Saturday 6 September 2014

Roland Rance on the two-state solution of Israel



" Those who continue to advocate a "two-state solution" in Palestine, and who still maintain, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Israel might at some time relinquish control over the territories it occupied in 1967, must be wilfully closing their eyes to reality. They are ignoring the way in which the 1967-occupied territories are thoroughly integrated into Israel, and in which today the Occupation IS Israel.
Israel existed for just nineteen years within the Green Line, the pre-1967 border to which these fantasists believe Israel should withdraw. It has existed for 47 years with its expanded borders; it has been forced to disgorge the Sinai peninsula to Egypt, and part of the Golan Heights to Syria, but neither of these areas forms part of Palestine.
It was a salutary moment when, one day in 1984, I saw posters going up in Jerusalem regarding the conscription to Israel's army of kids born in June 1967. I realised that a whole generation had grown up, which had spent its entire life in "Greater Israel", and for whom tales of the state's pre-67 life were as remote as tales of the Attlee government are to me. By now, we are reaching the time when the first grandchildren of this 1967 generation will reach conscription age. Three generations living in the bizarre dichotomy of a state that purports to be democratic for its citizens, while maintaining military rule over millions of its subjects; but which is, in reality, one apartheid regime in the whole of Palestine.
No repartition of Palestine, no "two-state" stitch-up, no continuation of the unequal status of more than a million Palestinian citizens of Israel and the exile of millions of Palestinians, can possibly lead to a just and sustainable resolution of this conflict. Those concerned for the future welfare of Israelis, no less than those concerned for a just future for Palestinians, must join in the struggle for the abolition of political Zionism, and for a common future, in one democratic entity, for all of Palestine's current residents and exiles."
by Roland Rance