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The Guardian
a day ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Palestinians don't need a state. We need justice
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
The Guardian
a day ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Palestinians don't need a state. We need justice
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
The Guardian
23-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
A biblical hatred is engulfing both sides in the Gaza conflict – and blinding them to reason
I sat this week with Hussein Agha, a man who has given his working life to seeking peace between Israelis and Palestinians, negotiating from the Palestinian side of the table. He was gloomier than I have ever seen him, adamant that peace between the two sides can never, ever come. Because, Agha explained, this conflict was not about mere lines on a map or forms of words, the goods in which diplomats trade. This was about emotions, and specifically hatreds. Hatreds that, he feared, are becoming too murderous to contain. 'It's biblical,' he said. What he had in mind was the fury that drove Hamas to slaughter around 1,200 Israelis on a sleepy Saturday morning nearly 20 months ago and the fury that has driven the government of Benjamin Netanyahu to bombard Gaza ever since, killing more than 50,000, according to the Hamas-controlled health ministry, and, over the last 80 days, denying food to those who remain. He fears that the hatreds that fuelled these events, and that are fuelled by them, will grow larger and more venomous until nothing and no one is left. The whole land shall be laid waste and made desolate. A biblical rage is one that devours all reason. It is blinding. It prevents those who are gripped by it from seeing anything other than their own side. It prevents them holding two apparently opposed thoughts in their minds, even when both are true. Take, as an example, two statements we can make about the events of this week. Israel's use of hunger as a weapon of war, keeping humanitarian aid out of Gaza for some 11 weeks, is a morally indefensible act that has, rightly, outraged the world. The partial lifting of the blockade supplies the tiniest fraction of what is needed and represents, by Netanyahu's own admission, the 'minimal' amount he can get away with to keep US political support. That is a fact. The deadly assault on the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington DC on Wednesday night was a morally indefensible act that left two young people dead. The pair were staffers at the Israeli embassy, but all the evidence suggests they were struck at random. Even if he was heard chanting 'Free Palestine' or 'I did it for Gaza', the gunman's target was a Jewish institution filled with Jews. That makes it an antisemitic act. That too is a fact. And yet, people struggle to hold both facts at once. They fear that by acknowledging one, they will somehow weaken the force of the other. Some seized on the killings in Washington to downplay the killings in Gaza; others did the reverse. In the first category were those who used the deaths of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim to argue that even to speak about the agony currently inflicted on Gaza by Israel is to incite terrorism. That was the move made by Netanyahu himself, a man never slow to exploit Jewish suffering for his own narrow political purposes. Earlier in the week, France, Canada and the UK had joined together to denounce Israel's escalating offensive in Gaza and especially its policy of hunger, described in March by Israel's defence minister as one of the country's 'main pressure levers' against Hamas. The shootings in DC gave Netanyahu an opening to hit back. 'I say to President Macron, Prime Minister Carney and Prime Minister Starmer, when mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers thank you, you're on the wrong side of justice,' the Israeli PM said, before deploying a phrase once favoured by the left: 'You're on the wrong side of history.' His argument amounts to the claim, often made, that those who draw attention to the consequences of Israeli policy are guilty of 'delegitimising' Israel. It does not occur to Netanyahu or his allies that what might undermine Israeli legitimacy in the eyes of a watching world is not the condemnation of Israel's actions, or the reporting of them, but the actions themselves. Again, two statements, apparently in tension, can be true at the same time. Journalists who this week demanded that Israel and Egypt make Gaza accessible to international news organisations were right to do so: the facts need to be known. Those facts, once known, may well drive people into a state of rage – even murderous rage – which is why they have to be handled with scrupulous care. And so, the UN humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, has been right to be clear and full-throated in his demands for Israel to let food and medicine into Gaza, but was wrong to suggest that 14,000 babies in Gaza would die within 48 hours – a statement that later had to be corrected, because that warning applied to what would happen if the state of siege was maintained not for another 48 hours, but for a full year. Grave enough, but not the same. Deep and lethal hatreds are at work here; people can be stirred to violence very easily. There is little room to be casual. I would say the same of Yair Golan, a former general and now leader of Israel's opposition Democrats party. He deserves credit for demanding Israelis face up to and look hard at what so many prefer not to see. This week he warned, 'Israel is on the way to becoming a pariah state, like South Africa was, if we don't return to acting like a sane country,' adding that 'a sane country does not fight against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not give itself the aim of expelling populations.' That reference to baby-killing, the use of the word 'hobby', immediately allowed his critics to say he was reviving the antisemitic blood libel that cast Jews as the ritual slayers of Christian children. This whole terrain is perilous and has to be navigated with great care, whether from within the conflict or without – and, again, that means realising that two things can be true at once. Yes, it's true that anti-Zionism is not always antisemitic. But that doesn't mean it's never antisemitic. Gary Lineker thought he was posting an anti-Zionist video. He failed to see it came attached to antisemitic imagery, in the form of a rat, a favourite Nazi shorthand for Jew. That episode was a reminder that, much as we might want these categories to be neat and hermetically sealed – 'Zionism' over here and fair game for attack; 'Jews' over there and protected by anti-racism – the boundary between them is blurred and porous. A man in Washington was angry with Israel and it was a Jewish museum that ended up under deadly fire. There are countless distinctions like that to be made; complex, apparently contradictory statements to be held in mind all at the same time. But it's impossible to see them when blinded by a rage and loathing that will not be quelled, when blinded by mutual hatred of biblical proportions. Agha no longer likes to speak in terms of peace or resolving the conflict, but rather of more modest 'arrangements' that might keep these furies in check. Either way, one way or the other, this needs to end. Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
