Palestinians don't need a state. We need justice

The Guardian

3 days ago

There are few things the pro-Israel side gets right. But on one point – the Palestinians' rejection of two states – they've been more-or-less correct. For me, and many others, the fundamental injustice of the establishment of the state of Israel – which occurred through massive, deliberate and purposeful ethnic cleansing designed to create a Jewish majority in historic Palestine – meant that Israel never really attained moral legitimacy among Palestinians. As Robert Malley and Hussein Agha write in their new book, Tomorrow Is Yesterday: 'deep down, most Palestinians, though ready to accept Israel's existence, have not accepted its historical legitimacy', a statement whose veracity I can attest to.
I remember being a 15-year-old in Palestine. I remember being held up at checkpoints in the West Bank, and being unable to visit Jerusalem or Israel because of the color of my ID card, in effect, because of my race. I could see how unjust, how retrograde, the entire basis of Israel was. No amount of German or western guilt over the Holocaust would make accept the idea that Jewish supremacy in Palestine was somehow desirable, or just. I think that continues to be true for the overwhelming majority of Palestinians. Possibly, for the overwhelming majority of humanity in the post-colonial global south.
That's not to say that the political process – which commenced in Madrid and Oslo –wasn't undertaken in good faith by sincere and earnest people. I know some of the negotiators on the Palestinian side, like Diana Buttu, a principled advocate for Palestinian rights for decades now. Daniel Levy, who negotiated for the Israelis, has been an outspoken opponent of Israeli apartheid and the genocide in Gaza, and a formidable critic of the peace process in the past 20 years.
At its height in 1995, the Oslo process, which was supposed to produce a Palestinian state, but more importantly, an end to claims, commanded the support of two-thirds of Palestinians. Many of them, like my parents, were prepared to close a chapter on history, to swallow their grievances so that their children may live. Similarly, the Palestinian negotiators I've met in the past two decades each understood the basic deficit of justice, the imbalance in the ledger, but they sought to abort a conflict which has ravenously claimed the future at every turn.
In many cases their intentions were honorable.
And yet, the failure of the Peace Process was pre-ordained, readily apprehensible to anyone who lived in the Occupied Territories in the 1990s, when the settlements truly metastasized. It should have been obvious to anyone with a map and a history book, too. That's because Zionism, Israel's animating ideology, adheres to classically European colonialism, which continues to be the best framework for understanding Palestine/Israel. Writing in October 2003 in the New York Review of Books, the moral thinker and historian Tony Judt described Israel as 'an anachronism', essentially a throwback to the Belgian Congo or 18th century Australia. Israel's extermination of native life in Gaza is anachronistic, too. It rhymes, in the worst way.
There were glaring structural reasons for Oslo's failure as well. The fact that many of the American negotiators were Zionists was under-reported, and under-appreciated. Dennis Ross, who led the American team, is a Zionist, indistinguishable to my eyes from Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, two former Israeli prime ministers. Bill Clinton, who was president at the time, recently referred to 'Judea and Samaria', coded Zionist language for the occupied West Bank. In effect, Oslo pitted a stateless people against two nuclear-armed states led by people who were fundamentally invested in Jewish supremacy in Palestine.
Emmanuel Macron's decision to recognize a Palestinian state in September amounts to little, as Donald Trump noted. I do not know Macron's intentions, but the Palestinians have never really warmed to European and American condescension, which is implicit in every conditional statement, every contingent incrementalism. Mark Carney's strange, confused statement that Canada would only accept a 'Zionist Palestinian state' is grimly entertaining for anyone with a basic grasp of the issues. Anyone who isn't a dilettante, in other words.
Now, in the midst of a genocide, the Palestinians are best served by abandoning any effort to attain self-rule in the Occupied Territories. A reorientation towards basic rights is overdue, along with recognition the Palestinian struggle was never really about a seat at the United Nations, representation in Unesco, or Fifa. The force of the Palestinian cause rests in one principle: justice.
Two years ago I thought justice meant a single state with equal rights between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. But now, the Palestinians are confronted by a difficulty: no one is able to articulate what justice means in the wake of so much slaughter, of so many dead men, women and children, dead babies. The genocide has changed my perspective on the majority of Jewish Israelis, and once they retire their guns and mortars – as one day they surely will – we will have to reckon with the moral, and actual, wreckage of their century-long Sturm und Drang, their violent ejaculations, in Palestine.
Ahmed Moor is a writer and fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace