing to accept for want of a better alternative. Importantly, ODS was ceded for tactical reasons, not because it was what Palestinians wanted, but because their political leadership was willing to make significant (and some argue foolish) concessions. It is wrong, therefore, to accuse the Green Party of talking over the Palestinians and denying them agency when the party reflects a longstanding Palestinian position.
Moreover, ODS has the greatest likelihood of mobilizing support for decolonization among citizens of liberal democratic countries. This is important, because Palestinians cannot liberate themselves so long as the insuperable obstacle of support for Israel by the United States and its allies continues unabated.
Calling for ODS is not white saviorism or a pre-emption of Palestinian agency. It is a call for a position that has not only long had a home at the heart of the Palestinian liberation movement, but is the only realistic way to galvanize citizens of liberal democracies, including very importantly the United States, to pressure their governments to remove the obstacles they maintain which prevent Palestinians from liberating themselves. Palestinian allies can facilitate the project of Palestinian liberation by sweeping away the obstacles to decolonization that frustrate the decolonial project. Popular pressure on political parties and states to follow in the footsteps of the Green Party represents, not the negation of subaltern agency, but the weakening of imperialism from within imperialist core.
The subaltern studies objection to the foregoing might be this: You don’t value decolonization per se, but decolonization as part of an ideology of inclusion and universal equality. Colonization is incompatible with your ideology—so you oppose it. Yours is a Marxist socialist view. It is no accident that the vision which you say lies at the heart of the Palestinian liberation movement—that of one democratic Palestinian state in all of Palestine, in which everyone is equal regardless of their ethnic or religious identity—is the vision of Marxist socialist Palestinians. Almost every one of the Palestinian liberation leaders you cite to make the case that ODS is a core Palestinian demand—George Habash, Ahmad Saadat, Leila Khaled, Ghassan Kanafani—were or are Marxist-Leninists who belong or belonged to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. It would be more accurate to say that ODS is a core Marxist socialist demand, that has been made by Marxist Palestinians, not because they’re Palestinian, but because they’re Marxists. Likewise, the ODSI, which you adduce as a Palestinian group which promotes ODS, is led by socialists who favor a socialist post-colonial future. And while the Green Party of England and Wales isn’t socialist, it is certainly of the Left and many of its members embrace a political program of inclusion and universal equality. Finally, you, yourself, are a Marxist. Hence, what you’re arguing for is a Palestine based on the Marxist vision of inclusion and universal equality which, by implication, is necessarily a decolonized one. What you’re not arguing for, however—and, indeed, what you’re implicitly arguing against—is the freedom of a subaltern people to self-determine its future in any way it pleases, including by building a post-colonial society that is exclusive and unequal. To this charge I plead guilty.
Nazis argued that Germans were a subaltern people, colonized by the Jews. The Nazi program was largely based on a project of decolonization (as they saw it) and the creation of a post-colonial future of exclusion and inequality, where the subaltern, the German volk, would now be supreme, and the colonizer, the Jews, would be excluded (or exterminated, the ultimate form of exclusion.) Today’s white nationalist movement stands in the same tradition. It is animated by fear of colonization by Arab immigrants and Islam (as well as Mexicans, Central Americans, and Somalis in the United States) and the descent of people of white skin color into subaltern status. Hence, they favor a pre-emptive decolonization, carried out in the deportation of the immigrants in order to recover an imagined ethnically homogenous society. They look to Israel, with its inequality and exclusion, as a model.
It can’t be denied that there are Palestinians with the same vision; who favor a post-colonial Palestine in which Jews are either excluded or subordinated; and where rights are tied to ethnic or religious identity and favor indigenous Palestinians or Muslims or both. Proponents of subaltern sovereignty argue that the colonized ought to be able to self-determine a future based on the exclusion and oppression of their colonizer. Some Marxist socialists are even willing to accept this point of view, arguing, for example, that the ANC’s failure to expel whites from South Africa accounts for why the country’s indigenous people remain mired in poverty decades after liberation. This ignores the reality that indigenous Africans remain poor for the simple reason that South African governments have done nothing of any significance to change the economic conditions of the black majority. They haven’t, for instance, undertaken meaningful programs of land redistribution and economic democratization. That’s not to say that matters would have been any better had they done so. In neighboring Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe championed a program of land reform and economic redistribution that was assailed, undermined, and sabotaged by the countries of the imperial core. The failure of the vast majority of post-colonial countries to make significant strides in improving the lives of their citizens have had nothing to do with whether settlers were expelled and everything to do with the fact that these states were decolonized politically, but not economically; and the few that tried to decolonize economically, as Zimbabwe did, felt the full weight of the rich countries come crashing down upon their heads. As Domenico Losurdo once put it, “The imperialist countries say ‘You want freedom? Fine, go ahead and starve.'”
There are, of course, great exceptions. South Korea and China spring to mind. But these two countries have enjoyed exceptional circumstances. South Korea was on the frontline of the Cold War. The United States turned a blind eye as Seoul pursued decidedly anti-market, anti-free trade, and state dirigiste measures to build its economy—measures that Washington would never have allowed any other state under its umbrella to pursue, but did allow South Korea to pursue, because it was important that South Korea surpass North Korea economically. China, by virtue of being a behemoth that cannot be easily pushed around, whose vast market has always proved alluring to investors and exporters, and whose Communist government has used planning and public ownership to guide economic development, has been able to achieve unequalled success. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that Palestine, South Africa, and China are very different places with very different colonial histories and very different economic potentials. The experience of one offers little insight into the developmental possibilities for the other.
To sum up, the debate between those who say Palestinians should seek one democratic Palestinian state in all of Palestine, based on inclusion and equality versus those who counter that Palestinians must be granted the latitude to define their future in whatever fashion they please, is really a debate over values: universal equality and inclusion versus the sovereignty of the subaltern to oppress others in an unequal post-colonial state, if that’s what they want to do. I would argue that the second, however much it masquerades as being radical, is ultimately reactionary, and is little more than a rationalization to be used by the formerly colonized to match their erstwhile colonizers in bile, enmity, and ugliness.
As a Marxist socialist I cannot help but be the ally of anyone fighting for inclusion and universal equality. This is why ODS is appealing. It is a program of replacing exclusion and inequality with inclusion and equality; of fighting fire with water, not fire. Indeed, I would say it is the only defensible Marxist socialist position. Neither can I help but repudiate any view which rationalizes exclusion and inequality, as does both the two-state solution and the subaltern studies paradigm. Proponents of these two positions differ only in that the former favors the exclusion and inequality of the Palestinians and the latter is willing to accept the exclusion and inequality of the Jews.
