Everyone’s attention today is concerned with the minutiae of internal Palestinian politics. Will a Palestinian unity government be formed? Can it stop Palestinian factional fighting? Will Israel and America deal with it? Will Hamas recognise Israel? And the like. In this flurry of activity, Israel’s occupation has almost been forgotten and the origins of the conflict have totally disappeared from view. And yet, it is only by returning to the roots of the problem, by reminding ourselves how flawed the Zionist project always was, that the solution can be found.
When the Zionists resolved in 1897 to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, they were aware that it was already home to an indigenous non-Jewish population. How to create and maintain a state for another people in a land already inhabited? Squaring that circle has been the essence of Israel’s dilemma ever since its establishment and the cause of the Palestinian tragedy that it led to. It could not have been otherwise, for what the Zionists envisaged was a project that was bizarre and, on the face of it, unworkable, namely to set up an ethnically defined, Jews-only collective existing on a land belonging to another people and to their exclusion.
Moreover, this new creation was supposed, irrespective of native opposition, to prosper in perpetuity. It was inevitable that a project necessitating the appropriation of a land already inhabited by a people defined as ethnically unacceptable could only have been realised by a mixture of force and coercion. To have any hope of long-term success, the new state thus created would have to maintain itself through constant military superiority and powerful backing by its creator, the West. The corollary to this was that the Arabs would have to remain too weak and disunited to offer much resistance, with the calculation that Israel’s powerful army would swiftly despatch any that arose.
This, in substance, is the Zionist project, whose main aims came to be realised in the creation of Israel in 1948, but which was never able to resolve the problem of how to get rid of the Palestinians. Not that the Israelis didn’t try in every way they could to make it happen. They expelled or caused the flight of three quarters of Palestine’s inhabitants in 1948, a black event in Palestinian history, called by them the Nakba or catastrophe ever afterwards.
From 1948 onwards, Israel made every attempt to erase all traces of the Arab presence in the country so as to destroy the Arab character and distinctive history of the old Palestine. Villages were demolished and place names changed throughout Palestine to new Hebrew ones, in an effort to eradicate the memory of the original inhabitants. No Palestinian was ever allowed back to reclaim his home, and Israel’s policy of not repatriating the refugees was never reversed, irrespective of the demands of international law, morality and common humanity. On the contrary, in the last six decades, Israel has taken every opportunity to expel more Palestinians -- during the 1967 war, when 250,000 people were displaced and from East Jerusalem when more were expelled through a variety of beaurocratic devices and tricks. Since the second Intifada, Israel has made life in the occupied territories a living hell, in the hope that the Palestinians will be compelled to leave.
Yet, these unrelenting efforts to eradicate the Palestinian presence in a country that Israelis considered to be Jewish and wholly theirs have still not succeeded. The number of Palestinians has only grown over time, such that by 2020, according to some estimates, they will from the majority in Israel/Palestine. Though occupied and oppressed, their political presence on the world stage is more firmly established than ever before. The idea that Palestinians should have their own state is universally accepted, even in Israel, and even though the Palestinian state’s exact borders and other features have not been agreed. Israel’s only answer to this situation has been more violence and more ‘facts on the ground’. Half the territory of the West Bank is in Israeli hands, Jerusalem is judaised beyond recognition, most of its land expropriated by Israel, and the scope for instability and increasing violence between the two sides is an increasing danger. No one is willing or able to control Israel’s behaviour, and so the problem seems be insoluble.
For decades now the two-state solution has been offered as the only way forward for Israelis and Palestinians. Those who continue stubbornly to advocate this solution have obviously never looked at a map of the occupied territories, or learned anything about the nature of Zionism. Israel’s policy of ‘creating facts’ on the ground has put the creation of a sovereign, viable Palestinian state out of reach, and thereby spelled the end of the two-state solutions. Israeli colonisation and segmentation of the West Bank proceeds unimpeded and the Palestinian territories supposed to form the state are now a jigsaw of Jewish colonies, bypass roads and barriers. Jerusalem is beyond the possibility of forming a Palestinian capital, and Gaza is stranded in an Israeli sea, unconnected to anywhere?
How to resolve this impasse? There is only one way: The key date in the genesis of this conflict is not 1967, as the two-state proponents implies, but 1948. Israel’s occupation of the 1967 territories is a symptom of the disease, not its cause. The obvious way to treat the cause is to create one-state in Israel/Palestine, to reverse the damage that Zionism did. Formidable as the difficulties will be of applying this solution, it is undeniably the only equitable and realistic way of sharing a land that both Israelis and Palestinians consider their own.
Ghada Karmi’s book, ‘Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine’, is published by Pluto Press in June.