I was wrong (again) about Palestine

Some of us lost friends over our “extremist” opposition to the dirty war on Syria. I stand by my post of eight years ago: Monbiot, Syria and Universalism. Any of us can get it wrong. I’ve been spectacularly so at times – here and here for instance – but I can’t name a single one of my critics on Syria, some of them having for decades opposed the Zionist regime which gained so much from the fall of Assad, who did the right thing once it became clear how badly misled they’d been.

Me, in a BTL comment on a recent post

One of the examples cited, of my being “spectacularly” wrong, was 9/11. Nine years ago I wrote a piece rubbishing the thesis of that day being a false flag or inside job. It drew enough flak to down a United Airlines transcontinental and two years later, having done as I should have in the first place – i.e. studied evidence, gaping holes and unanswered questions gathered by the best critics of the official narrative as set out in the NIST Reports of 2008 – I ate my words in a book review. I now use ‘conspiracy theory’  neutrally: not to smugly dismiss a given example without troubling to appraise the evidence for it, but to denote any explanation of major events hinging on a conspiracy which may subsequently be upheld or refuted evidentially. ¹

A priori  dismissal of such an explanation on the sole ground it invokes conspiracy on high now strikes me as lazily reactionary. As with two other fashionable put-downs, whataboutery and mansplaining, ² I want to know who benefits.

But 9/11 did not deliver my first public helping of humble pie. That had come eight years earlier in 2008. Under a spell of liberal lifestylism, and unduly influenced by approaches that prioritise ideas over material drivers to explain socio-economic phenomena good or bad, ³ I’d put out an essay critical of Islam. Big mistake, but the fall out helped reconnect me, I believe with greater nuance, to perspectives abandoned fifteen years earlier when I’d thrown the baby of dialectical materialism out with the bathwater of its ossified expression in a vanguard model long past, in the West at least, its sell-by date … ⁴

… to embrace a decade of spiritual enquiry ⁵ which yielded many benefits – benefits I still, some twenty-five years later, draw on in my tiny struggle against a dying but terrifying empire – even as it took me down an eye-wateringly expensive blind alley.

I say these things by way of preamble to today’s offering. For years after establishing this site I paid little attention to Palestine. That’s not because I thought it unimportant but because, with many doing great work there, I deemed my painfully limited energies better applied to causes less popular: primarily a dirty war on Syria – which saw not only left liberals but large swathes of the ‘hard’ Left abandoning first principles of anti-imperialism – and, four years ago, a proxy war against Russia sold with stupendous levels of deception to a credulous West as principled resistance to ‘Putin’s land grab’.

October 7 changed all that, and its antecedents and consequences have dominated my writing ever since. But it put me on a steep learning curve, one which saw me adopt legacy positions pending greater understanding. One such legacy position was the ‘two-state solution’. If it was good enough for so effective a scourge of Zionism as Norman Finkelstein, I reasoned, it was good enough for me. In any case, I further reasoned, from October 8 onwards one-state-or-two was a sterile theological question when neither seemed remotely achievable.

I abhor red lines when I see them as needlessly dividing good people. Too often they strike me as drawn by folk less interested in effecting change than in maintaining purity or intellectual superiority; too often by folk who do next to nothing themselves. But neither is a charge I can bring against Caitlin Johnstone. Here she is, just yesterday. She’s right. ⁶ I was wrong.

Again.

The Two-State Solution Is A Western Liberal Fairy Tale

The Israelis are telling us this is the case themselves, right to our faces. It’s time to wake up.

The only real benefit to this latest western “recognition” of Palestine is that it drew out high-profile Israeli politicians to explain to western liberals in plain English that the entire state of Israel stands opposed to their vision of a two-state solution. ⁷

Former Israeli defense minister Benny Gantz has a new op-ed in The New York Times where he explicitly states that opposition to the creation of a Palestinian state is “the heart” of a national consensus among Israelis across the mainstream political spectrum, and that this isn’t an obstacle that will go away once Netanyahu is out of power.

“Too often, Western leaders view our policies in this war not through the lens of national security, but through the prism of individuals — and, in particular, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu,” Gantz writes. “The conversation is often framed as a question of what serves the prime minister, as if Israel’s national security begins and ends with one man. This view is mistaken and counterproductive to global stability, regional normalization and Israel’s own security.”

“I myself have been a vocal critic of Mr. Netanyahu,” says Gantz. “But the nation’s core security interests are not partisan property. Today more than ever, they are anchored by a national consensus that is rooted in the hard realities of our region. Opposition to the recognition of Palestinian statehood stands at the heart of that consensus.”

He’s spelling it out in black and white. The Bernie Sanders-style framing of the nightmare in Palestine as a Netanyahu problem which can be remedied in short order by a two-state solution is a fairy tale that western liberals tell each other so they don’t have to face the cold hard reality that the problem is the state of Israel itself.

This comes after Netanyahu publicly stated that “There will be no Palestinian state to the west of the Jordan River,” and after former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant proclaimed that “There will never be a Palestinian state.”

Israel is the problem. Not Netanyahu. Not Hamas. Not that both sides have tragically failed to sit down and find common ground in good-faith negotiations. The problem is that the west established a state in the middle east which holds as its foundational ideology that the people who were living there before that state was created are less than human, and must never have access to the full spectrum of human rights.

The problem is Israel. A state which has always been a racist endeavor from its very inception. A state whose Jewish citizenry are indoctrinated from birth into accepting the hateful, supremacist worldview that is necessary for apartheid and abuse to be accepted as the status quo.

No solutions are going to emerge until the west gets real about this. As long as western liberals are still buying into the fuzzbrained escapist fantasy that Israel is just an election away from a two-state solution if the US simply keeps funding the Iron Dome and making nice with Tel Aviv, we’re going to continue seeing Israel inflicting the nonstop violence and abuse that is necessary for it to exist in its present iteration as a state.

Any actual, reality-based solutions are not going to make liberal Zionists happy like their daydream about a two-state solution does. Israel simply cannot continue to exist as a Zionist entity. It needs to be disarmed, dramatically restructured, and comprehensively denazified as a society. This isn’t going to happen without force, and that necessary force isn’t going to be forthcoming from the western world as long as we are deluding ourselves with infantile fantasies.

The Israelis are telling us this is the case themselves, right to our faces. It’s time to wake up.

* * *

1. Driving my own unexamined rejection on logical rather than empirical grounds of 9/11 as false flag was a vulgar Marxist approach taking me to the unconscious non-sequitur that since class rule does not ultimately rely on conspiracy, in this instance conspiracy could not have occurred.
2. Yes, ‘mansplaining’ did a good job of skewering one form of man on woman hectoring, but I also saw its more philistine use to deride intellectual inquiry and elevate emotional responses easily manipulated by power.
3. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Steven Pinker spring to mind as antagonistic to Islam on epistemologically idealist grounds I now reject. But Dawkins is an erudite and gifted populariser of evolutionary theory. I recommend the book he wrote explicitly to that end: The Greatest Show on Earth. As for his polemics against religion, he was content to let it coexist, like art and literature, in parallel with science until a Creationism rebranded as “Intelligent Design” demanded a place on school science curricula, claiming explanatory power no less valid than that of evolutionary theory. On this I’m firmly with Dawkins.
4. In a post apropos June’s US-Israeli aggression on Iran, I wrote of a Western ‘vanguard party’ model which:

   … embraces or pays lip service to a fantasy of violently overthrowing capitalisms armed to the teeth, versed in the dark arts, and wielding tools of surveillance beyond the wildest dreams of the 20th century totalitarianisms. This, moreover, in a West whose export of industry has eroded the very socialising conditions – an exploitation experienced en masse in the huge dark Satanic mills of Marx’s day – which led him to see the proletariat as the only force with both the means and the motive to take humanity into socialism.

5. I’ve always been hesitant, even in the decade (1995-2005) when I was most dedicated to ‘spiritual enquiry’, to use the s-word. It means all things to all folk. Suffice to say here that I do not mean crystal balls, seances or writing letters to the universe. I use the term in the sense approximated by ‘the human spirit’ … ‘that’s the spirit!’ … ‘spirited opposition’. And when I speak of fusing materialist enquiry and class struggle with spiritual aspects of our humanity, I mean in the sense of the socialist anthem, Bread and Roses.
6. “She’s right” – as is Jonathan Cook, writing today in similar vein.
7. It’s hard to dispute that …

   The only real benefit to this latest western “recognition” of Palestine is that it drew out high-profile Israeli politicians to explain to western liberals in plain English that the entire state of Israel stands opposed to their vision of a two-state solution.

   … but, like the mainstream media’s newfound willingness to speak of genocide in Gaza, it is also significant as a marker of how the mainstream had to shift in ways it wouldn’t have shifted prior to the age of social media, and footage captured and globally disseminated by cell phone.