None of us get to decide anything, so one may as well make a statement of principle. I proposed 2 November 2023:
- Ceasefire.
- Return of all hostages and political prisoners.
- Israel within its Green Line borders and no more.
- Full sovereignty for Gaza & the West Bank as a state (or two?) of Palestine, with free and fair elections.
- Shared governance of Jerusalem.
- Right Of Return for Palestinians where practical; reparations by Israel where impractical or unwanted.
- Israel and Palestine disarmed, under NATO Article 5 protection.
On the merits I prefer a single democratic state, or even better a federated democratic state, and I respect and support anyone advocating for those, but the reasons to doubt that Palestinians & Israelis can build a shared polity from here are familiar, so I fall back to pretty conventional two-state thinking as the achievable minimum just resolution for the liberation of Arab Palestinians.
Except for that last point, my crackpot attempt at cutting the Gordian knot of security & stability.
The last 55 years have shown that shown that the IDF is a threat to the rightful sovereignty of Palestinians and cannot even deliver security to Israelis. It should be evident why countering that with an armed state of Palestine threatens to produce an escalation spiral even worse that the one which has sabotaged any resolution for generations.
I see no solution other than radical disarmament. But how can both be secure against each other and their other neighbors? Palestinians would have to worry about neighbors other than Israel. Israelis will protest that they face existential threats from their neighbors, and though the wars against Israel ended in 1973 when it was clear that they had the Bomb, total disarmament is a lot to ask. They need a shared guarantor of their security.
It should be evident why the US cannot perform that function, and why the UN is inadequate. But NATO would want security and stability for both states ....
Capturing & slightly refining a comment I made reiterating these points in April 2024 when asked “what's your opinion on the region, morally and politically?”:
Though Israel emerges from a bloody colonial history, that does not make it an illegitimate imposition into the region; Jews in the Levant long pre-date the zionist project, and we should understand the 1950s & ’60s as a partition and population transfer of Mizrahi Jews to Israel. More fundamentally, the state of Israel is legitimate because it is the only home which millions of Israelis have ever known. By that same token, Gaza & the West Bank are rightfully sovereign because all peoples have a right to self-determination in the Westphalian order of nation-states.
Israel therefore has an minimum obligation to ...
- end their attack on Gaza
- accept Gaza & the West Bank as fully sovereign no longer subject to military policing
- fully depart from West Bank settlements
- end de facto apartheid within the Green Line pre-1967 borders with true equal citizenship for all Arabs currently resident
On the merits I would prefer a one-state or mixed-sovereignty resolution, but I consider the kind of two-state solution this implies more plausible. The “western” powers of Europe & the US need — both morally and pragmatically — to underwrite the security of Israel and Gaza & and the West Bank.
Both the Likudniks responsible for the current horrors and the leaders of Hamas who precipitated them with the horrors of 10/7 belong in the dock at the Hague for crimes against humanity.
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