Why recognizing a ‘Palestinian State’ evades the challenge of stopping the genocide and ethnic cleansing

If Palestine is to be saved at all, it will have to be saved not only from Israel, but also from the stated designs of the United States

Imagine it’s 1943 and the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazi SS is imminent — and Western powers solemnly declare their intention to recognize a “Jewish State” in Palestine in five years’ time. That’s an (albeit imperfect) analogy for the recognition of a “Palestinian state” being considered by France, Canada and the U.K. right now. It’s a nonsensical evasion of their obligations to take action to stop the genocide facing Palestinians today.

If such “recognition” were, in fact, a good-faith effort to address the plight of a people facing genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, some obvious questions might be:

* Where is this state? Where are its borders? Who lives there?

* Is it a sovereign state or some sort of counterinsurgency-manual mannequin accessorized with the accoutrements of statehood? How does a “demilitarized” state – as France and Canada demand – protect itself from a savagely violent neighbor who covets its land and seeks to destroy its people? Or is this state not, in fact a Palestinian state, but instead a kind of geopolitical stockade erected by outside powers to contain Palestinian aspirations?

* Have the Palestinians in whose name this “state” is being imagined even been asked for their opinions? Is it even remotely designed to accommodate their right to self-determination?

* And, of course, the elephant in the room: What do those granting this “recognition” plan to do to stop Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide that threatens to eliminate the Palestinians as a national community on its own land, a project so far advanced in Gaza that vultures like Tony Blair and Jared Kushner are being summoned to the White House to discuss Gaza’s post-Palestinian future, but also accelerating in the West Bank?

But recognizing Palestinian statehood is hard to read as a good-faith effort to address the existential crisis facing Palestinians. Without forceful steps to end the genocide (which won’t end until the Israelis face unacceptable consequences for doing so) and the illegal occupation is an empty gesture by Western powers who want to be seen to be “doing something” while evading their moral and legal obligations to do things that are in their power to stop Israel’s crimes. Instead, they intone the mantras of a “peace process” that died a quarter century ago. There are many reasons this necromancy will be nothing more than ritual for the foreseeable future, but the most glaringly obvious and immediate one is this: Israel never had any intention of allowing any Palestinian sovereignty between the river and the sea, and the U.S. has given up even pretending to pursue that goal (hollow pretense though it was, when measured by actions rather than words over two decades).

Viewed historically, the 1990s iteration of the “two-state solution” was driven by a U.S. drive at the end of the Cold War to move on from regional conflicts by securing political settlements in South Africa, Ireland, various Latin American countries, East Timor etc.

Oslo was Israel’s response to the Bush (father) Administration’s efforts to promote a political solution that started with the 1991 Madrid Conference. And, in the years that followed, the nation states of the Arab region and of Europe accepted in principle that the road to the imagined “two-state solution” ran through Washington, which was granted a monopoly over the Israeli-Palestinian file and was allowed to bat away all efforts to restrain Israeli actions that flagrantly undermined the very foundations of that “two-state solution”, by declaring that these would undermine “the peace process”.

While no U.S. President since Bush-pere in 1991 had lifted a finger to create consequences for Israel defying the two-state schema by expanding settlements, Trump has been the first to not bother with empty words. Palestinian state? He’s talking about taking direct control of Gaza and ethnically cleansing its inhabitants!

But we could ask whether the “two-state solution” was ever going to solve the problem it effectively caused when the 1947 Partition Plan authorized the creation of a Jewish ethno-state on land where Palestinian Muslims and Christians were the majority. The 1948 Nakba was effectively, if inadvertently, triggered and also legitimized by the UN partition plan (the first “two-state solution”). It hypothetically partitioned historic Palestine into a “Jewish State” on 55% of the territory and an “Arab State” on 45%.

But the Palestinian Arabs who comprised 68% of the population and owned 80% of the land obviously could never accept the inevitable dispossession and national subordination implied by this partition of their land authorized by a distant colonial authority (consider that the U.N. was heavily colonially skewed in 1947 — most of today’s countries of Africa and Asia were not invited to vote on the issue, because they were still colonial possessions of European powers).

Still, the Zionist movement could not live with a U.N. partition map whose “Jewish state” contained a population was almost half Palestinian Arab. The cynical pragmatist David Ben Gurion “accepted” the partition plan (over the fierce objections of the forefathers of today’s Likud party) in the same way that Lenin “accepted” the treaty of Brest-Litovsk in order to get Russia out of WWI — a diplomatic feint of “accepting” unacceptable terms, confident that his forces would, when the opportunity came, militarily change the “facts on the ground”.

An internationally-imposed partition set the stage for war and brutal ethnic cleansing to reengineer the demographics of the “Jewish state”, and for the Zionists to considerably expand their share of the partition map: Ben Gurion could look with satisfaction at the new “facts on the ground” his forces had created — his “Jewish State” controlled not the 55% of historic Palestine, but 78%. Even more importantly, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian majority from within that territory had reduced its Arab population to 20% — and turned the majority of Palestinians into refugees. (The majority of people living in Gaza today are family of those violently expelled from Israel in 1948.)

The post-colonial Arab states were mostly authoritarian, serving the interests of a narrow ruling coterie while maintaining a clientelist relationship with major powers (principally the United States by the late ‘70s). And none has lifted a finger for the past half century on behalf of the Palestinians. A relatively stable, status quo, then, maintained at the expense of the region’s Arab citizenry.

If the 1947 attempt at partitioning Palestine set the stage for the Nakba, the 1993 Oslo version set the stage for where we are today. Even if the Israelis had effectively neutralized any military threat from the PLO, whose headquarters in Tunis was now further away from occupied Palestine than it was at its founding. But the First Intifada had made clear that the Palestinian people would not accept life under the yoke of apartheid occupation. So, the Oslo process “recognized” the Palestinians so long ignored and even erased in the international and regional machinations — but recognized them simply as a problem that needed solving to stabilize Pax Americana in the Middle East. That meant offering them some of the accoutrements but none of the powers of statehood, a kind of toy-telephone parody of independence familiar to South Africans who remember Bantustan “independence”, i.e. which does nothing to transform their fundamentally subordinate status.

It did achieve a kind of apprenticeship in the U.S.-backed network of authoritarian Arab states — a corrupt mini-Mukhbarat domain tasked with administering and policing the cities of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, serving as Israel’s first line of security while the occupation not only persisted, but actually deepened and expanded. The historic function of the Palestinian Authority, then, has been to contain and suppress the liberatory energies of autonomous Palestinian struggle; to provide an authentic PLO seal of approval on decades of Palestinian dispossession. It failed because it amounted to a sugar-coated Palestinian surrender, while the Israelis had no interest in halting their own expansion.

Regardless of what’s said at the U.N., there’s no prospect in the foreseeable future of Israel’s leaders or its public accepting any kind of Palestinian state anywhere between the River and the Sea. Nor is there any chance of Israel being strongarmed by its Western backers into unwillingly accepting one.

So, the “recognizing Palestine” question at the U.N. is, in fact, an evasion of the crisis facing Palestinians (see Warsaw Ghetto analogy) and of U.N. member states’ moral and legal responsibility to halt the genocide. That genocide, and the ethnic cleansing of both Gaza and the West Bank, will not be willingly ended by the Israelis, as long as they have a choice in the matter. Western powers have always known that genocides are not ended by appeals to the better angels of the perpetrators; historically they have ended only when the perpetrators have achieved their goals, or when they’re militarily stopped. The world’s immediate responsibility to Palestinians right now is to stop the genocide. That requires discussing not symbolic “statehood” gestures, but imposing a no-fly zone (85% of those killed by Israel in Gaza over the past two years have been struck from the air) and other measures to physically prevent the genocidal forces of Israel from entering Gaza. Even more challenging is the responsibility of all states who uphold international law to block efforts at third-party colonization of Gaza by the United States and its partners, by instead enacting a U.N.-centered triage process for the territory. (The U.S. has made no secret of its criminal intent to take control of Gaza, and to complete the erasure of Palestine there by moving its surviving population to other countries.)

The Trump Administration’s actions in support of Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing, and its intention to erase Palestinian Gaza and its officials’ enthusiasm for the Greater Israel project have made abundantly clear that if Palestine is to be saved at all, it will have to be saved not only from Israel, but also from the United States — not simply by saying things Washington doesn’t like (such as “Palestinian state”) but by taking action to stop the genocide, and also the post-genocide ethnic cleansing of which the U.S. has declared its intention to be a co-owner.