I never imagined agreeing with Bibi Netanyahu. But
there, just before the Israeli election, outright rejection of an independent
Palestinian state. Hallelujah!
Forget his post-victory back peddling. It's what we always knew. But now Bibi has opened the door to the only sustainable alternative: one democratic state (ODS) for all between the River Jordan and Mediterranean. One country for all its citizens, the national home of two peoples. Voting rights for all, Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) just like their 600,000 Jewish- Israeli settler neighbors.
Implicitly Bibi acknowledges that Israel-Palestine has already emerged as a de facto one state, the "Green Line" having been eroded by Jewish settlers pouring into the West Bank. As former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, Meron Benvenisti, put it," "You cannot unscramble that egg."
In truth, it would not have mattered which Jewish-Israeli party had won, left or right. Each is Zionist, devoted to maintaining Jewish hegemony at the expense of democracy for all its citizens. Even if Palestinians were to agree to the fragmented "state-let" Israel disingenuously proposed in the past, this "two state solution" would do nothing for greater legal and political realities:
First, it would not end apartheid within Israel. Racism is untenable but as in South Africa and Jim Crow U.S., only institutionalized, " legal" racism is "apartheid" under the UN's International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, and International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD). Israel, by law, has institutionalized privilege of Jews over non-Jews within Israel and the OPT, defining itself as the state of the Jews worldwide rather than the country of all its citizens:
For example, the 2011 [Bertrand] Russell Tribunal on Palestine, lists Israeli laws and legislation giving exclusive land and citizenship rights to Jewish-Israelis, and despite Palestinian citizens ability to vote, "the tribunal concludes that Israel's rule over the Palestinian people, wherever they reside, collectively amounts to a single integrated regime of apartheid."
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cerd/docs/CERD.C.ISR.CO.14-16.pdf
Jewish-Israeli anthropologist Uri
Davis describes the process by which quasi-governmental agencies--World Zionist
Organization, Jewish Agency and Jewish National Fund--maintain Israel's
discriminatory land polities, committed to serving interests of Jews alone. "It
is through this mechanism of legal duplicity . . . , that the State of Israel
has successfully veiled the reality of Zionist apartheid in the guise of legal
democracy. . . ." (Apartheid Israel, p. 48, 2003).
By such "legal" land control mechanisms,
Palestinian citizens of Israel can access only about 7 percent of the land, a
situation worse than apartheid South Africa's "influx control" policy
restricting black South Africans to 13 percent of the land.
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