XPost: uk.legal, alt.checkmate

by Vijay Prashad

On October 30, 2023, Israeli authorities said that they had killed
“dozens” of Hamas fighters in the first days of their ground invasion. Meanwhile, Gaza’s Ministry of Health has struggled to keep its website
online given the lack of electricity, internet, and attacks.
Nonetheless, at noon on October 29, the Ministry of Health said that
the death toll in Gaza is now 8,005 (of which 67 percent are women and children). For those who doubt the numbers, the Ministry of Health has
been releasing lists of the dead with their Israeli identification
numbers (it is a sign of the occupation of the Palestinians of Gaza
that when they are born, they must be registered not by the
Palestinian Authority but by Israel). Save the Children says that more
children (3,195) have been killed by Israeli bombing over these three
weeks than have been killed in total across all conflict zones since
2019.

The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East
(UNRWA) said that by Sunday the 29th, 1.4 million Palestinians out of
2.3 million were internally displaced, with 671,000 taking shelter in
150 UNRWA facilities. Most of the dead by Israeli bombs and tank
shells have been civilians. The ratio of dead between combatants (few)
and civilians (many) is startling, far beyond what takes place in a
war (in contrast, of the 1,400 Israelis killed on October 7 by Hamas
and other factions, 48.4 percent were soldiers). By saying that they
have killed “dozens” of Hamas militants—the purported target—and
having at the same time killed thousands of Palestinians, the Israeli authorities have admitted to the world that their war has resulted in
far more civilian deaths than combatant deaths.

Meanwhile, the Israeli military has sent its bulldozers to destroy
homes and businesses in northern Gaza as well as in the West Bank city
of Jenin. Little in this maneuver looks like a military operation
since these homes and businesses are not military institutions. Given
the history of the bulldozing of housing in the West Bank to create
settlements and the “apartheid wall,” this bulldozing in Gaza and
Jenin appears like a massive civilizational campaign of ethnic
cleansing to create what the Israeli political class calls Greater
Israel (Eretz Yisrael Hashlema). The Israeli political class is famous
for saying that they want to change the “facts on the ground” so that
any negotiations with the occupied Palestinians are based on those
“facts” and not on “claims.” This is what Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu has been doing for decades through illegal
settlements in the West Bank: erasing the fact of Palestinian claims
on their land and establishing the right of Israelis to the entire
landmass from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Effectively,
the Israeli political class appears to be using the conflict that
began on October 7 as the pretext to do what it had planned to do for
decades, namely, to erase Palestinians from historical Palestine and
to erase the Palestinian nation as an entity.

Two-State, One-State, Three-State

When Palestinian political forces agreed to a “peace process” that
resulted in the Cairo Interim Agreement (1994) and the Oslo Accords
(1994), it adopted what was known as the “two-state solution” to the
Israeli occupation of Palestine. The basic outline of the Oslo Accords
was that a Palestinian Authority (PA) would govern the territory
seized by Israel in 1967 (East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank).
The Oslo Accords, argued Gaza-based Professor Haider Eid, created a
“Bantustan” (such as the “African homelands” created by apartheid
South Africa). The implication of the establishment of the PA was that
it would neuter actual Palestinian claims to the land (including the
right of return of Palestinian refugees, established by UN resolution
194 in 1948), and—at the same time—it would allow the Israeli state to
change the “facts on the ground” by the creation of more and more
illegal settlements. Furthermore, after the Second Intifada
(2000-2005), Israel cut off the “safe passage” requirement of Oslo
that allowed Palestinians in East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank
to travel across these zones. By 2005, Israel had annulled the Oslo
Accords, although the Palestinian political class remained bound by
them as the only sliver of hope for the establishment of the state of
Palestine (even if it would be a small fragment of historical
Palestine).

The reality of the “two-state solution” disappeared as the settlements increased in the West Bank, as Palestinian control over East Jerusalem
was increasingly absorbed by Israel, as the right to return was set
aside, and as Gaza was bombed almost every year. In that context,
several important Palestinian intellectuals began to raise the
question of the “one-state solution,” with one Israeli-Palestinian
state based on a non-ethnic, secular, and democratic idea of
citizenship. By 2021, a majority of scholars of the region said that
the actual facts show Israel to be “a one-state reality akin to
apartheid.” The idea that Israel is an apartheid state is now
well-established in United Nations documents and human rights reports.
This assessment demonstrates two things: first, that Israel and the
Occupied Palestinian Territory are already “one state” and second,
that it is an apartheid state with the Palestinians in a second-class
category. Advocates of the “one-state solution” argue that the reality
of a singular state now requires equal citizenship for all who live in Israel/Palestine. The current Israeli political class refuses to
accept the idea of a democratic and secular one-state, because they
are wedded to an ethno-nationalist project of a “Jewish State” that
erases the possibility of full citizenship for Palestinian Christians
and Muslims.

If the “two-state solution” is no longer practical and if the
“one-state solution” is blocked by the Israeli political class, then
all that remains for Netanyahu and others is the “three-state
solution.” This is the solution that seeks to remove large parts of
the Palestinian population from East Jerusalem, Gaza, the West Bank,
and perhaps even from within Israel’s 1948 lines and send them to the
three states of Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. The bulldozers coming
behind the tanks in Gaza are attempting to push the Palestinian
refugees (70 percent of them are descendants of those sent to Gaza in
the Nakba or Catastrophe of 1948) through the Rafah Crossing into
Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. This “three-state solution” is precisely
ethnic cleansing, a crime under international law. For decades, the
Israeli political class has been willing to conduct genocidal policies—including this bombardment of Gaza—to facilitate its
ethno-national, apartheid state project that requires the erasure of Palestinians and Palestine.

In 2014, in the aftermath of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, the
Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC)
opened an investigation into the situation in Palestine. Nothing much
came of this investigation. During this current attack on Gaza, the
prosecutor Karim A. A. Khan went to the Rafah Crossing and said that
Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid into Gaza may be a crime under
ICC jurisdiction. Indeed, the fact of apartheid is already a crime
under the 2002 Rome Statute that created the ICC. Both the “one-state
reality akin to apartheid” and the “three-state solution” of ethnic
cleansing are serious crimes that require investigation. Will Khan ask
the judges of the ICC to frame arrest warrants against Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his colleagues?

https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/11/03/israel-wants-either-an-apartheid-state-or-an-ethnic-cleansing-process-both-crimes-under-international-law/


We Are Millions, We Are Billions, We are all Palestinians: Stand with Palestine in DC on November 4th

There is an emergent mass movement in the United States unwavering in its struggle for the liberation of Palestine. Join us in Washington, DC on November 4 for the largest march for Palestine in U.S. history: the Palestinian cause is your cause.

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