Who Won the U.S. Presidential Debate?

It would be helpful to clarify what the Palestinians are really being offered as part of this much-lauded solution to the conflict in Israel-Palestine.

Evidence of genocide in Palestine has inspired several prominent onlookers in Western media and academia to offer up “solutions”. This means the resurfacing of the so-called two-state solution, ie providing Palestinians with their own nation-state – one that would coexist peacefully with Israel.

Imperialism or “international diplomacy” might concoct a thing and call it a state. A state to run alongside the real state. A sidecar nation. A state one part dinner joke, two parts prison warden. The “State of Palestine”, albeit saddled with a more questionable “right to exist”, may indeed feature in the next stage in the evolution of settler-colonialism in Palestine.

But we have seen the births of such “post”-colonies before – colonies being renamed “independent countries” and expected to remain on good behaviour for the benefit and security of their former masters. Is this what is envisioned in the two-state solution? Is the second state to be a second-class state? A Palestine that exists at the enemy’s pleasure and obligated to ensure the security of its enemies? Its elected (or selected) leaders paid off to stem the flow of the displaced (to be renamed “migrants”) still attempting to return to their taken land? Where the settler oppression of “insurgent Arabs” is delegated to the new postcolonial state’s police so that colonial violence can be represented as “political violence”? And explained at lecterns and news desks as the “repressive instincts of a culture prone to authoritarianism”? Where the torture of resistors and beating of protesters is no longer settler-colonialism’s trade but now “yet another failure of democracy in the developing world?” Will the Israeli military leave Gaza like South African police left Soweto during apartheid – and fulfil the promise of a more ethnically representative baton strike?

• Read More