No Law, No Peace
There was, in fact, no mystery about Hamas’s real position prior to Israel’s all-out declaration of war on it. If prior to that Israel had said and meantit was ready to negotiate a full and final peace on the basis of a genuine two-state solution – one that would see Israel back to its pre-1967 borders with Jerusalem the capital of two states, Hamas would have said, “Let’s do the business”. And Hamas’s leaders would have said that and meant it because they are not stupid. They knew that a genuine two-state solution was still what the vast majority of Palestinians were prepared to settle for?. But how much longer that will remain the case is a good question.
In my analysis, Zionism’s own end-game strategy for a solution to the Palestine problem leaves nothing to the imagination. Israel’s leaders still believe that by means of brute force, reducing the Palestinians to abject poverty and more generally making life hell for them, they can break their will to continue the struggle for their rights. The Zionist assumption being that, at a point, and out of total despair, the Palestinians will be prepared to accept crumbs from Zionism’s table in the shape of two or three bantustans, or, better still, will abandon their homeland and seek a new life in other countries. In my view the conviction that Zionism will one day succeed in breaking the Palestinian will to continue the struggle for an acceptable minimum of justice is the product of minds which are deluded to the point of clinical madness. Some – including some Israelis – say that Israel is well on its way to becoming a fascist state. I think the more appropriate terminology is lunatic asylum.
The question that’s almost too awful to think about is something like this: What will the in-Israel Zionists do when it becomes apparent even to them that they can’t destroy Palestinian nationalism with bombs and bullets and brutal repressive measures of all kinds?
My guess is that they, the Zionists, will go for a final round of ethnic cleansing- to drive the Palestinians off the West Bank and into Jordan and beyond. That, I fear, will be Zionism’s final solution to the Palestine problem?? If that is allowed to happen, the West Bank (as well as the Gaza Strip) will be turned red with blood, mostly Palestinian blood. And honest reporters will describe it as a Zionist holocaust.
But that does not have to be the end of the story of Palestine. There still could be a new beginning.
Many years ago, in the Introduction to my first book, Arafat, Terrorist or Peacemaker?I said that, generally speaking, the Jews are the intellectual elite of the Western civilisation and the Palestinians the intellectual elite of the Arab world. What those two peoples could do together in peace and partnership was, I suggested, the stuff that real dreams are made of. They could change and develop the region for the better and, by so doing, give much needed hope and inspiration to the whole world. I still believe (perhaps I’m very naive) that dream could be made to come true, but only within the context of a One State solution to the Palestine problem. The only alternative I can see to One State for all is Catastrophe for All; and by “all” in the catastrophe scenario I don’t mean only the Jews and Arabs of the region, I mean all of us, no matter where we live.
Am I suggesting that a genuine and viable two-state solution is dead if not yet formally buried? Yes! Though the pragmatic Arafat prepared his people to be ready for such an unthinkable compromise, the truth is that Zionism has never been interested in peace on any terms the vast majority of Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept. That, I know, is a very big statement to make but there’s a mountain of evidence to support it including explicit statements by various Israeli leaders over the years. Zionism’s real position was and is as stated by Moshe Dayan many years ago: “It’s them or us.”
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