Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Until recently, Zionists liked to say the Israeli/Palestinian fiasco was “insoluble,” and they were saying this well before October 7. “Insoluble.” Some may still say it. This is convenient, because it shunts aside the obvious solution, namely a single, binational state with equal rights for all. So when someone says to you that this particular situation is insoluble, you should know what you’re hearing. What you’re hearing is an excuse. An excuse for an intolerable status quo.

What’s alarming, however, is the moment when this excuse gets dropped – because a “solution” has been found. And when those people, who previously liked to say nothing could be done, finally start doing something because the FOUND a solution, you know it’s nothing good.

Currently Israeli settlers and soldiers are storming cities and towns in the West Bank and, as the whole world witnessed, the IDF reduced Gaza to rubble, its two million inhabitants to utter destitution and murdered at a minimum 70,000 people, at least 20,000 of them children in a slaughter of what can only be described as incomprehensible wickedness. So while this old excuse that the Israeli/Palestinian dispute was “insoluble” long served, and for some still serves, to deny basic justice to millions of Palestinians, more recently Israeli bigwigs have found a solution, and it involves mass displacement of Palestinians and denial not merely of justice but of survival to tens potentially hundreds of thousands of people.

But let’s go back to this old excuse, because ironically, in the long run, it also endangered part of the Jewish Israeli population, namely secular Jews, a group that has so far shown itself to be singularly inept at saving itself from the rapidly accelerating violence of the theocratic fascism practiced by the Likud government. This group, politically completely on the outs, let the “insoluble” excuse deprive them of an ally – Arabs living in greater Israel – which was a big mistake. Because in the long term – and history may surprise us by making that actually not so long – secular Jews living in Israel are an endangered species. Their sparse sympathy for Palestinians, which they exhibit from time to time, is greeted with gunfire and rock-throwing by settlers, who do not distinguish them from what they regard as the enemy.

So what’s the problem with equal rights for all Arabs living in greater Israel? The problem is that if all the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza become Israeli citizens with equal rights, they will then outnumber the Jews in Israel, whose founders went to great lengths, cooking up “acceptable” ratios of an Arab minority to the Jewish majority, and so forth, to avoid this eventuality, and thus preserve, by ethnic engineering, the state’s Jewish character.

But the founders of Israel were not infallible. In fact, they made big mistakes, chief among them setting the nascent Israeli state on a trajectory of genocide of Palestinians. Calling this a mistake is a misnomer, of course, because it was deliberate, but let’s be generous and assume that Sigmund Freud’s repetition compulsion led these witnesses of horrific Nazi violence toward and murder of Jews in Europe to stumble onto creating a paradigm that would, as we’ve seen in the past two years, repeat some of the worst atrocities of the Holocaust, to wit, the murder of those more than 20,000 Gazan children. Or the creation of well over 56,000 Palestinian orphans.

So the Israeli founders set their state on the untenable, dangerous and – far worse – criminal course of constant expansion, ethnic cleansing and now, as we see since October 7, genocide, a project which is clearly a crime against humanity that screams to be quickly rectified, and has led us to the present: Israel fresh off that Gazan holocaust it perpetrated in full view of the entire world, as a result of which Israel is now rightly shunned in many, many quarters of the globe. This is a stain that cannot be washed away. And this bloodstain, the inevitable result of Israel’s founders’ approach to the indigenous Palestinian population, will be very difficult in the long run to prevent the world from attributing to the Jewish diaspora as well.

All this is obvious to any moderately informed observer. Why, then, isn’t it obvious to the Israeli political opposition, now dithering over whether it should ally with Arab political parties, because if it doesn’t, it has no chance of defeating the Judeo-Nazis running the country? It’s not clear to them because the founders’ myth and the history of the past 80 years based on those founders,’ shall we say, “errors,” blinds them to basic humanity and even more profoundly, to reality. Old habits die hard. And the habit of mind of most Israelis has long been that the founders were right, that they saved God’s remnant of European Jewry, that ethnic cleansing was a necessary evil to do so, and, worse, that it continues to be a necessary evil.

But ah, that evil has now morphed into genocidal murder, so what comes next? More ethnic cleansing? More murder – until it is total? Israel already stands convicted in the court of world opinion, with the possible exception of some of the western Empire’s heavily – and quite expensively – propagandized population. How long can this situation hold? How long before the scales fall from the eyes even of Americans? I’ll tell you how long: not very, because it has already begun. Vast majorities of Democrats and many Republicans already regard the blood-soaked Israeli project in Gaza as genocide, a development unprecedented in Americans’ view of Israel, previously regarded as virtually able to do no wrong.

Even right-wing Republicans have defected. Look at the unexpectedly courageous congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who previously appeared to embody kooky, far-right wrong-headedness, but who had the guts to jeopardize her political future and relationship with Trump – who ditched her, calling her “wacko,” ostensibly over the Jeffrey Epstein fracas. But don’t think for a minute that MTG’s stance on Israel was not also a problem for Trump. Luckily for him, he no longer has to worry about endorsing whoever AIPAC got to primary her, since she quit.

If MTG could call the Israeli attack on Gaza a genocide and demand blocking the pipeline of weapons and money to Israel, what does that say about Trump’s rightist base? MTG announced that she received lots for support from her district for her views, and that’s no district of milquetoast liberals. Too bad that just when she found her voice on one of the central life-and-death issues of today’s world, namely Israel-Palestine, she threw in the towel. But there’s no denying what she said, and that represents a political sea-change.

Opposition politicians in Jerusalem would do well to note this portent and, if they do not want to go the way of the dodo, to ally with Arab parties in the Knesset tout de suite. The only thing to say to that wobbling opposition is: you need an ally. The only ally on offer is the Arab Israeli public, but the ultimate price could well be equal rights for Palestinians in the occupied territories. Of course, for the opposition as currently constituted, that is a bridge too far, so…

But it may well be the only way to save the Israeli project, at least for secular Jews, many of whom Likud members already regard as traitors or traitor-adjacent. Because in the end, a bi-national state with equal rights for all is, frankly, just about as likely as the so-called two-state solution, which Prime Minister Netanyahu, for one, as dedicated his entire, long, blood-drenched career to thwarting. His logic, namely to prevent the creation of a “terror state” alongside Israel, was only reinforced for his supporters by the atrocities of October 7. But that said, if a two-state solution is truly off the table (and it probably is), only one state remains – greater Israel. And the question is, what ultimately happens to the Palestinians who live in greater Israel sans rights? History has rather ominous things to say about what occurs when an ethnic group is stripped of its rights within a nation. Just look at Hispanic immigrants in Trump’s America. Or the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.

If secular Jews in Israel lack the nerve to ally with Arab parties and the current catastrophic arrangement persists, with daily pogroms in the West Bank and the continued starvation, homelessness and low-level bombing of Gazans, I fail to see how more murder of Palestinians is averted without intervention by the Global South – which dominates the United Nations General Assembly – led by the only two great powers, Russia and China, that can stand up to a very lethal U.S. Empire. But so far, to judge from the recent, ghastly UN Security Council vote on Trump’s soi-disant peace plan for Gaza, this approach looks dead in the water. It’s about as likely as an opposition/Arab alliance in Jerusalem, which is to say, not very. This is a disaster for lots of people in greater Israel, but first and foremost for the Palestinians who lack rights, whose predicament Zionists may very well finally no longer regard as insoluble. And you may be sure, any more recent solution will make the Nakba look mild in comparison, in fact, to a certain extent, Israel’s mass murder in Gaza already has.

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