On Israel and Palestine- Part 8
Introduction:
The creation of the state of Israel almost 80 years ago and the conflict between its citizens and the displaced Palestinians and surrounding countries has become one of the most polarizing geopolitical topics in popular discourse. Those with any “skin in the game,” so to speak, (eg. Israelis, Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, Jews) probably have very strong beliefs about which “side” is in the right, and the actual facts and events occurring on the ground are unlikely to significantly change those beliefs, myself included. Discourse about this conflict across all forms of media is rampant in an attempt to sway public opinion, with wild claims being made to justify the actions of one side or another. It’s obviously a very complex topic and I encourage anyone interested in an in-depth look at Palestine to do their own research and reading, while being very critical of what biases sources may have.
The purpose of this series of essays is to give some basic background information for those with relatively little knowledge of the conflict and its history, to help clarify some of the conflicting and opposing claims you will often hear online or in the news, and help explain why I believe the actions of the state of Israel definitively put them on the wrong side of history and merit harsh criticism.
This will be an 8-part series that I will post over the following weeks/months, with this identical introduction in each. I will list sources I referred to at the end of each post but, as this is not an academic treatise, the formatting will be informal and will not be embedded into the text itself.
Parts 1-3 are going to give some historical background on the region. One of the fundamental arguments made by both sides in the conflict is that the land belongs to them on a historical basis. It is helpful then, to have a basic overview of the broad strokes of history and what populations lived there at various points throughout history. This will be an extremely basic summary, as you could read books on each of these periods in history and still have a lot to learn.
Parts 4-8 are going to be formatted essentially as responses to frequent claims made in defense of Israel and will cover a variety of topics, including Israeli behavior in relation to the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors, the relationship between the US and Israel, and what the future may hold.
This is Part 8, where we will discuss the possible various solutions for the conflict and what the future may hold.
I highly recommend reading these essays in order, and you can find the other essays here:
Part 1- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-1/
Part 2- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-2/
Part 3- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-3/
Part 4- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-4/
Part 5- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-5/
Part 6- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-6/
Part 7- https://sunflowers.ghost.io/on-israel-and-palestine-part-7/
Is there any way you can shoehorn in leftist politics before you wrap up these essays?
I won’t belabor this point too long, as I feel like it’s pretty self-explanatory how those who ascribe to leftist ideologies and philosophies are going to find a settler-colonial project reprehensible.
It is maybe worth mentioning that ironically, many early Zionists were themselves secular nationalists who believed in socialist views on labor, though this did not prevent the hypocritical reliance on settler-colonialism to establish their state. Of course now, in the last few decades, the “left” in Israeli politics has grown progressively weaker, marginalized, and irrelevant, and the governing coalitions in the Israeli government are much more right-wing and overtly religious.
For some leftist perspectives, I’ll draw from an excellent article written by Alain Alameddine published on 5/26/26. Karl Marx (that most foundational of leftists, an ethnic Jew, though an avowed atheist), in his analysis of the dynamics between capitalist and worker, reached the conclusion that the exploitation of the worker would inevitably lead to revolution. Yet, in the most industrialized societies, where this was predicted to happen more rapidly, this did not occur (and in fact happened more commonly in agrarian societies with limited industrial capacity). It was the work of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist that helped explain this contradiction.
Gramsci would posit that those in power help to propagate their exploitative system in part through cultural hegemony, where they propagate a system of values and beliefs that portrays the current reality as common sense. Once society views the reality as inescapable and the natural order of things, it accepts that system, and the masses will thereafter not even consider changing it because the current system is thought to be inevitable and natural.
Through the control of the media that we are exposed to, America’s politicians and media moguls seek to convince us that the current state of affairs in the Middle East, the oppression of the Palestinians, is the inevitable and natural order of things. We must strive to be aware of this tactic, and not let it lead us to malaise and inaction due to a sense of hopelessness.
I’ll finish by shoehorning in this quote from Karl Marx in 1875 that discusses Poland, divided as it was in the 19th century by Russia, Austria, and Prussia, but I think you can see that if you did not know it was about Poland, it could almost letter-for-letter be about Palestine:
“First of all, of course, sympathy for a subjugated people which, with its incessant and heroic struggle against its oppressors, has proven its historic right to national autonomy and self-determination. It is not in the least a contradiction that the international workers’ party strives for the creation of the Polish nation. On the contrary, only after Poland has won its independence again, only after it is able to govern itself again as a free people, only then can its inner development begin again and can it cooperate as an independent force in the social transformation of Europe. As long as the independent life of a nation is suppressed by a foreign conqueror it inevitably directs all its strength, all its efforts, and all its energy against the external enemy; during this time, therefore, its inner life remains paralysed; it is incapable of working for social emancipation.”
What is the one-state solution? What is the two-state solution? Why hasn’t either one been implemented?
The one-state solution is, simply, the idea that all of the former British Mandate of Palestine should be a single nation, within which Arabs and Jews live together as equals. This has generally been an unpopular idea amongst Israelis because it would result in Jews no longer being a majority in Israel. If you include the ~2 million Israeli-Arabs, the ~5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and the exiled Palestinians in other countries who would want to return, the ~8 million Jews currently in Israel may find soon find themselves outnumbered. For many Israeli Jews, the Jewish character of the nation is of vital importance, and is an inherent part of the Zionist ideology. There’s also the practical matter of what will happen to the Jews who have been living in the land that Palestinians were kicked out of 80 years ago when those Palestinians want to return?
The two-state solution is ostensibly what was agreed to in the Oslo Accords of 1993. It is the idea that Israel would exist on the land the Jews captured after the 1948 War, while the West Bank and Gaza would be part of a Palestinian state. We’ve previously discussed how this has been undermined: Israel blockades Gaza and ultimately has “remote” control of its infrastructure, land, airspace, and territorial waters; while the majority of the West Bank is still directly under Israeli occupation (Zone/Area C) and Israel continues to move more settlers into the West Bank. Many on the Israeli right believe that the West Bank (or as they refer to it, Judea and Samaria) is historically supposed to be a part of Israel, and are not willing to concede it to the Palestinians (hence, why Rabin was assassinated after Oslo). Gaza is also too small to really be a viable nation on its own, and so there would need to be some concession by Israel to connect it to the West Bank if they are to form a viable country. Of course, Gaza and the West Bank are ruled by different political parties that hate each other so that’s another thing that would need to be sorted out, even if the Israelis allowed the two separated enclaves to connect. A two-state solution also does not address the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living outside of the country who are the descendants of people driven away from territory that is currently in Israel.
So both of these possible “solutions for peace” have significant hurdles to overcome to be a reasonable solution.
What do you think are some alternate solutions?
While the one- and two-state solutions are what we most commonly hear in popular discourse (and really, nowadays only the two-state solution is discussed), there are other possibilities.
First of all, I think it’s important to establish that a just solution has to take into account the ancestral right of the Palestinians to return to land in Israel that they were driven from in 1948. This is not ancient history after all, some of those who were exiled are still alive, and if not, then their children are still alive. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that there are Israelis who are living in that land (potentially for several generations now) who may themselves have not participated in the ethnic cleansing that founded their nation, and any just solution has to take both of these factors into account. To simply say that too much time has passed, and the land belongs to Israelis now, is to ensure that this moral injustice persists, and that the exiles will continue to try to find avenues to return, by force if needed.
One possible solution, is to have Egypt annex Gaza and Jordan annex the West Bank, this was the situation that existed between 1948 and 1967. This would provide some measure of protection for the Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank, and the barrier for Israeli abuses is much higher if they have to invade a sovereign nation to do it. These are also Arab countries that are Muslim majority, which the Palestinians (the Muslim ones, anyway) will have a lot in common with, culturally. Of course, neither one of those countries has any interest whatsoever in annexing these territories, and we’ve discussed earlier in this series why that is the case. For Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza who were exiled from land that is currently in Palestine, there is a high likelihood that they would continue to launch attacks into Israel (as was the case from 1948 to 1967), and neither the Egyptian or Jordanian governments want to antagonize Israel. This “solution” also doesn’t account for the Palestinian right of return into land that is currently in Israel.
My dream, (and I fully acknowledge that this is not likely to happen, and as time passes from the signing of Sykes-Picot, it becomes increasingly unlikely), is for all of the Middle East and North Africa to unite into a single country based on the commonality of the use of the Arabic language. This would include Israel, since as recently as 80 years ago the vast majority of the country was Arabs. This would be a secular country, with a relatively weak central government that would primarily be responsible for ensuring free trade within its borders, managing the military, and other civic aspects that make more sense to be run by a central authority (eg. a healthcare system, or transportation/infrastructure standards for example). Otherwise, the country would be divided into smaller provinces based on more granular demographic, religious, and cultural breakdowns (for example, areas of Israel that are predominantly Jewish could be their own state, the Kurds could have their province, the Druze in Israel, Syria, and Lebanon could have their own province, the eastern half of Iraq that is predominantly Shia might be its own province, etc.) such that each of these provinces is given wide latitude with the laws within its own territory to ensure people are able to live following laws that agree with them, while each area is given representation within the legislative body of the central government, and the executive of the central government can come from different provinces in a rotating fashion. A federalized system that has some parallels to the early American government after independence from the British. Of course, there is no real movement pushing for such a unification, and this description is purely an indulgence of mine.
What I think is slightly more realistic, and is the ideal solution for Israel and Palestine is the one-state solution occurring in a graduated fashion. Ultimately, there will not be peace in the region unless the Arabs and Jews learn to live alongside one another, and the unification of both peoples in one nation is the ideal solution. However, there is a lot of animosity between the two groups to simply dissolve the borders between Israel and Gaza and the West Bank and expect it to work out well. It is probably reasonable for a transition period of two states, with a Palestinian state in a combined West Bank and Gaza, not under the Israeli thumb (meaning no settlements, no blockades, no checkpoints, no controlling the flow of water and electricity into the land). After a proven period of stability and the two countries getting along, they would then integrate into a single country. In the preparation for this unification, a new constitution would need to be created to enshrine important political rights regardless of a citizen’s ethnicity or religion, and the nation itself would need to be secular given the mix of Jews, Muslims, and Christians within it. Preparations would need to be made to allow for the return of the Palestinian exiles, and new housing would need to be made in the villages/towns/cities they were exiled from (in lieu of displacing Jews that have been living in these areas for decades). A general amnesty would need to be implemented, and any revenge killings on either side would need to be punished harshly. This solution would also allow for continued movement of Jews into the West Bank, should they feel religiously compelled to live in that land.
Obviously, this is very much a utopian vision, but it is the best avenue for long term peace in the region that sees Israel become another country in the Middle East among equals, rather than continue as a Western settler-colonial project that “bullies” all of its neighbors and leads to hatred without end between Jews and Arabs. The main obstacle to this, is that as the party with significantly more wealth, power, and control of the land, in order to bring the Palestinians up to parity to allow both peoples to share the land as equals, the Israelis would necessarily have to make concessions that thus far, they have been completely unwilling to make, and no one is willing to apply the pressure needed to bring them to the negotiating table to make these concessions that can put the country on a meaningful path to peace.
What is the future likely to hold?
It’s always a tricky business predicting the future. There are some easy patterns to comment on since Israel’s formation, however. First of all, Israel has had a tremendous amount of success being aggressive towards its neighbors. It has won every war it has waged against its neighbors and gained large amounts of territory from it. Even in conflicts where they don’t meet their stated objectives (eg. the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the 2006 invasion of Lebanon), they walk away from the conflict having inflicted many more casualties on the enemy than they suffer.
Recent years have seen the virtual total ascendancy of hawkish right-wing governmental coalitions in Israel. These political factions have had great political success by taking a “hardline” stance against Palestinians and their other Arab neighbors. This confrontational approach to the Palestinians, nominally meant to crush resistance to Israeli oppression, only encourages further resistance. As we’ve pointed out multiple times in this essay series, the behavior of the Israelis has shown that the Israelis will not negotiate with them in good faith, and have left the only avenue for change as armed resistance. But this is, I suspect, by design. When the Palestinians fight back, it further pushes the Israeli populace to the right, and keeps the right-wing coalitions in power. Because of the sheer imbalance in power between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the Palestinians are not able to cause enough damage to the Israelis to cause the Israeli population to rethink the efficacy of these “hardline” policies. Unfortunately, this is a difficult cycle to escape from, and I struggle to see in the near future how to escape this cycle that pushes Israeli politics further to the right (because, in the short-term, it’s working out nicely for the Israelis, though this comes at the expense of horrific abuses of the Arabs).
When we look at what the Israeli stance seems to be towards the West Bank and Gaza, the future looks grim. While Gaza has been in fairly dire straits since at least 2005, since October 2023 virtually all major urban areas have been leveled, 80,000 have been killed, infrastructure is nonexistent, and the remaining Palestinians live on the razor’s edge of poverty, famine, and sickness. 70% of the Gaza strip has been directly occupied by the Israeli military, with profound surveillance and regular raids and airstrikes on the remaining 30%. It’s hard to believe that the Israeli military will withdraw in the near future. In the West Bank, the Israeli government continues to promote settlements and makes life hell for the Palestinians through the use of settler attacks, destruction of infrastructure, destruction of homes, restriction of building permits, destruction of agricultural land, security checkpoints, and the ever-present threat of violence. It is clear that this current government has no intention of working towards an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, and their behavior indicates an intent to annex these areas outright in the near future.
One must wonder, if the West Bank and Gaza are annexed, what is going to happen to the people there? In the event of annexation, there are only 3 possibilities: the remaining Palestinians will be codified as lower-status guest workers without legal protections (a continuation of the current apartheid dynamic), they will be ethnically cleansed and driven into Egypt or across the Jordan River (or else massacred), or they will be granted full Israeli citizenship and rights (a sort of one-state solution, exceedingly unlikely to occur in the current Israeli political climate where successive elections seem to reinforce the popularity of the right-wing).
Any hope for peace in the future has to start with abandoning the Israeli strategy of oppressing and killing the Palestinians until they no longer wish to fight (ie. to “beat the violence out of them”), and should instead revolve around the idea that improvement of Palestinian living conditions and treating them like people with rights is the first step towards bringing them to the negotiating table and showing that there is an alternative to violence.
But what incentive does Israel have to look for peace? They have done so very well with war for almost 80 years, that what incentive do they have to come to a negotiating table, if their more powerful patron refuses to pressure them to stop their excesses of violence and persecution and negotiate in good faith?
If there is to be peace then, and a peace that does not come at the price of annihilation of the Palestinians, the US must stop support to Israel. As we’ve previously covered in this series, the US provides virtually unlimited financial, military, and diplomatic support to Israel. So long as Israel has such an ally in the form of the world’s dominant superpower, what possible incentive do they have to curb their behavior that has served them so well for 80 years? Why would they make any concessions to the Palestinians? If the Palestinians don’t like it, and decide to fight back, 50 are killed for every dead Israeli. This is fundamentally the issue at the heart of this conflict. When one side is vastly stronger than the other, negotiations cannot happen in good faith.
Along this line of thinking, I will say, unequivocally here, that there is nothing inherently evil about the Jews of Israel. It is simply human nature; the logical course of action when they have faced minimal tangible consequences for their treatment of the Palestinians and have known nothing but military dominance. Why abandon a strategy that works well for your own people? Why make concessions to people you view as your enemy when you have no reason to, when you know that you can dominate your enemy’s military and punish them a hundred-fold for any slight against you?
There is reason to be pessimistic. One possible future is that the US will continue its unlimited support of Israel, which will allow Israel to continue its belligerent behavior towards its neighbors, and Gaza and the West Bank will be annexed. The Palestinians will be driven out or massacred. Surrounding Arab states, faced with no reasonable prospect for military success against Israel will normalize relations (even if their populations are sympathetic towards the Palestinians). And ultimately, as the years pass and the descendants of the Palestinians-in-exile age and new generations grow up away from their homeland, the Palestinian cause will be abandoned. The reality is that the historical precedent with which we are faced is that the natives displaced by settler-colonialism lose. They lose their land, their independence, their culture, and their lives. And the colonists face no consequences as a result.
If I’m not happy about the state of Israeli dominance in the Middle East, what can I do? It feels hopeless.
What I’ve just described is just one possible future of many. It may seem like the Middle East is destined to be embroiled in endless wars, but we should consider that this was the case in Europe until 80 years ago, so while there is reason to be pessimistic, there is room for cautious optimism as well. So let’s end on what actions we can take.
Obviously, I am not here to encourage you to do anything illegal. I’m not suggesting you go join a Palestinian militia or give money to an organization designated by the US as a terrorist organization, righteous though their cause may be. But as we’ve previously established, a requirement for actually moving towards peace is cessation of American support for Israel. Israel must feel pressured to negotiate in good faith.
So if you are an American, and if this is an issue you care about, you should make it a point to not vote for any politician that does not pledge to stop American support for Israel (when it makes sense, it probably doesn’t matter for your local schoolboard elections, but it certainly matters for your senator or presidential elections). Even if one side is worse than another, if this is an issue that matters to you, don’t compromise on it. Just looking at the last presidential election, yes Trump is worse for the Palestinians than Harris would have been, but if we keep letting candidates skate by on being the “lesser evil”, the political establishment is not going to feel any pressure to stop support for Israel. Make it loud and clear to those running for office: your vote is contingent on stopping American aid for Israel.
And yes, other issues are important. Economic inequality at home is important. The environment is important. Immigration is important. Protection of ethnic and religious minorities is important. Funding education is important. Maintaining our infrastructure is important. Having public safety nets for our society’s most vulnerable is important. LGBT rights are important. But the fact that our tax dollars are used to provide weapons to a nation that is using those arms to commit genocide is more important, and by virtue of the fact that it is our labor that generates the governmental revenue that facilitates the abuse of the Palestinians, not one of us (ie. Americans) is innocent.
So make your beliefs clear to those running for office, and spread the word among your community. I know it can be dangerous to speak out, and many, many people have faced devastating consequences in their lives and career for publicly speaking out against Israel. But make people aware of what is done in our name. Pressure the government into stopping American support for Israel at a minimum, but while we are stating our goals, we should strive for more. It’s obviously not realistic for American troops to land in Israel as liberators of the Palestinians, sure, but pressure must be applied to the Israelis. Cessation of US aid yes, but what if we applied sanctions to them? Made their people feel unwelcome wherever in the world that they travel? Or ban Israelis outright from visiting the country so long as Palestinians are oppressed. They claim to be a democracy, so every Israeli citizen, Arab or Jew, is also culpable for their government’s actions. If every Palestinian in Gaza is treated like Hamas, treat every Israeli like Likud. How would things change if this could be accomplished?
Israel is obviously in a position of tremendous strength, and we must not forget that it is a nuclear power with hundreds of nuclear warheads, but it is also in a more tenuous position than it may seem. It may seem unstoppable, but ultimately, they have had the advantage of limitless American support. If the political winds should change in the US, if that aid were to be cut off, yes they will still have a powerful economy and a powerful military, but one that is subject to the ever-changing fluctuations of a global market and one that is isolated and surrounded by countries hostile to it (and deservedly so, given their history of belligerence to their neighbors). Public opinion in the US is turning against Israel, and more of the public is beginning to question the sheer amount of support given to Israel after the immense amount of death they have dealt out in Gaza and Lebanon, and for the geopolitical disaster they’ve dragged us into with the war against Iran. Never before have so many people (even some public officials) been so vocal about supporting cessation of aid to Israel.
In such a situation where they lose American support, rather than endless belligerence, Israel would be better served to try to foster the friendship of the Arabs, to try to fit in as part of the community of states in the Middle East (and to that end, perhaps work towards the last of the solutions I outlined above), rather than their current approach of setting themselves apart as a Western settler-colonial project with an aggressive attitude. All this does is ensure that they will be locally isolated, and have the Arab powers always looking for a sign of weakness (even if the Arab governments themselves normalize, the Arab people will remember the abuse they or the Palestinians were subjected to by the Israelis). That weakness will eventually occur, that much is inevitable.
Because we must remember the long arc of history. It may not happen in our lifetime, it may not happen for hundreds of years, but nations and empires rise, and then no matter how powerful, eventually fall. History is full of nations and empires that learned that painful lesson: eventually you will reach the limits of your military power, and the consequences that come with that, whether it is an end to imperial ambitions, or the destruction of the nation in its entirety, or simply a temporary setback.
The Persians learned it on the waves of the Aegean Sea near Salamis, and thereafter would not convincingly threaten the Greeks until their obliteration by Alexander the Great. The Macedonians, inheritors of Alexander, would learn it in the marshes of Pydna, as they were crushed and conquered by the Romans. The Carthaginians learned it in Sicily, and then in the hills of Italy, and then as the Romans overran Carthage itself. The Romans learned it in the Teutoberg Forest and would never conquer Germania. The Arabs learned it at the unbreachable walls of Constantinople, halting the spread of Islam into Eastern Europe until the time of Ottomans. The Ottomans learned it at the walls of Vienna and would thereafter be slowly pushed out of Europe. The Aztecs learned it on the pyramids and floating bridges of Tenochtitlan, as a handful of Spaniards robbed them of their Empire, with the gleeful help of those they had oppressed. The Spanish learned it in the waters of the English Channel, as the British sank their Invincible Armada to the bottom of the sea. The French learned it in the snows of Russia, as they began to lose their hold on the Europe they had conquered. The British learned it in the hills of Verdun, the beaches of Gallipoli, and later in the sands of Egypt as they thereafter abandoned all imperial pretense. The Germans learned it in the crumbling walls of Stalingrad and in the bloody fighting retreat that led to the partition of their country. The Japanese learned it as they were burned out of their tropical subterranean bunkers and incinerated in nuclear fire.
The Americans, hailing from that young nation, experienced it in the jungles of Vietnam, and in the mountains of Afghanistan, but have failed to learn the lesson, and their military adventurism continues. Perhaps this latest conflict with Iran will be their “Suez Crisis”, and show the world the limits of American military might, we shall have to see.
Israel, an even younger nation, has so far, only learned the lesson of the Holocaust. The lesson that capitulation and inaction and the vulnerability of disunity almost led to their obliteration. They use the trauma of this history as an excuse for the abuses they subject the Palestinians to, as an excuse for disregarding the sovereign territory of their neighbors and seizing land as they wish and bombing with impunity. But they too must learn the lesson of the limits of military power eventually, whether in the near-future or in 500 years. We can only hope that it happens while there are still Palestinians left to speak of.