The
No-State Solution to the Israel-Palestine Conflict
By Jeremy R. Hammond
July 11, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- It is time for the citizens of the world to effect
the paradigm shift required to bring about a
peaceful resolution to the world’s most infamous
conflict.
Twelve years ago today, the International Court of
Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion at the
request of the United Nations General Assembly on
the legality of the wall Israel has constructed in
the West Bank. The ICJ affirmed that all of the Gaza
Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem,
are “occupied Palestinian territory”, and that
Israel’s wall, as well as its settlements, violate
the Fourth Geneva Convention.
The ICJ’s ruling helps to underscore the prejudicial
nature of the discussion about the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Western
mainstream media—and particularly in the US. The
media never fail to elevate Israel’s policy aims to
the same level of legitimacy as international law.
For example, we can frequently read in the New York
Times, the Washington Post, et al, that East
Jerusalem or areas where Israeli settlements are
located are “disputed” territory—thus placing equal
weight to Israel’s position as the entire rest of
the planet, which recognizes Israel’s settlements as
illegal and East Jerusalem as occupied Palestinian
territory.
Needless to
say, this is not balanced journalism, but
extremely prejudicial to the rights of the
Palestinians living under foreign military
occupation. When the illegality of the settlements
is alluded to by the mainstream media (all
too infrequently), they typically obscure it by
saying something like: “Most countries do not
recognize the legitimacy of Israel’s settlements.”
This leaves readers with the impression that the
matter is controversial, that there is debate about
it within the international community, that there
are two legitimate points of view. It affords
validity to Israel’s position when it has none.
Translated from newspeak, what that means is that
every single government on planet Earth other
than Israel itself recognizes the settlements as a
violation of international law.
The media
bend over backwards to accommodate and attempt to
legitimize Israel’s criminal policies. How can the
media get away with such outrageously biased
reporting? Furthermore, why is the US
mainstream media so prejudiced against the rights of
the Palestinians?
The answer
is simple:
the policy of the US government is one of
unconditionally supporting Israel’s violations of
international law and the human rights of the
Palestinian people.
The US Role in the
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
While the
US has long sought to characterize itself as an
“honest broker” between the Israelis and the
Palestinians, the truth is scarcely concealed
beneath the thin veil of rhetoric. The US supports
Israel’s violations of international law
financially, militarily, and diplomatically.
Military
aid to Israel tops $3 billion annually, which aid
serves in part as a US taxpayer subsidy for the arms
industry as Israel invests in US military technology
and hardware. US-supplied arms are routinely used by
Israel to commit war crimes, such as its deliberate
targeting of schools and hospitals in Gaza under the
Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) “Dahiya Doctrine”—a
reference to the leveling of the Dahiya district of
Beirut during Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon and
a policy designed to use intentionally
disproportionate force in order to punish the
civilian population. This policy was implemented
during Israel’s military assaults on Gaza in 2008-09
(“Operation Cast Lead”), 2012 (“Operation Pillar of
Defense”), and 2014 (“Operation Protective Edge”).
The world
superpower also uses its weight to protect Israel
from censure for its perpetual violations of
international law, acting to prevent Israeli
officials from being held accountable for their
crimes. For example, in the aftermath of “Operation
Cast Lead”, the US sought to bury the report of a UN
fact-finding mission (the so-called “Goldstone
Report”) that found both Israel and Hamas had
committed war crimes. The US’s goal was to ensure
that the report’s recommendations were not
implemented—particularly the recommendation to refer
the matter to the International Criminal Court (ICC)
absent credible investigations by the Israeli
government and Hamas governing authority into
allegations of war crimes, which never occurred (the
IDF’s self-investigations, needless to say, were
rightfully recognized by the international community
as a whitewash).
For another
example, in February 2011, the Obama
administration—its own rhetorical opposition to
Israel’s settlements notwithstanding—went so far as
to veto an uncontroversial UN Security Council
resolution condemning Israel for its continued
expansion of illegal settlements in the occupied
West Bank.
The Mainstream
Media’s Complicity
The
mainstream media in the US serve the role of
manufacturing consent for government policy, with
the intelligentsia acting as high priests of the
state religion, as dissident American intellectual
Noam Chomsky has described it. As before the US’s
illegal war on Iraq (among countless other
examples), the media mindlessly parrot government
propaganda. It is axiomatic among academics and
journalists who have a voice in the mainstream that,
while the US government might sometimes make
“mistakes”, it only ever acts out of benevolent
intent. Voices that don’t subscribe to this belief
system are excluded from the discussion. “There is
indeed something truly religious,” as Chomsky has
observed, “in the fervor with which responsible
American intellectuals have sought to deny plain
fact and to secure their dogmas concerning American
benevolence, the contemporary version of the
‘civilizing mission.’”
Far from
serving the role of properly informing the public in
order for Americans to be able to make objective
judgments about world affairs, the media serve to
indoctrinate Americans in narratives about the
Palestine conflict that fundamentally obscure its
true nature.
This
extends to the media’s reporting on the conflict’s
origins. There are a great many things that
“everyone knows” about the conflict that in fact
have no basis in reality. For example, it is a
widely believed myth that the UN created Israel or
otherwise conferred legal authority to the Zionist
leadership for the unilateral declaration of the
existence of their “Jewish state” on May 14, 1948.
This claim is absolutely false. Moreover,
the UN plan to partition Palestine into separate
Jewish and Arab states called for expropriating land
belonging to Arabs in order to redistribute it to
Jews. The representatives of member countries who
drafted this plan recognized that this prejudiced
the rights of the majority inhabitants, but the
Arabs’ rights were simply of no consideration to
policymakers still operating within a framework of
racist colonialism, and so they premised their plan
upon the explicit rejection of the right of
the Arab majority to self-determination
(notwithstanding how this violated the very UN
Charter under whose authority they were ostensibly
operating).
Needless to
say, such minor details as this are never reported
when the media fill the public in on the conflict’s
origins.
Another
thing that “everyone knows” about the conflict is
that the combined Arab armies invaded “Israel” after
the May 14, 1948 declaration of its existence, in an
effort to wipe the nascent state off the map. As the
New York Times and other major media report
it, today’s refugee problem is an unfortunate legacy
of Palestinians having to flee or being expelled by
Israeli forces as a consequence of this Arab
aggression in 1948. Another minor detail willfully
omitted in reports by journalists like the Times’
Ethan Bronner is that by the time the neighboring
Arab states managed to muster a military response,
300,000 Arabs had already been ethnically
cleansed from their homes in Palestine.
By the time
the armistice agreements were signed in 1949, over
700,000 Palestinians had been ethnically cleansed,
never permitted to return to their homes despite the
recognition under international law that refugees of
war have a right to do. Although the Jewish
community in 1948 owned less than 7 percent of the
land in Palestine, by the time the war was ended,
Israel had conquered territory beyond even that
allotted to it under the never-implemented UN
partition plan (never implemented because the UN
Security Council recognized that the only way to do
so would be by force, and that it had no authority
to partition Palestine against the will of the
majority of its inhabitants).
Then again
in 1967, as the mainstream media tell it, Israel
faced a genocidal threat from its neighboring Arab
states, and so launched a preemptive attack against
Egypt to defend itself and its citizens from
extermination. Never mind that, as no less
authoritative a source as former Israeli Ambassador
to the US Michael B. Oren has documented, Israel’s
own intelligence assessed that Egyptian President
Gamal Abdel Nasser had no intention of attacking
Israel—because he wasn’t insane. Israel had already
invaded Egypt once before, in 1956, in collusion
with Britain and France, and the CIA observed that
Egyptian forces in 1967 had taken up defensive
positions in the Sinai Peninsula and informed
President Lyndon B. Johnson that a war was brewing
and that it would be started by Israel.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, too,
has acknowledged that this was a war of choice, and
that the Egyptian troop presence in the Sinai didn’t
prove that Nasser intended to attack Israel.
During that
war, of course, Israel invaded and began its
occupation of Gaza and the West Bank—an occupation
that persists still today nearly five decades on.
The ethnic cleansing also continues incrementally as
Palestinians’ homes are demolished or life is
otherwise made so miserable for them that they are
forced to relocate in order for Jewish settlements
to be built, “facts on the ground” designed to
prejudice the outcome of negotiations under the
US-led so-called “peace process”.
And while
the media report on the “peace process” as though
the US was truly an objective mediator, the truth,
also scarcely concealed beneath the thin veil of
rhetoric, is that it is the process by which the US
and Israel block implementation of the
two-state solution, in favor of which there is
otherwise a consensus among the international
community.
This
consensus is based upon the requirement, emphasized
in UN Security Council Resolution 242 (passed in the
wake of the 1967 war), that Israel must withdraw to
the 1949 armistice lines (also known as the 1967
lines or the “Green Line” for the color with which
it was drawn on the map) in accordance with the
principle of international law that the acquisition
of territory by war is inadmissible. It is also
based on the internationally recognized right,
reflected in UN General Assembly Resolution 194
(passed during the 1948 war), of Palestinian
refugees to return to their homeland.
While the
US professes to support a two-state
solution, it is emphatically not the same
as the two-state solution. The latter is
premised upon international law and respect for the
equal rights of the Palestinians, while the former
is premised upon the use of violence to coerce the
Palestinians into accepting Israel’s demands to
surrender their rights, including by ceding even
more of their land and renouncing their right of
return.
What Hope for
Peace?
There is a
popular view that the Israel-Palestine conflict is
inevitable, too complicated for a practical solution
to ever be found, which leads to resignation that it
will just persist forever. This view is mistaken.
There is a solution, which is for
international law to be applied. This is the outcome
that Israel and the US have fought so aggressively
to prevent under the “peace process”, which is
premised upon the rejection of the applicability of
such treaties as the UN Charter and the Geneva
Conventions and, instead, elevates Israel’s
wants over Palestinians’ rights.
Hence the
accommodative reporting in the mainstream media
describing East Jerusalem as “disputed” territory,
etc., ad nauseum.
So what can
be done about this situation? How can the
Palestinians ever hope to see justice done, and how
can peace ever be realized?
The answer
is simple. The citizens of the world simply need to
stop waiting for the governments of the world to
solve the problem. There needs to be wider
recognition that the world’s governments, far from
being part of the solution, are part of the
problem. This includes the UN organization,
which played no small role in helping to create the
conflict in the first place, and which continues to
play a duplicitous role—most specifically, the UN
Secretariat under Ban Ki-moon’s leadership has been
complicit in Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians
(e.g., calling for negotiations “without
preconditions” in his role as Quartet partner, which
is a euphemism that simply means the Palestinians
must cease demanding that Israel cease its illegal
settlement construction before rejoining talks under
the guise of the US-led “peace process”—among
numerous other gross abuses of the authority of his
office).
Israel is
able to act with such impunity because it has the
backing of the world’s most powerful government. The
US government, in turn, is able to persist in its
complicity in the oppression of the Palestinian
people because the media manufacture consent for its
criminal policies. Most Americans simply have a
perception of the conflict that has no bearing on
reality. The mainstream discussion about the subject
is fundamentally misrepresentative of the conflict’s
true nature.
That needs
to change. What is required is a paradigm shift. The
public needs to stop buying into the perpetually
told lies and propaganda. Americans, along with
other citizens of the world, need to become properly
informed. There are of course those who will cling
to their worldview regardless of the facts, and
those whose own prejudices will blind them to the
truth. But those of us who are honest and actually
care about the victims of the violence—on both
sides, both Jew and Arab—have a responsibility to
educate ourselves and take an active role in sharing
knowledge with others.
We need to
reach a critical mass of knowledgeable citizenry, a
tipping point at which enough people are properly
informed about the conflict’s true nature that it no
longer remains feasible for the US government to
continue its policy of trying to sustain the status
quo of occupation and oppression. This applies to
citizens of other countries, too, whose own
governments—even those ostensibly supportive of
Palestinians’ rights—are blinded to the reality that
the “peace process” is designed to prevent a
peaceful solution and which thus act complicity
by advocating the continuance of this farce. This
framework for negotiations needs to be replaced with
a real peace process, one which doesn’t
reject the applicability of international law and
isn’t fundamentally prejudiced against the
rights of those who are living under an oppressive
occupation regime—in which the oppressed aren’t
forced to “negotiate” with their occupiers over the
extent to which they can retain their own land.
The world
is moving in this direction, albeit not
nearly quickly enough to be of any comfort for the
victims. The European Union, for example, has
revised its guidelines for trading with Israel to
include the requirement that goods produced in
illegally constructed Israeli settlements be labeled
as such. The growing boycott, divestment, and
sanctions (BDS) movement can claim some success in
this regard, but there is another important factor
frequently overlooked that led to this development:
the UN’s recognition in 2012 of Palestine as a
non-member observer state.
With the
UN’s recognition of Palestinian statehood comes
access to international legal institutions such as
the ICJ and ICC, to which the Palestinian Authority
(PA) may now turn in order to seek legal remedy for
Israel’s violations of international law.
So why
hasn’t the PA already done so?
The Role of the
Palestinian Authority
The answer
to that question, too, is simple. The PA was
established under the “peace process” to serve the
aims of the US and Israeli governments. It is,
simply stated, Israel’s collaborator regime in the
occupied territories that serves to keep the
Palestinians in line by repressing popular uprisings
against the occupation regime.
This is not
to say that the PA leadership under “President”
Mahmoud Abbas—who remains in office illegitimately,
his term having long ago expired—is entirely
dedicated to serving Israel’s interests. But the US
and Israel have their ways of forcing his
compliance, such as Israel’s withholding of
Palestinian tax dollars it collects on the PA’s
behalf in the occupied territories, or the US’s
threats to cut off aid to the PA if it steps out of
line.
Of course,
these are bluffs on the part of Israel and the US
since they need the PA in order to sustain
the status quo of occupation. Neither wants to risk
causing the collapse of the PA—least of all the
Israeli military establishment, which prefers to
have a collaborator regime in place to do its dirty
work for it. While Abbas has taken an important step
by successfully submitting Palestine’s application
for a status upgrade in the UN General Assembly, he
has to date remained too cowardly to take the next
step by pursuing legal claims against Israel in the
international institutions now available to his
government.
It is the
risk that Palestine might eventually do so, no
doubt, apart from the influence of the BDS movement,
that has prompted the EU to revise its trade
guidelines with Israel so as to take a modest step
away from its complicity in the wholesale criminal
violation of Palestinians’ rights.
A Global Intifada
This raises
a conundrum for the Palestinians. The weight of the
world’s governments, meaningless rhetoric to the
contrary nothwithstanding, is against them. Absent
recognition as a “state”, they had no recourse to
legal mechanisms to compel Israel’s compliance with
international law. Yet even with such
recognition, they remain powerless given complicity
of their own government in their oppression. So it
comes to this: if the PA—which has been all too
willing to lay Palestinians’ rights on the
negotiating table in order to preserve the
privileged status of its crony elites—will not act
to support the rights of its own people, then the
Palestinian people must act to rid themselves of its
rule over them.
It is time
for another popular uprising, an intifada
grounded in the principle of non-violent
resistance to occupation and oppression. Hamas and
other armed groups must realize that, apart from
being illegal and immoral, committing acts of
terrorism or engaging in war crimes such as
indiscriminate rocket fire into Israeli residential
communities are a strategic mistake since
such actions serve to hand Israel the very pretext
it requires in order to preserve its occupation
regime.
This is not
to say that the Palestinians must renounce their
right to legitimate armed resistance
against foreign military occupation, which, too, is
codified under international law; it is simply to
recognize the futility of trying to gain freedom in
this particular case through the barrel of a gun and
to see that disallowing Israel even the
slightest pretext for its own incomparably
greater violence is the surest path to creating the
conditions necessary for Israel’s policies to no
longer remain politically feasible.
It is up to
the rest of us to support the Palestinians in that
struggle. We must all rise up in solidarity
with the oppressed and become active participants in
this Third Intifada. The governments of the world
aren’t going to get the job done. It is up to the
informed citizens of the world to effect the
paradigm shift required to compel state
leaderships to cease being part of the problem and
to do what is right for the victims on both sides.
That will
require a change in the nature of the media’s
reporting on the conflict, which, although a
daunting task, in this age of the internet and
social media is foreseeable. It is up to each of us
who cares about human rights to take an active role
in the discussion, to educate ourselves and others
about the true nature of the Israel-Palestine
conflict, and to share that knowledge with others by
whatever means available. Enough people need to be
knowledgeable enough about the conflict—and the US
government’s role in it—that it no longer remains
permissible for the mainstream media to serve as the
government’s very own Ministry of Propaganda.
That is to
say, it is time for the world’s citizens to free
themselves from the indoctrination of the state
religion and recognize that the state itself—as
an institution fundamentally grounded in the use or
threat of violence to compel desired behaviors—is
the enemy of Liberty and of Peace. Yet so long as
these political institutions remain on this planet,
they ought to hold themselves to their own
obligations under the treaties that comprise the
body of international law—and they ought to hold
each other’s leaderships accountable when those laws
are violated and especially when war crimes are
committed. It is toward this end that our collective
efforts ought to be focused.
Peace
can be achieved. There is a path to
resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But we
shouldn’t make the mistake of focusing so much on
establishing respected borders between conflicting
parties that we fail to realize what a peaceful,
civilized world would look like: one without
borders. |