Can the world accept refusal to contemplate a one-state solution?

IWAS grateful to read Wael Shawish’s column in Saturday’s paper (I was born in occupied East Jerusalem – the war in Gaza is only one part of the story). It is far too rare to read or hear about Palestine’s situation from the Palestinian perspective.

However much we condemn the events of October 7, as we should, there is no denying that Hamas achieved something of a coup. For years, the Palestinian people of Gaza and the West Bank have suffered a daily grind of oppression and the rest of the world has studiously ignored it. Now at a stroke it is the foremost issue in the minds of the world.

Hamas is vilified as calling for the destruction of the State of Israel. As I understand it, this was once its position but now no longer is. Denying Israel’s “right to exist” seems to be held to be a vile instance of antisemitism.

To me, this question is not so black and white. The state was brought into existence by a campaign of terrorism and ethnic cleansing. In 1948 I think it would have been quite thinkable to call for Israel’s dissolution. The events are still in living memory – there are still people who lived through the Nakba, and younger Palestinians have parents and grandparents who did. It is hardly ancient history.

Israel holds itself up as a democracy but has been judged by Amnesty International and the Israeli human rights organisation B’tselem to be an apartheid state. As such it is no democracy.

Western leaders still talk feebly of the need for a “two-state” solution. Have they not noticed that this will never happen? All along, Israel has worked to ensure that it cannot.

In the 1980s, Netanyahu, no less, fostered and funded Hamas and said, explicitly, that creating an opposition to Fatah and dividing Palestinian opinion would prevent any Palestinian state from coming into existence.

After the Oslo accords of the early 1990s, there was supposed to be a winding down of illegal settlements in the occupied territories but there was no pause in their construction, which has in fact accelerated as time went by.

Israel never honoured the supposed agreement. The settlement programme is one of the strategies to make an independent Palestinian territory impossible.

If there were still any doubt, when Tzipi Hotovely (Israel’s ambassador to the UK), was interviewed on Sky News last week, she scornfully dismissed any idea that Israel would allow a two-state outcome. October 7 destroyed that possibility, she said, ignoring the fact that if Israel would only reach a just settlement with Palestine, the attack would not have happened.

The old Zionist slogan was “a land without people for a people without a land”. Palestine was never “without people” unless you regard the indigenous Palestinians as not people. The Israeli defence minister’s remark about “human animals” suggests to me that is in their government’s thinking.

Israel supposedly has a “right to defend itself”. By no stretch can what it is now doing be described as defence. It is a spasm of vindictive rage against a whole population.

Our political leaders are supplying the weaponry to allow this to continue, in full knowledge of how they are being used. If the United States in particular pulled the plug on the flow of weapons, it could stop this practically overnight. For this reason they are also guilty of genocide.

Biden has fruitlessly asked Netanyahu what his plan is for after the killing stops. Again, from the comments of Netanyahu’s ministers, there can be no doubt that they see the endgame as the elimination of all Palestinians from Gaza, either dead or forced to flee, presumably into Egypt, although Egypt has made clear it wants no part in this.

A few years ago, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations waved a Bible and announced it was their title deed to their country. We really are not dealing with a normal country here and it really should not exist in its current form. The only possible end to the conflict has to be one state. South Africa and Northern Ireland managed to reconcile hostile communities to live together. As it stands, Israel will never accept this.

Can we accept this in the modern world? Can we not demand that it become a normal, multi-cultural, multi-faith nation? Robert Moffat

Penicuik