(Twenty minute read)

Seventy-five years ago this week, an anomalous state was imposed on the Arab Middle East.

The new creation was alien in every sense to the region’s culture and anti-colonial struggle, which it would put into reverse – and it had no historical antecedents in the Arab world, despite the relentless promotion of biblical mythology to pretend otherwise.

From the start, Israel was a western creation:

A settler-colonial state set up with the aim of absorbing the Jews of the world.

The gift of Palestine as compensation to Jews for their suffering, not least the western antisemitism that was behind it, has been fundamental to western support for Israel, although it is unlikely that anyone today is conscious of it.

The residual legacy of guilt about Jewish suffering, and the idea that Jews are owed a state, still runs deep in western psychology – most obviously in Germany, but also elsewhere in Europe and among European-origin Americans.

The new state went on to violate international law repeatedly, attack its neighbours, persecute the native Palestinian population, and impose a system of apartheid rule over them.

Astonishingly, it became the recipient of unstinting support from powerful western states, apparently unshaken by any of its excesses.

(Russia’s crimes against Ukraine were swiftly punished by the imposition of ferocious western sanctions, while Israel has been forgiven for similar crimes against Palestinians – and its privileged status in western esteem has not changed. ) Palestine was a godsend to be exploited.

The US has stood with Israel throughout history.

It is hard for the US to distance itself in any way from Israeli military operations.

The US was the first country to offer de facto recognition to the new Israeli government when the Jewish state declared independence on 14 May 1948. Seventy-five years later, Washington has long been Israel’s strongest military and diplomatic ally.

There are multiple US laws that require monitoring and cutting off military aid to countries that use it to violate human rights and commit war crimes – which raises the question of why Biden is creating an entirely separate mechanism to enforce the same standards American lawmakers and his own administration created.

With Israel, however, the US provides so much military aid that it has become impossible to track down to an individual unit. So the vetting doesn’t actually happen before the provision of military aid to Israel as the law requires. ( Section 620(i) of the US Foreign Assistance Act prohibits sending arms to a country that prohibits or restricts the transport or delivery of humanitarian aid is ignored.)

One need look no further than the US position on the military occupation of Palestine v the military occupation of Ukraine to see the hypocrisy of its position.

One would think that by now the USA government believes – and finds it deeply disturbing – that Israel is not taking into sufficient consideration how many civilians it kills and is forcibly displaying civilians far beyond what’s necessary.

All of this becomes especially troubling when considering the reasons that Biden is communicating conditions behind closed doors where there can be no oversight or accountability. That he still does not feels the need to break from decades of exempting Israel from scrutiny.

Despite that conclusion, and instead of immediately halting arms transfers, the Biden administration is still sending a bottomless tray of armaments to Israel.

However there is a law:

The US, it states, will not send weapons overseas if it “assesses that it is more likely than not” that they will be used to commit grave breaches of the Geneva conventions, specifically mentioning “attacks intentionally directed against civilian objects or civilians protected as such; or other serious violations of international humanitarian or human rights law”.

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Though both Jews and Arab Muslims date their claims to the land back a couple thousand years, the current political conflict began in the early 20th century. An early United Nations plan to give each group part of the land failed, and Israel and the surrounding Arab nations fought several wars over the territory.

Today’s lines largely reflect the outcomes of two of  wars, one waged in 1948 and another in 1967.

The relationship only really began to flourish following the 1967 War which saw Israel defeat a coalition of Arab states, suffering comparatively few casualties in the process with little help from outside forces, and occupy swaths of new territory, including Gaza and the West Bank.

From the beginning. Former US President Harry Truman was the first world leader to recognise Israel when it was created in 1948.

In the 1980s and ’90s, the US and Israel began cooperating on research and development and production of weaponry.

After the 9/11 terror attacks, that money helped spur advancements in Israel’s surveillance technology and signal intelligence.

Currently, Israel receives $3.8 billion in military aid from the US annually under a memorandum signed in 2019. That accounted for about 16 percent of Israel’s total military budget in 2022 — a significant fraction, but not so large that Israel still depends on US aid in the way it once did.

This has made Israel the 10th largest military exporter in the world — and also made the US conversely reliant on Israel.

Even in the face of global opposition to Israeli  treatment of Palestinians the US is continued its unconditional aid to Israel, which has totaled $158 billion (not adjusted for inflation) since World War II.

The US is Israel’s top trading partner, with annual bilateral trade of nearly $50 billion in goods and services. “American capacities are now to some extent dependent on Israel.”

Washington has failed to urge an immediate ceasefire or utter a word of criticism directed at Israel.

The US president’s position is not unique among a long line of US presidents who have shown nearly unconditional support for Israel in times of conflict. The US also blocked a United Nations Security Council statement that would have called for an end to the violence.

In 2016, then-President Barack Obama signed a defence agreement with Israel providing $38bn in US military support over 10 years including funding for the Iron Dome missile defence system. The responsibility for these tragic deaths rests squarely with Hamas. “No nation should accept rockets being fired into its borders, or terrorists tunnelling into its territory,” Obama said.

This recent outburst of violence was instigated by Hamas – a Palestinian terrorist group supported by Iran and Syria that calls for Israel’s destruction,” Bush said.

The Trump administration facilitated agreements to normalize relations between Israel and several of its Muslim-majority neighbors, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco. There is speculation that Hamas’s attack was intended to upend talks brokered by the Biden administration to also normalize relations between Israel and its main regional rival Saudi Arabia so that they can form a united front against Iran, a common enemy that financially supports Hamas.

Donald Trump was deeply unpopular across much of the world. Israel was an exception after he moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognising the city as Israel’s capital which most countries do not.

There are a number of organisations in the US that advocate for US support of Israel.

The largest and most politically powerful is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Pro-Israel interest groups donate millions to US federal political candidates. During the 2020 campaign, pro-Israel groups donated $30.95m, with 63 percent going to Democrats, 36 percent to Republicans.

Large majorities of the US Congress in the Democratic and Republican parties are avowedly pro-Israel.

It seem on the surface that the US have accepted that it’s just the cost of maintaining the special relationship, which is not just military and political in nature, Biden has reportedly floated a proposal for $2 billion in supplemental aid that would go towards missile interceptors for the Iron Dome, artillery shells, and other munitions. However, the White House could try to tie that aid to other, less bipartisanly popular causes — including funding for Ukraine and Taiwan and border security — which could delay its passage in the Republican-led House.

The continuing US alliance is giving Israel a wide berth for military actions, while disproportionately blaming Palestinians for any violence.  “Israel is in the American camp, no ifs, ands, or buts so is this current war/genocide an American war cleansing.

Decades of brutal Israeli control have demolished the moral case for unconditional US support to the point that these weapons were and are now being used in the commission of war crimes.

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”What does it mean for the current Gaza war?

The war is such a major development, with such major implications for the region, that it could transform the nature of Israeli-Palestinian relations as we know them.

This could  stir anti-US sentiment in the Middle East as neighboring countries witness the death and destruction wreaked by Israeli forces in Gaza.

Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs both want the same land. And a compromise has proven difficult to find.

Israel is the world’s only Jewish state.

Palestine, wants to establish a state by that name on all or part of the same land.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is over who gets what land and how it’s controlled can only be resolved by peace in some form.

The alternative to a two-state solution is a “one-state solution,” wherein all of the land becomes either one big Israel, one big Palestine, or some kind of shared state with a new name.

Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel all live under various regimes of organized discrimination and oppression, much of which makes life nearly unlivable, If you watched only US news, you would be likely to presume that Palestinians always act while Israel only reacts. You might even think that Palestinians are the ones colonizing the land of Israel, no less. And you probably believe that Israel, which holds ultimate control over the lives of 5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and yet denies them the right to vote in Israeli elections, is a democracy.

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To be considered a political being you must at the very least be considered a human being. Who gets to count as human? “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant said.

Human animals?

How can such language and an announced policy of collective punishment against all the residents of Gaza be seen by Israel’s supporters in the United States or elsewhere as defensible? Let’s be clear: Gallant’s language is not the rhetoric of deterrence. It’s the language of genocide.

One fundamental way this double standard operates is through a false equivalence, a two-sides-ism that hides the massive asymmetry of power between the state of Israel and the scattered population groupings that make up the Palestinian people. They’re not equal. One dominates while the other is dominated. One colonizes. The other is colonized.

We are very likely entering another long and painful era where armed struggle and violent domination become increasingly and mutually dependent on each other for survival. Yet neither can win. The Palestinians will remain. They cannot be eliminated. Israel too will continue to exist. The future is full of unnecessary and horrific bloodshed all around. Desperate western attachment to morally bankrupt double standards bears a large portion of the blame. The failure of  “the two-state solution.

The failure of the Zionist movement to entice the majority of European and American Jews to come to Palestine between 1897 and 1947 (or since) and its failure to acquire more than 6.5 percent of the land during that time necessitated an arrangement to establish a Jewish settler-colony on at least parts of Palestine, if not all of it.

It is important to point out, is only a solution to the Zionist failure to successfully colonise the whole country.

The crowning efforts of realising the “two-state solution” that legitimises Israel while granting a consolation prize to the PLO in the form of an ever-deferred mini-state.

For the Israelis, who essentially authored the accords, the Oslo deal was no more than a public relations stunt for the “two-state solution,” while they secretly and not-so-secretly sounded the death knell for it, in preparation for the final “one-state solution”.

What the Israelis have in mind is a one state, not unlike what European white colonists had achieved across the Americas, Africa and Oceania, since the late 18th century, namely domination of the natives through land theft and a series of draconian security arrangements legitimised by the signing of a series of treaties.

These arrangements worked relatively well in the United States until the 1960s, when they had to be updated to be more effective in selling white supremacy to white Americans and to the rest of the world as the best form of “democracy”.

This is, with some variations, what had transpired in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

However, the white-supremacist one-state solution which worked well because of the effectiveness of genocide and slavery in establishing white demographic supremacy in the Americas and Oceania was less successful elsewhere, least of all in Africa.

In Palestine, the dilemma of the Jewish colonists who constituted 10 percent of Palestine’s population after World War One and 30 percent after World War Two was how to establish a demographic majority short of genocide. They opted for mass expulsion, a plan they had drawn up as early as the late 1920s and more formally after the mid-1930s. By the time they finished conquering Palestine in late 1948, they had expelled 90 percent of the Palestinian population in the Palestinian areas they conquered and established a Jewish-supremacist one state, in the American, Canadian, and Australian style.

Today, indigenous Palestinians (seven million – 5.1 million in the West Bank and Gaza and 1.9 million in Israel) have again outnumbered their colonisers (6.7 million), not counting the eight million expelled Palestinian refugees living in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon within a 100-mile radius around their homeland.

It is also the major reason why the one-state solution, despite its clear advantages – not to mention, inevitability – has never taken off at the official level, and is unlikely to while the present mindset persists in western countries.

As there are three different arrangements for the ‘one-state solution,’ which one of them does Israel have in mind for the Palestinian people?

Let no one be fooled, unless the one-state solution nullifies all Jewish racial and colonial privileges and decolonizes the country in order to grant equal rights to all, it would be yet another PR campaign to cover up the maintenance of Jewish supremacy under a new guise.

In the end do states have the right to exist. Taken literally – no state has a right to exist, especially settlers states.  States exist because a group of people wants the state to exist for their benefit. If the state is no longer beneficial to its people, it can be changed or dissolved.

Even after three months of violence and tragedy in Gaza, there remains one theme which is too often danced around or simply ignored. It is the question on which all others depend: does Israel have a right to exist?

How to solve the unsolvable.

It seems to me that the nature of states should be determined by the demographics and democratic will of the people that state governs.

So Israel has the right to maintain its character as a Jewish supremacist ethno-state. But to have a genuine state like all state it must not just reconcile its history but accommodate it in all its forms, granting equality of opportunity to all its citizens no matter what their beliefs.

This is currently not happening through refusing Palestinians citizenship or collaboration as equals, or the right of return to their ancestral lands. Considering the fact that Palestinians have spent the last few decades either in ghettoized villages in the West Bank or in the open air prison camp of Gaza, and embrace absolute resistance to their own disempowerment and exclusion, to say “Israel has the right to exist” is a declaration of commitment to either eternal war, ethnic cleansing, or genocide.

In the case of Israel, the choice the state has faced has been between allowing the Jewish Supremacist nature of the state to change to account for the democratic will of Arabs, African asylum seekers, and other non-Jews, or to deny those non-Jews citizenship and go one claiming to be a “democracy” in the same way that ancient Athens was a democracy- if you happened to be a Greek male citizen, but not if you were a slave, non-Greek, or a woman..

If what we mean by “destroy Israel” is dissolve the nature of Israel as a Jewish ethno-state, than there is nothing wrong with saying so or doing so.

If the will of the actual people living in what is now Israel, want to re-imagine their country as a multicultural democracy or a binational state of Jews and Arabs, than they may do so, and there is nothing immoral or violent about saying so or advocating for this.

There is no other choice as very state formed by settlers colonization is learning to its cost.

Put simply, how can you expect calls for a ceasefire to be heard if you do not recognise the right to exist of those doing the fighting?

Peace depends on the hope of co-existence. Peace also requires leadership that Palestinians have rarely had — and Israel only sometimes. That lack of leadership is linked to opposition to a two-state solution extending back a century, even if the Palestinian Authority technically recognised Israel from 1993.

It’s logical to conclude that the repeated failures of Palestinian leaders to reach a deal for their own state (especially the offers on the table in 2000 and 2008) are inextricably linked to a refusal to consider true co-existence. Accepting a two-state solution means accepting Israel, and for most that cannot happen

.A positive response to “Does Israel have a right to exist?” sticks in the throat of a lot of pro-Palestine protestors, let alone Palestinians themselves.

This aspect of their cause is both fantastical and fantastically futile, since it rests entirely on the forlorn hope that Israel would, ideally, just disappear. The more Western activists adopt an absolutist stance on Israel, the more they put their own ideological purity before the long-term suffering of the Palestinians.

With or without a gencoid, leaving a uninhabitable land there is only a one state solution that can bring permanent peace.

Why not a Federalism? 

States do not have rights. People have rights, and these rights generally exist to protect them from states.

Just like in Northern Ireland when they dont exist to protect them from the states, they exist to protect them from other people.

With a single state likely the inevitable reality, it is past time to start imagining how it could be best implemented.

Fundamentally based on creating an Israeli-Palestinian reality that is shared rather than separate.

Since most peace efforts are based on relationship building, the two-state’s rhetoric of separation ultimately reinforces the perception on both sides that Palestinians are unwanted by Israel.

Regional governments under a larger federal body. This would preserve Israel’s Jewish majority, even in the long term. Israel plus the West Bank is currently 65% Jewish, and birth rates for Jews and Palestinians in this area are almost identical.  The federal government would operate based on a written constitution, which Israel currently lacks.

The constitutions of the cantons could be oriented toward the local majority culture while preserving freedoms of all religions and remaining within the bounds of the federal constitution.

A new parliamentary body representing the cantons would become the upper house, and the existing unicameral Knesset would become the lower house.

Jewish settlements would integrate rather than be dismantled.

The borders of this federation model are more easily defensible than almost any possible with a two-state solution.

Palestinians will likely be concerned about leaving Gaza behind.

To address this, Gaza could receive a port, airport and reasonable border and access arrangements. It would remain independent for as long as expedient. In the future, it could be integrated partly or wholly into the federation. One possibility for Gaza is a proposal related to federation, called confederation. Confederation includes elements of the federation model, such as shared Israeli-Palestinian governmental structures. However, it fundamentally preserves the existing national sovereignties, and so is considered a separate-state solution.

On the Palestinian side, it gives Palestinians the empowerment they have long sought. On the Israeli side, it opens the West Bank, develops Gaza for trade and improves Israel’s worldwide image. It even has the potential to inspire and rally parts of the Jewish Diaspora that are currently apathetic or polarized.

The West set up Israel out of compassion now it must for the same reason offer an alternative with the potential to succeed.

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How do you define genocide?

The term genocide was coined in 1943 by the Jewish-Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who combined the Greek word “genos” (race or tribe) with the Latin word “cide” (to kill).

But behind that simple definition is a complicated tangle of legal concepts concerning what constitutes genocide and when the term can be applied.

Out of respect for those who lost their lives in these grievous mass exterminations, let’s spend some time completing these sobering events in human history.

Bangladesh Genocide, The Croatian Ustasha Genocide. The mass extermination of the Mongol Buddhist Dzungar people, or Zunghars,  The Rwandan Genocide, Tutsi ethnic group, with Hutu nationalists annihilating nearly seventy-five percent of the Tutsi people. The Armenian Genocide.The Kazakhstan Goloshchekin Genocide. The Cambodian Genocide. The Ukrainian Genocide. The Holocaust

Combined wiped they out around 38 million and counting. 

Even the darkest moments of human history have an undeniable impact on the future of our world:

IF JOE BIDEN 81, DOESN’T HAVE THE BALLS to turn on the red light THE REST OF US ARE SITTING ON A POWDER KEG of eroding democracy and the looming threat of authoritarianism.

Because Donald is running for president under the shadow of 91 criminal charges in four jurisdictions, knowing that regaining the White House might be his best hope of avoiding prison – a calculus that could make him and his supporters more desperate and volatile than ever.

Biden is surrounded by people who are experienced campaign veterans and so is he. Use it.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

Contact: bobdillon33@gmaail.com