What Palestinian state?!?

I came to Palestine four months ago with a clear idea of a two state solution as the best solution for the region. That will say a Palestinian state alongside with Israel. I thought that most Palestinians wanted that too, but I was pretty surprised when I discovered that that’s not the fact. Now, four months later, I’m having my own doubts about a two-state solution on the territory of historical Palestine.

I still believe that a two state solution is the most realistic, or achievable, but it will be an unfair solution.

First thing first; where exactly do the world community, the Quartet or anyone, see the contiguous state of Palestine, as Bush promised in January 2008, in between the Israeli security zones, settlements, settler roads and of course the apartheid wall that eats up most of the West Bank? There has been little to suggest that Israel plans to give up the territories we know as Jordan Valley (the entire east side of the West Bank, thus the border to Jordan, which Israel wants to keep for security reasons), leaving the West Bank with no other neighbouring (trading) country than Israel, the numerous settlements in the West Bank (128 illegal settlements), their roads, the apartheid wall and so on.

If Israel had a desire to negotiate on those areas, they, if not decreasing the numbers, at least hadn’t continued to build more as they have done. Only in the course of this year, the year when Palestinians and Israelis would, according to Bush, sign a final peace agreement, Israel has built more than 25,000 illegal units inside the West Bank. All while Annapolis agreement was still under function. Illegal settlements have since the beginning in the 70’is been a crucial part of the Zionist project to control and later take over territory, and ar still part of that masterplan. As reported in Haaretz today, the population growth among West Bank settlers was three times higher than that of the rest of Israel during the past 12 years. Settler population went from 130.000 in 2005 to 270.000 by the end of 2007. The Palestinian figures are much higher (around 400.000).

During the same year, the numbers of road blocks on the West Bank have increased with 3%, according to a UN report (September 08), and are currently as high as 630. After standing over 50 minutes in queue at Qalandia checkpoint yesterday, I could only wish that once, only once, the so-called friends of Israel would have to stand in that line, listen to a 18-year old soldier barking his orders from his cabin, as if they were sheep or worse, with no regard to their age or condition, in a language no one but him understood. This year 67 women have given birth at a checkpoint, half of them loosing their child and 2 women bleeding to death.

Secondly, a two state solution would be bloody unfair. It would be unfair to the more than 750.000 Palestinians who were expelled from their homes in 1948. Today they count about 5 million people and are spread throughout the world, but live mainly in neighbouring countries as Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and even West Bank in refugee camps and under severe circumstances.

Ilan Pappe, one of the so-called new-historians in Israel, describes in his newly released book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, how the Jewish (Israel didn’t exist yet) military groups, or better to say, Zionist terrorist groups, as Hagana and the Irgun, under orders from the indisputable leader of Zionist movement, David Ben-Gurion, systematically expelled Palestinians from their homes and destroyed their villages. As part of the so-called Plan Dalet, village after village was attacked and Arabs thrown out of their homes, sometimes even massacred. The massacre in Deir Yassin is the most famous of them, when Menachim Begin (yupp, the later prime minister) led his Irgun group into Deir Yassin 9. April 1948, and killed 170 civilians. Another massacre in Ayn al-Zayton that formed the basis for the novel Bab al-Shams and later a movie, left 70 people were left dead. All this with one aim at sight: Intimidating the Palestinians and thereby judaise the land. “Had we never heard of the events in the former Yugoslavia but had been aware of only the case of Palestine, we would be forgiven for thinking that the US and UN definitions [of ethnic cleansing] were inspired by the Nakba, down to almost their last minute detail”, Pappe writes in his first chapter.

Half of the indigenous people living in Palestine were driven out with half of their villages and towns destroyed by the Jewish military force.

All this before May 15th, 1948, before the state of Israel was declared, and the Arab countries half heartedly entered Palestine to “defend” the Palestinians. By then over a quarter a million Palestinians had already been expelled, two hundred villages destroyed and scores of towns emptied. Villages as Khirbat al-Kasayir and Hawsha are just two examples of villages allcoated to Palestinian state by the UN partition resolution (181) occupied by Zionist troops before May 15th. All under the watch of British troops morally bound to protect the civilians, and the UN representatives who were on the ground supervising the implementation of the division plan, but basically turning there back to whole thing.

There will be no peace without these people getting their right to return, as the unanimous UN resolution 194 (1948, dot 11) states, and Israel taking the moral responsibility of making them refugees in 1948. Pushing them to Europe or other countries, which seems to be the Israeli plan, or not taking any responsibility is not the right stand.

In connection with Israel's UN membership in 1948, fulfilling this resolution was one of the requirements, but Israel holds the "hardly flattering world record of ignoring UN resolutions", as Snorre Lindquist and Lasse Wilhelmson writes in an article in Palestine Chronicle.

It can be written much about the war in 1948. All too often we hear about Jewish David facing an Arab Goliath. Attacked by 7 Arab countries, it fought bravely (and miraculously) won the war. Well, the war started, as just shown, long before May 15th, and the Goliath was at that time defenceless Palestinian villagers. The other reason for the “miraculous” victory is the Israeli superiority both militarily and numerically. Only Hagana had, when plan Dalet was put into effect (april 48), more than 50.000 troops at its disposal, half of which had been trained by the British army during the Second World War (Pappe). The Arab states, numbering at top 30-40.000, knew before entering the war, that the Palestinians had lost, and that they didn’t have any chance to win.

The biggest force, the Jordanian Legion (under the command of British General Chief of Staff, John Glubb Pasha) actually annexed the West Bank without firing one shot, due to a double game King Abdullah of Jordan played. Being the head of the military effort of the Arab countries on the one hand, and striving to reach an agreement with the Jewish state about annexation of the West Bank on the other. In other words, the Jordanian occupation of the West Bank at first came about thanks to a prior agreement with the Israelis, but it remained in Hashemite hands due to defensive efforts of the Jordanians and the Iraqi forces when the Israeli army tried to wrest parts of it back (Ilan Pappe 2007:121).

A two state solution would furthermore be unfair to all the Palestinians who have lived in Israel for the last 60 years.

Out of 970.000 Palestinians living in the 1948 Palestine, only 156.000 remained. 50.000 of these were internal refugees not living in their original villages, since those villages were demolished. Today there are about 1.2 million Palestinians (not including Arabs in East Jerusalem) in the state of Israel (app. 20%). 263.000 of them, or in other words, every 1 in 5 Palestinian/Arab in Israel is a refugee. These people would have a very uncertain future in case of the creation of a new state of Palestine next to Israel. The Foreign Minister and the newly head of the leading Kadima party Tzipi Livni is quoted in Haaretz last week questioning, the already B-citizens in Israel’s, national aspirations.

The “biggest democracy in the Middle East” as some falsely call the state of Israel, wants only to be a home state for the Jews, leaving no room for other nationalities or minorities. As in 1948, The Zionist wants the land, but without the Palestinian population.

There has never been a Palestine, the Ziontists claim, and they are right. All through history the people of Palestine have been under foreign rule, be it the Ottomans or the British Mandate. But this doesn't change the fact that there was an entity of land called Palestine or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights' Article 21 (3) that states that the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government, and it definitely doesn't give the Zionist Colonialists the right to claim a state and rule on Palestinian land. If Israel righteously wants to claim the title of “biggest democracy in the Middle East”, there is only one, and the only fair, solution: A bi-national state for all the people of the historical Palestine, even the refugees.