Palestine: The third way forward
Demonstrators with a Palestinian flag during a protest against Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Hebron, 4 September 2019
Marwan Bishara writes in Aljazeera:
Since the catastrophic Arab failure in the 1948 and 1967 wars led to total Israeli control over historic Palestine, the Palestinians have been trying to recover their losses, but to no avail. Refugees and prisoners in their own homeland, they have tried armed struggle and peaceful negotiations with equal vigour, but have failed to get justice or attain peace.
Both strategies entailed great sacrifice and major concessions, but ultimately neither led to the liberation of Palestine from Israeli domination. Worse, Israel’s appetite for expansion has grown with every Palestinian concession, and now its delusion of invincibility is driving it to illegally annex almost a third of what the Palestinians assumed would be their future state.
Regardless of whether it actually formalises its de facto annexation or not, Israel is already radically and unilaterally changing the reality on the ground.
It is important to remember that contrary to newspeak there is no “Palestine problem” but rather an “Israeli colonial problem” – the region’s last colonial problem – and the Palestinians may prove to be its only solution.
Since its creation at the end of the 19th century, Zionism has mutated from arguably a legitimate Jewish national movement in Europe to a European colonial enterprise in the eastern Mediterranean.