Category: Two State Solution

The Illegitimacy of Both Israel and the Two-State Solution

August 19, 2024

By Stephen Gowans

Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy recently misattributed the Himalaya of injustices the Israelis have visited upon the Palestinians to ‘the army,’ as if, absent the IDF, Israel—not only its conduct but its very ethos—would become acceptable to world opinion. [1] But were the IDF to disband, or renounce its genocidal conduct, Israel would still be a Jewish state, founded on the robbery of the Palestinians, and committed to their continued dispossession and exile in order to maintain the state’s Jewish character.

The army’s role in Israel is to defend Jewish supremacy and extend the territory over which Jews come first and Palestinians matter not at all. The 1948-9 theft by Jewish nationalist settlers of the Palestinians’ country, along with their homes, land, and property, is Jewish supremacy’s original sin. The IDF defends and promotes it. The two-state solution ignores and conceals it.

The fruits of the Jewish nationalist plunder are thus defended by violence, and extended to such territory in the West Bank which Jewish settlers have not yet completely taken for their own use. The process is summarized by a single word: Zionism—the racist ideology of Jewish nationalism and Palestinian dispossession. Pro-Zionist, as the Palestinian revolutionary Leila Khaled once pointed out, equals anti-Palestinian.

It is Zionism (the project) and its child, Israel, not the IDF (the project’s instrument), that lies, contra Levy, at the root of the problem of Israel. 

To correct Levy, the following injustices, which he attributes to the IDF, are properly understood as the bastards of settler colonial Jewish nationalism.

“…the Sde Teiman base is [Zionism], the human shields used in Gaza are [Zionism], the assassinations are [Zionism]. Forty thousand dead are [Zionism], the destruction of Gaza is [Zionism]; the cruel roadblocks in the West Bank are [Zionism]; the killing of the 3-day-old twins, along with their mother and grandmother, while the father was out obtaining their birth certificate, is [Zionism]; the growing use of drones for killing people in the West Bank is [Zionism]; the pilots, artillery units, armored units, bulldozers, canine units, they are all [Zionism].”

It is difficult to understand how the two-state solution continues to be seen by people ostensibly committed to Leftist or humane values as constituting either a just solution, or even a practical one. Levy himself rejects the two-state solution, not because he dislikes it, but because, with 700,000 Jews in the West Bank, he recognizes that the idea is no longer workable. Scholar Rashid Khalidi calls the two-state solution an Orwellian hoax—a promise to replace the quisling Palestinian Authority with a quisling Palestinian pseudo-state. The two-state solution has always meant one Jewish state plus Palestinian Bantustans, Khalidi argues.

The two-state solution in its current guise rests on UN Security Council Resolution 242, formulated by the United States and Israel, and ratified by the Soviet Union, as a solution to the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel conquered the Sinai, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and parts of Syrian territory in Jawlan (the Golan Heights).

The resolution (unheeded by Tel Aviv) demanded that Israel withdraw to its pre-1967 position, roughly the armistice lines which ended the conflict of 1948-9 between the Zionist settlers and four of the Arab states—Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. These states had intervened in the war between the Palestinians, who were seeking to keep their country, and the Zionists, who were seeking to make it their own.

At the heart of 1948-9 conflict was UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of 29 November 1947, which ended the British Mandate in Palestine and ordered the partition of the country between Jewish and Arab states, to be linked by an economic union, with Jerusalem under international control. The resolution assigned 56 percent of the Palestinians’ country to Jewish settlers, most of whom were recent immigrants, and who comprised less than one-third of the population. The Palestinians, the majority, were granted a state comprising only 42 percent of their country. The remaining two percent was allocated to an internationalized Jerusalem.

Neither the Palestinians, who had been disarmed by the British Mandate, and in any event had little military training, or the Arab armies, which were rendered ineffective by division and the absence of a central command, and were outnumbered by Jewish settler forces by at least three to one, could prevail against the well-organized, well-trained, and well-equipped Zionists. The Jewish nationalists could count on the assistance of Western imperialist countries as well as the Soviet Union, which shipped arms to the Zionists through Czechoslovakia. Indeed, it was the colonialist West in partnership with the USSR that presented and approved the partition of the Palestinians’ country. Little wonder that the great powers should play a key role in helping the settler army rob the Palestinians.

The outcome of the war was, from the Palestinians’ perspective, a Nakba. Zionist settlers conquered 80 percent of the Palestinians’ country—not just the 56 percent which Resolution 181 allocated to a Jewish state, but also half the territory allocated to an Arab state, and, on top of that, West Jerusalem. At the same time, they exiled (ethnically cleansed) 700,000 Palestinians, at least half and probably much more than half of the Palestinian population. In 1967, the Zionist settlers gobbled up the remaining 20 percent of the Palestinians’ country. It is on this one-fifth of Palestine—what is deceptively called ‘occupied Palestinian territories’—that apostles of the two-state solution propose to give the Palestinians a rump state. The term ‘occupied Palestinian territories’ is deceptive because it refers only to the territory Zionist settlers have occupied since 1967, and not the larger territory they’ve occupied since 1948.

The inequity of a two-state solution should be glaring enough. How is it fair to grant Palestinians a tiny, disjointed, fraction of their own country? But the problems run deeper than that. A two-state solution ratifies two fundamental injustices.

The first injustice is the decision of the UN General Assembly, under the influence of the United States and the Soviet Union, to partition Palestine, granting more than half the country to recent Jewish immigrants. The UN General Assembly had no more authority to rob Palestinians of a part of their country than did the British in the 1917 Balfour Declaration to promise Jews a homeland in Palestine. Au fond, Resolution 181 is a violation of two principles: democracy (the Palestinians were opposed to their country’s division) and self-determination. It is also an expression of US and Soviet imperialism. Gifting the larger part of Palestine to recent Jewish immigrants, a minority, contrary to the majority’s wish, and over its objection, suited the electoral goals of the US president, who hoped to strengthen his appeal to Jewish voters, and comported with the geopolitical aims of the Soviet Union, which hoped to build influence in the British-dominated Middle East. Palestinians didn’t count. What’s more, neither the General Assembly or the Security Council had the authority to create two new states, let alone, abolish another (Palestine.)

The second injustice is the ratification of Zionist conquests in the 1948-9 war, which allowed Jewish settler forces to extend their plunder of the Palestinians’ country to 80 percent of the territory from the 56 percent allocated in Resolution 181.

The two-state solution thus fails to address the fundamental injustices at the core of the problem, namely:

  • The negation of democratic principles;
  • The denial of Palestinian self-determination;
  • The spoliation of the Palestinians’ country and the forcible transfer of their land, homes, and property to Jewish settlers with the approval and aid of imperialist powers;
  • The immiseration of the Palestinians by the theft of their land, homes, and property and the corresponding enrichment of Israeli Jews in whose hands these stolen goods have been deposited. The two-state solution offers no mechanism for reversing the colossal inter-ethnic redistribution of wealth, whose major effects have been the ghettoization of millions of Palestinians in squalid refugee camps and the enrichment of Israel and its favored Jewish citizens.

Israel is the outcome of an enormous theft, and an affront against democracy and self-determination, approved (without authority) by the UN, sanctified by international law, backed by the colonialist West, and supported by the Soviet Union. The two-state solution ratifies these crimes, throwing a few crumbs to the plundered and immiserated Palestinians as a sop.

In The Palestine Question, legal scholar Henry Cattan asked whether a two-state solution based on the implementation of Resolution 242 would resolve the Palestine issue. Since it would simply restore the conflict that existed prior to 1967, he answered in the negative.

Would implementation of Resolution 181, and a two-state solution as originally envisaged by the UN in 1947—which at least condescended to allow the Palestinians to keep more of their country—work? No, insisted Cattan, since the resolution was rejected by both the Palestinians in words (who understandably objected to their victimization by a settler colonialism that would deny them self-determination) and Zionist settlers in deeds (who sought in 1948-9 to conquer as much of Palestine as their strength and Soviet arms would allow, and in 1967, when their strength had greatly increased, extended the conquest to the whole of the Palestinians’ country. It has been clear from the beginning, and is all the more evident today, that the Jewish nationalists want all of Palestine, and have no intention of settling for less.)

The solution to the Palestine problem is not, then, a ratification of Zionist settler colonialism, as the apostles of the two-state solution propose; settler colonialism, after all, lies at the heart of the problem. The problem can only be resolved at its core, which is to say, by de-colonizing Palestine, not just occupied ’67 Palestine, that part of the country which the two-state advocates propose to throw to the Palestinians as a sop in the hope of pacifying them, but also occupied ’48 Palestine, the greater part of the country conquered in the 1948-9 war by Jewish nationalist settlers. 

Palestine must become a democratic country, from the River to the Sea, in which all people, regardless of religion or ethnicity, are equal. There should never have been a Jewish state in Palestine, any more than there should have been a white supremacist state in South Africa and another in Rhodesia. All the brutalities of the Zionist regime—the genocide, the official racism, the pogroms, the ethnic cleansing, the prison abuses and torture, the incessant colonial expansion—flow ineluctably from the project of maintaining a Jewish state on the stolen land of the Palestinians.   

The solution to settler colonialism is de-colonization and equality among peoples—not the two-state solution’s ratification of settler-colonialism, not the repudiation of a democratic state in which settlers and natives are equal, and not the relegation of Palestinians to Bantustans within their own country.

1. There is a danger that I have created a misleading impression of Gideon Levy’s views. To be clear, Levy makes similar arguments to my own. He says that “The decisive moment is ‘48. A people came to a populated land and took it over. That’s the core of everything.” He adds that “any solution which will not include some kind of accountability of ‘48 and some kind of compensation — not only in terms of money — will not be a just solution.”  For the future, he envisages “one vote, one person, as in any other democracy,” even though it means “the end of the Jewish state.” See  “It’s too late for the Jewish state”.

On the Palestinian Question, Opportunism Has a Long History

June 1, 2024

By Stephen Gowans

Le Monde Diplomatique is running a review of Moscow’s stance on the Palestinian question in this month’s (June, 2024) issue, presenting a history that begins with the twists and turns of Soviet policy.  

The Soviet Union’s initial position on the Palestinian question, likely formulated under the influence of the Comintern and definitely under the influence of Marxism, was that there ought to be in Palestine an independent, non-national, democratic state, in which all citizens are equal, regardless of their ethno-religious identity.

This is the same view which was initially taken up by the PLO, and is the stance of those who today “support the dismantlement of Israel’s racist structures and laws and advocate for one decolonised state, from the river to the sea, in which everyone living within it is equal before the law and does not benefit from any racial, ethnic, or religious privileges,” as Joseph Massad recently put it.

In early 1947, R. Palme Dutt, writing on behalf of the communist parties of the British Empire, demanded “the creation of a free, independent and democratic Palestinian state, which will guarantee equal rights of citizenship with full religious freedom and full opportunities to develop their culture to all its inhabitants, Arab and Jewish.”

It seems odd that a little over one year later, the USSR recognized “the state of Israel, three days after its founding,” and equally odd (or disappointing if not repugnant) that less than a year earlier it had backed the UN partition plan, which granted Jewish settlers in Palestine, who made up one-third of the population, over one-half of the Palestinian’s country.

One body, the UN General Assembly, at the time dominated by imperialist and settler colonial states, pledged more than half of the country of one nation to Jewish settlers who said they made up another. The UN General Assembly had no legal or moral authority to partition Palestine.

Worse still, Moscow was recognizing a state that had no intention of even adhering to the legally and morally invalid UN plan, having taken territory by force slated for an Arab state, and expelling 800,000 Palestinians.

It gets worse. Stalin then sent arms via Czechoslovakia to the Israeli army, and dispatched “hundreds of Jewish officers from the Red Army,” to help put down the resistance of the Palestinians and their Arab compatriots to the theft of their land and expulsion.

Soviet support helped “Israel defeat the Arab countries, then seen as British allies by the Soviets.” In the settler-native war of 1948, the Soviets were clearly on the side of the settlers and against the oppressed. Moscow’s appeal to the oppressed to join hands with workers around the world under Soviet leadership, must have seemed to be, for good reason, a bad joke.

Why did the Soviets abandon a position of opposition to settler colonialism in favor of one supporting Zionism? Raison d’etat. Realpolitick. Moscow saw advantage for the Soviet state in backing a movement it saw as against British influence in the Middle East. Since the Zionists had engaged in a war of terrorism with the British mandate authorities, and London controlled Egypt, Iraq, and Transjordan, Stalin thought that support for Jewish settlers in Palestine would deal a blow to British influence in West Asia and North Africa.

It didn’t. The British continued to wield influence in the region and Israel looked to the West for support. Soviet influence in subsequent years remained limited to a few Arab nationalist states—Syria, Iraq, Libya—which had turned to the Soviets for aid against the British and Americans, who objected to their economic nationalism.

Even then, these states were wary of getting too close to Moscow for fear of being turned into Soviet vassals. Given Moscow’s capacity to sacrifice principle in pursuit of realpolitik and its immediate political aims, their fears were not without foundation.

Moscow’s shift from endorsing a decolonized Palestine to supporting Zionist settler colonialism was an instance of opportunism—sacrificing principal and fundamental goals to short-term advantage. Lenin railed against the opportunism of the Second International; on the Palestinian question, Stalin practiced it.

Of course, it could be quibbled that the Marxist notion of opportunism is specific to working class interests, not those of an agrarian people despoiled by settler colonialism.  The reply, if we confine ourselves to the Marxist canon, is to paraphrase the words of Marx. No people can be free who help enslave another. Clearly, the Soviets, at Stalin’s direction, helped Zionists figuratively enslave the Palestinians.

It is said, though the story may be apocryphal, that Stalin later recognized his error and apologized. If true, we must ask ourselves—what did he apologize for? His opportunism, or the fact that he failed to obtain even an opportunistic advantage in his abandonment of principle?

In later years, the USSR would support the two-state solution, as do some previously Soviet-aligned communist parties today, for example, the Communist Party USA, the Communist Party of Canada, and the KKE. So accustomed to blindly following the Moscow line with all its twists, turns, opportunism, and raison d’etat, the leaders of these parties long ago lost the power of independent thought, if they ever had it to begin with. So, they ape what the Soviet position was in its final years, and one suspects without the foggiest idea of what they’re supporting or why.

The two-state solution has a practical problem. Exactly where is the Palestinian state to be located, now that the building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank has effectively denied the Palestinians territory on which to build a viable state? And why should Palestinians be crammed into an insignificant slice—or many insignificant, incontiguous, slices—of their own country?

But the practical problems of the two-state solution pale in comparison to the moral problem. A Palestinian state alongside Israel means the continued existence of a Jewish supremacist apartheid state, whose origin is found in settler colonialism, the theft of the Palestinians’ country, and ethnic cleansing.  

Moreover, two-states concedes the legitimacy of Zionism, a racist, antisemitic, doctrine which holds that:

  • The Jews are a nation, rather than a religious community;
  • Dismisses activism against antisemitism as futile (because Zionists believe antisemitism is ineradicable, built into the DNA of non-Jews); and
  • Favors, as antisemites do, the emigration of Jews from the countries in which they live to Israel.

Strange that no one with even a single progressive bone in their body would have accepted anything less than the complete dismantlement of apartheid South Africa, and the creation, in its place, of a single, unitary, non-national, democratic state in which all people, settlers and natives, were equal. And yet many of the same people, including communists, continue to support a two state solution in Palestine–the companion South African arrangement to a state for whites and Bantustans for blacks.

In 1973, Louis Eaks interviewed the historian Arnold Toynbee on the Palestinian question. Eaks began by outlining what, at the time, now largely forgotten, was the dominant Palestinian goal, “a unitary and democratic state” in all of historic Palestine. Eaks observed that this would offer, “both for the Jewish settlers in Palestine and for the Palestinians, safeguards for their existence in Palestine and for their civil rights.” He lamented, however, that “there doesn’t seem to be any kind of debate about the merits of the Palestinian plan.”

Toynbee opined that the plan “has two merits. It would produce the greatest possible amount of justice, with the least possible amount of suffering for everybody. Nobody would be turned out of his home.” Then Toynbee turned to what he saw as the plan’s weakness. It is “recognized to be politically impracticable. I don’t think that the Israelis would ever agree voluntarily, and I don’t think that America would be willing to compel them to agree to this. Therefore, I don’t think it is possible to carry out this plan.”

Eaks objected. “You say that it is a plan which is now almost impossible to achieve, but the United Nations solution [of cutting the Palestinian baby into two ethnic national states, one Jewish and one Arab] seems equally impossible to achieve, and particularly that aspect which the Palestinians must consider to be the most crucial paragraph, which concerns the right of the refugees to return.”

Eaks, of course, was right. A half century later, the two-state formula remains as much an unrealizable fantasy as it was in 1973, indeed as much as it was in 1947, when it was first proposed as the UN Partition Plan. It has been rejected in deeds and in some cases words by all parties involved ever since.

Eaks continued: “Do you think it is wise in the long run to compromise with Zionism, which is based very much on racial discrimination? Do you not see any future threat to the East if one accepts this kind of racialist state.”

 “Yes,” conceded Toynbee, “I think a racialist state is as bad and as dangerous in the Middle East as it is in southern Africa.”

Eaks wasn’t finished. “It seems to me,” he continued, pressing the point, “that no one who says that apartheid is wrong would say that South Africa is here to stay, and that therefore the African states should accept it and recognize it. Yet many people who say that Zionism is evil and wrong, claim that Israel is here to stay and that we must accept it. Why is there this contradiction between the attitudes towards Zionism and towards apartheid?”

As for China, the capitalist giant which occasionally sings rhapsodies to Marx to excite its gullible communist supporters in the West, its president Xi Jinping “recently reiterated his support for a two-state solution”, which is to say, for the continued existence of a Jewish supremacist state based on settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and racist institutions.

As Xi rejects a two-state solution for China—where two independent Chinese states, Taiwan and the PRC, could live side by side, in peace—he endorses a two-state model for the Palestinians. The Chinese, in his view, deserve better. They won’t concede a part of their country in the name of peace—as Xi expects the Palestinians to do.

Xi cares about China, tout court, not the global south and not the Palestinians, any more than Stalin did. As leaders of major states, Stalin then and Xi now, pursue as their priority the interests of the states they lead; everything else is secondary, available to be sacrificed in pursuit of raison d’etat, realpolitik, and opportunism.

Follow-up

In his critique of the KKE’s endorsement of the two-state solution, Jorge Martin makes many of the same arguments I do, but develops some themes more fully. Here are what I think are the parts of his analysis that are particularly relevant to my discussion above.

“[T]he two-state solution has been proven to have been impossible in practice, as we have explained in detail elsewhere. The Oslo Accords of 1993 were seen precisely as a road map towards a two-state solution by the Palestinian leadership. In fact, they were a complete betrayal and sell out of the Palestinian struggle. Israel kept control of a large section of the West Bank and of the external borders, Jewish settlers were allowed to remain in the Palestinian territory and settlements have continued to expand. 

“Meanwhile, the questions of the right of return and the state of East Jerusalem were postponed to be discussed in the long distant future (read: never) and in exchange a pitiful Palestinian ‘Authority’ with no real power was created with the sole aim of subcontracting the policing of the Palestinian masses to the rotten leadership of the PLO. 

…

“So as long as the capitalist state of Israel exists, the Israeli bourgeoisie will never accept the existence of a genuine viable Palestinian state as it considers it a threat to its ‘national security’. This has been proven, not in theory, but in practice. Since the Oslo Accords, the number of Zionist settlements in the West Bank has continuously increased, while Gaza remains completely blockaded by the state of Israel. Israel’s military interventions in Gaza, as well as in the West Bank, have become increasingly frequent and violent, undermining the very existence of even the limited Palestinian entity that is the Palestinian Authority. 

“Furthermore, it is difficult to see how a capitalist state of Palestine would be viable in the territory of the 1967 borders, side-by-side with a powerful imperialist capitalist state of Israel. Such a capitalist Palestine, if it were possible, would be economically dominated by its powerful neighbor and remain at best its semi-colony. 

“It is the practical experience of the last 30 years that has led a majority of Palestinians to reject a two-state solution. In September this year, a poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 67 percent of Palestinians reject a two-state solution, with only 32 percent in support. The same poll shows that “71 percent believe the two-state solution is no longer practical due to settlement expansion”. A separate poll conducted by the Arab World for Research and Development on 15 November found that 74 percent of Palestinians are in favor of one state, while only 17 percent want a two-state solution. An overwhelming majority of Palestinians reject the Oslo Accords altogether. 

“Incidentally, even if one were to accept the idea of a two-state solution, why should a Palestinian state be established ‘on the 1967 borders’ (presumably what the KKE means is the pre-1967 war borders) which represented only 22 percent of historic Palestine? Why not go back to the 1947 UN partition plan borders, where a Palestinian state represented 44 percent? The 1967 borders represent not only accepting partition itself but also the further territorial conquests by the State of Israel in the period after it. 

…

“In 1947, the Soviet Union backed the partition plan at the United Nations. This was not done in solidarity with the Jewish people .. but rather in an attempt to undermine the position of British imperialism in the Middle East. [My note: It could have been done for both reasons.] The USSR was the first country to recognize the newly created State of Israel and Stalin supplied the Zionists with weapons via Czechoslovakia. Soviet support for the setting up of the State of Israel in 1948 was a betrayal with catastrophic consequences for all the communist parties throughout the Middle East and beyond. Such a position cannot be justified and made the USSR complicit in the crime that was committed against the Palestinian people.”