Futility of the two-state solution
by
Khalid Amayreh*

Source: Palestine Times February 2001 (Ptimes.com)

It is not hard to realize what prompted the Zionist regime to adopt the so-called “two-State solution” as the most expedient political device to end the Palestine question.
We all know that reaching true peace with the Palestinians and other Arabs and Muslims in the region has never been a real Zionist consideration.

Indeed, decades of Israeli bellicosity, aggression and hostile alliances amply testify to the Zionist aversion to peace and peaceful coexistence with neighbours. Moreover, Israeli leaders on the right and left don’t seem to have been suddenly transformed into true peace-lovers believing in generosity and self-abnegation.

In fact, the Zionists realize well that the two-State solution is in reality no more than a euphemism for the liquidation of the Palestine question.

They are absolutely right. The two-State solution would enable the Jewish State to arrogate 80%-84% of mandatory Palestine and deny the vast bulk of the estimated 4-5 million Palestinian refugees their inalienable right to return to their hometowns and villages from which they were expelled at gunpoint by Zionist troops and irregulars, or fled in fear, when the Zionist regime was established in 1948.

Furthermore, the scandalous arrangement would conceivably allow the Zionists, perhaps at some point in the future, to deport the already sizeable and growing Palestinian population still living in pre-1967 Palestine to the adjacent Palestinian “State” on the grounds that “this is our State and that is yours.”

Geographically and demographically, the two-State solution is nothing short of a gigantic scandal.

The nearly 8 million Palestinians worldwide would be given the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which make up less than 22% of Palestine and which are already congested beyond capacity (the Gaza Strip has the highest population density on earth).

In contrast, the estimated 5 million Jews now living in Palestine would be given the remaining 78%, along with the lion’s share of underground water, economic resources, arable land and other basic infrastructure essential for making a State viable and sustainable.

More to the point, the outlook for the two-State solution would even look grimmer and bleaker for the Palestinians if a significant number of Jewish settlements were allowed to remain in the West Bank because then we wouldn’t be really speaking about a prospective serious State or even a quasi-State but rather about a big joke, even if metaphorically called a Palestinian “State” and celebrated by the capitals of the world as the “ultimate embodiment and consummation of Palestinian national yearning for freedom and liberation.”

Now, what logic if any is there for accepting such an obscene obliquity? Would the Palestinian leadership be so gullible and so drunk to sign away Palestinian rights? Indeed, what kind of “peace” would emanate from the perpetuation of all these inequities and injustices which Palestinians have endured (and continue to endure) since the misbegotten birth of the Zionist regime, the source of all evils in the region.

Besides, what right does the Palestinian Authority and its aging leader Yasser Arafat have to allow ethnic cleansing to win?

It has absolutely no right, and that must be made crystal clear to Arafat and his advisors.

We are not here talking merely about symbolic values only, but rather about tangible material rights that don’t and won’t become obsolete with the passage of time.

Clearly, the recent signing of the “oath of return” by so many Palestinian refugees in Palestine as well as in the Diaspora is a clarion message to the world that the Zionist thieves will have to return whatever they had stolen to the original owners. Or else, how could there ever be a real peace that is worth the name?

A “peace” that is built on the perpetuation and “legitimization” of the biggest act of thievery in history, even if sustained by sheer military power and economic bribery, will not last for a long time.

This humane and equitable solution would necessarily require the dissolution and dismantling of the Zionist regime (Israel) and the establishment in Palestine of a democratic, non-racist, multi-religious and multi-ethnic civil State in which Jews, Muslims and Christians live together in peace and equality.

Such would be the State of Palestine of, for and by all its citizens irrespective of race and faith. A State where religious freedoms and justice are guaranteed for all. A State without checkpoints and roadblocks and without a justice system based on evil racism whereby child killers go free because the victim is perceived to be a child of a lesser God and the murderer a member of a chosen race.

Can’t an egalitarian State as such be a more humane alternative to the truncation of Palestine into “two States” laden with huge inventories of mutual bitterness and dormant enmities awaiting the first historical opportunity to explode into a fresh war?

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* Khalid Amayreh lives in the West Bank Town of Al Khalil (Hebron) and is the Editor in Chief of the Khalil Times.