One state push for Israel and Palestine? by Ilan Pappe

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

The recognition of the U.S. State Department of the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank is yet another indication that the two-state solution is dead. There are 600,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank and they will soon be one third of the overall population. When the Zionist settlers in the 1930s became one third of the population, Palestine was doomed. This is when the Zionist leadership began to contemplate the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
… In some cases, the settler community acted upon the logic, defined by the late Australian scholar, Patrick Wolfe, as “the logic of the elimination of the native”. This led to the genocide of native Americans and aboriginals. But even there the struggle continues for recognition, restitution and equality. In Palestine, that logic was translated to an incremental process of ethnic cleansing, which the Palestinians call “the ongoing Nakba” (Nakba in Arabic is catastrophe and is used in the Palestinian narrative to describe the ethnic cleansing of 1948).

Continue reading at https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/one-state-push-for-israel-and-palestine/article30152631.ece

Israel’s new law is a form of apartheid by Ilan Pappe

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

A closer deconstruction of this document reveals why this law changes the nature of Israel and, more importantly, why it is ominous as far as the Palestinians are concerned. First, this law denies the fact that within the state of Israel, and indeed within what is called Eretz Israel, there are two national movements. This total denial of the Palestinians’ right to Palestine as a future vision has to be seen in the wider context of the historical circumstances in which Israel was born in 1948. Zionism was a settler colonial movement and Israel is a settler state. This means that Jewish colonisation and the oppression of the Palestinians is on par with the European destruction of the native Americans or of the genocide of the aboriginals by the Australians. The difference is in the historical timing: the Zionist settler colonial project is an unfinished historical episode, as is the Palestinian resistance to it.

Continue reading at https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/israels-new-law-is-a-form-of-apartheid/article24513993.ece