The Path Ahead for Palestine

We can live together. We lived together with the Jewish people before Israel was established. Palestine was not a place where Jewish people were persecuted or discriminated against. On the contrary, as was the case in most European countries. I understand the suffering of the Jewish people. I understand how they went through the Holocaust, which was the most horrible thing, and the suffering in the pogroms in Russia, and the suffering during the Inquisition time.

But one thing that many Israelis forget is that all of these atrocities had nothing to do with Palestinians. Palestinians were never part of any oppression of any Jewish population. That suffering of the Jewish population doesn't justify in any way Israel's oppression of the Palestinian people. Because of that suffering, I think the Israelis should be more sensitive about injustice and oppression of another people than anybody else.

Unfortunately, that is not the case in Israel today. That's why you see many Jewish people in the U.S. and in many other countries, joining and supporting the Palestinian struggle in solidarity with Palestinians because they care about the moral values.

That's why I say that if Israel prevents the two-state option -- and it would be Israel's responsibility -- there would be no other alternative than one-state solution with equal rights and equal duties. Such a state would not be a Jewish state. It would be a mixed state. That's what people need to understand. If the two-state solution vanishes, the Israeli government is responsible.

DB: Isn't it just as unrealistic to expect a two-state solution in Israel as it was to expect a two-state solution at a certain point in South Africa?

MB: Exactly. A friend of mine was a Jewish white minister in the first South African government that brought down the apartheid system. I told him that I thought the situation for the Palestinians was similar to the apartheid in South Africa. He stopped me and said what you have in Palestine is much worse than the apartheid system we had in South Africa. In South Africa people were not forced out of their country and did not suffer from this horrible system of oppression that Israel delivers.

In South Africa, the only solution was one-state with democratic rights for everybody. And this would not have happened if it weren't for the BDS, which eventually made the South African apartheid system understand that they would lose everything unless they stopped the system of apartheid. I believe there is a lot of similarity between our situation and South Africa's situation, and that's why I hope that some of the strategies that were used then can also work for Palestine today.