An actually modest proposal
Blame the British!
The origin of the fighting in Israel-Palestine is the fault of fucking British Imperialistism exploiting Socialist Zionism to maintain control of the Middle East before packing it up and leaving chaos in their wake.
Same deal as the Partition. Same deal as Iraq. Same deal as the Troubles.
Revisionist and Religious Zionist definititely picked up the torch. But Socialist/Liberal Zionism is a very complicated subject (speaking as an Anti-Zionist Jew who attended Hebrew school—there was a ton of “Being Jewish Means Supporting Israel” messaging while studying for my bar mitzvah. I read Said when I was 18 and I realized all the lies. But renouncing part of your identity is hard for anyone and I empathize with Liberal Jewish Zionists who find it difficult).
The big difference between the Partition and 1948 is that a bunch of surrounding dictatorships didn’t invade India-Pakistan. I can understand how that would be a pretty traumatizing formational experience for the founding generation and make prosecuting all the Zionist terrorists and war criminals difficult.
That doesn’t make it right but when terrorists can get away with killing refugees from the Shoah in 1943, how likely is it that a new government is going to be able to move against them in 1949? Bringing charges doesn’t bring justice if you are ousted by a popular coup—it just puts the most radical nationalists in charge.1
So, the current government of Israel is commiting genocide. But Netenyahu and co are not all of Israel any more than Trump and co are all of the United States.
Haaretz has published IDF Soldier’s accounts of war crimes. Our mainstream press’s idea that talking about genocide is controversial is a sign if how far Christian Zionists have pushed the Overton window. Unless you subscribe to the Protocol’s of the Elder’s of Zion, I think it’s obvious that Presidents of The United States have far more influence on the discourse than AIPAC or J Street do.
After all, by the logic of both Trump and the Biden administrations, Haaretz is more than willing to publish antisemitic propaganda by Israeli Jews! It’s downright insane that we are actually have an argument around it in this country.
A free and democratic Israel-Palestine two-state resolution a la Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland isn’t an unprecedented solution.
Just dust off the Good Friday accords, bring in the Brits to pay reparations and reconstruction costs, and get the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators to gang up on a common enemy.
It would be a nightmare for the negotiators and probably take years, but it worked to end the Troubles. Nothing like getting a bunch of Semites together to complain about WASPs to make the smaller distinctions between us seem less important.
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This may be controversial, but, if two states had been established in 1948, I think it’s perfectly plausible that the Palestinian state ends up an analogue of Pakistan and there is communal violence against Jews. Palestinians aren’t saints and expecting them to act virtuously in the misdst of a chaotic war isn’t realistic. (This in no way excuses Zionist war crimes any more than Japanese war crimes in China exused American war crimes during WWII). ↩