Debate: What is the solution? One state, two states or something altogether different?

People may have difficulty accepting the headline. The IHRA ‘definition’ of anti-Semitism calls it anti-Semitic. Today even the simplest of truths, such as calling Israel’s attack on Gaza ‘genocide’, are deemed ‘anti-Semitic’.

In 1993 the Oslo Accords were signed. The wolf and the sheep were going to lie down without the Palestinian sheep being eaten by the Israeli wolf. Not only did most Palestinians support it but so did the vast majority of the Palestine solidarity movement,

In Britain PSC held an Emergency General Meeting to debate the Accords. About one-third of the meeting opposed the Executive motion arguing that support for the Oslo Accords represented a capitulation to Israel and that there would never be a Palestinian state. That the Oslo Accords represented a neo-colonial solution. Moving the Executive motion Israeli anti-Zionist Uri Davies, who is now embedded in the Quisling Palestinian Authority, assured the meeting that all would now be hunky dory,

As a result of our defeat I resigned from PSC, the group that I had been one of the co founders of, along with Roland Rance, another Jewish anti-Zionist and co-founder of PSC. I did not rejoin Brighton and Hove PSC until 2000 and national PSC until 2005 when the BDS campaign began. In 2022 I resigned once again from national PSC when, with the support of the SWP, it abandoned opposition to Zionism.

We were told that we could not go against the will of the Palestinians, even though most Palestinians only supported Oslo because they believed that a fraction of a loaf was better than no loaf. If given a free choice most Palestinians would have supported a unitary Palestinian state and the Right of Return of the refugees.

Oslo gave the Palestinians virtually nothing. Autonomy in a fraction of the West Bank (Area C) a city state to run (Jericho) and control of that part of Gaza where there were no settlers with Yassir Arafat arriving in triumph.

As I predicted in a debate in Labour Briefing with Julia Bard of the non-Zionist Jewish Socialists Group, Oslo represented the worst defeat since the Nakba for the Palestinians. It didn’t even mention a Palestinian state. I used a biblical metaphor. The Accords were a message of potage. The soup that Jacob gave Esau in order to deprive him of his birthright.

The JSG and other soft supporters of the Palestinians were all in favour of the Accords. For them Zionism was not a reality, it was just a word. Israel was not a settler colonial state but just a Jewish state gone wrong. Zionism wasn’t part of their language. All that mattered was that Palestinians and Israelis had become reconciled. Their differences hadn’t really been political but inter-personal. All that was needed was reconciliation. It was part of the western personal politics of identity and the feminist zeitgeist. The PLO had been legalised, the Palestinian flag could now be flown and in return the PLO recognised the Israeli state and the UN repealed Resolution 3379 which said that Zionism was a form of racism.

Zionism was irrelevant to anyone except us leftists. All that mattered was that Israelis got to know Palestinians better. The differences had not been structural. The Nakba was the past, Israel was here to stay.

Netanyahu and Obama

I dropped out of Palestine solidarity work for the best part of a decade. After all if the Palestinians had decided to fly the White Flag what role was left for people like me?  However disillusion with the Accords was quick to materialise. On 4 November 1995 Yitzhak Rabin, the war criminal turned peacemaker, was assassinated. Netanyahu played a major part in creating the atmosphere that led to Rabin’s murder. He had spoken at rallies where Rabin’s effigy had been dressed up in Nazi uniform.

Netanyahu won the May 1996 elections for Prime Minister against Labour’s Shimon Peres (the first and only time the Prime Minister was chosen by the electorate). In 2000 there began the second Intifada.

The question however is why did the Oslo Accords fail? Large sections of the left supported it, including even the Fourth International’s Michel Warshawsky, of Jerusalem’s Alternative Information Centre.

To understand what is happening today and yesterday one has to go back to basics and understand Zionism. This is one of the reasons why I am a Marxist because it gives me the tools of analysis to understand historical developments by reference to the material and economic conditions that lead to capitalism and imperialism.

Nationalism and religion deal in heroic tales, myths of the past and the metaphysical. It substitutes wishful thinking and a deity for what was and what is.

Why is it that Israel has come to be a Reflection of Nazi Germany?

The one question that has bedevilled Israel since its creation in 1948 has been ‘Who is a Jew’. It is the same question that perplexed the Nazi race scientists too. Defined as a race, the Nuremberg definition of Jews was based on religious practice. If your grandparents, going back to 1870, were practising Jews then you too were Jewish.

The Nazis found that even this definition had its difficulty, so they created a ‘mixed race’, the Mishlinge. If one of your grandparents was Jewish you were a quarter Jew and if two of them were Jewish then you were a half-Jew. So too in Israel. There are many Jews who conform to the definition of a Jew in the 1970 Amendment to the Law of Return, also based on who your grandparents, relatives and partners are but they still fall foul of the religious halachic definition, which is based on whether your mother is Jewish.

The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute

That is the problem with ‘race’. Despite the best efforts of the racial scientists of the Nazis' Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, (which was partly funded by the Rockefeller Foundation) with their measurements of the cranium and other physical attributes, ‘race’ defies any scientific definition.

The ‘Jewish’ State was created as an ethno-nationalist state so defining who is a Jew was supremely important. It was inevitable that purity of race and the predominance of Jews was essential. That is why the Zionist formulation of a ‘Jewish Democratic State’ was an oxymoron. Israel could be either Jewish or Democratic but not both.

Moshe Sharrett - Israel's second Prime Minister and its only dove

Anyone wishing to understand the engine behind Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide should read Livia Rokach’s Israel’s Sacred Terrorism, which is based on the diaries of Moshe Sharrett, Israel’s second prime minister. Sharrett was a dove amongst wolves and he lasted less than two years as Prime Minister, from December 1953 to November 1955, when Ben Gurion ‘retired’ and then returned as first Defence Minister then Prime Minister.

Sharrett however left what became 8 volumes of a diary. Over 40 years later it was translated into English and expanded to include declassified archival material, released as My Struggle for Peace: The Diary of Moshe Sharett, 1953–1956. It pulled no punches. Sharrett described Ben-Gurion’s ‘diabolic plans’ to "Christianize"Lebanon, i.e., to foment and take advantage of the sectarian divisions in Lebanese society that French colonialism had bequeathed to them. Ben-Gurion had a ‘detailed blueprint for the partition and subordination of that country to Israel’. Sharrett described how:

"I have been meditating on the long chain of false incidents and hostilities we have invented, and on the many clashes we have provoked which cost us so much blood, and on the violations of the law by our men-all of which brought grave disasters and determined the whole course of events and contributed to the security crisis".

Sound familiar? It should.

Moshe Dayan, lsrael's then chief of staff (later Defence Minister), explained why Israel needed to reject any border security arrangements offered by the neighbouring Arab States or the UN, as well as formal security guarantees suggested by the United States.

Such guarantees, he predicted, might "tie Israel's hands" and prevent the attacks and incursions across the armistice lines which went on throughout the mid- 1950s, under the ‘euphemistic name of reprisal actions.’ Dayan described these actions as being

" our vital lymph. They . . . . help us maintain a high tension among our population and in the army. . . in order to have young men go to the Negev we have to cry out that it is in danger". (26 May 1955)

Rokach described how

the creation of a siege mentality in Israeli society was necessary to complement the prefabricated myth of the Arab threat. The two elements were intended to feed each other.

Rokach quoted the testimony of a soldier who participated in the occupation of the Palestinian village of Duelma in 1948:

Killed between 80 to 100 Arabs, women and children. To kill the children they fractured their heads with sticks. There was not one house without corpses. The men and women of the villages were pushed into houses without food or water.

Then the saboteurs came to dynamite the houses. One commander ordered a soldier to bring two women into a house he was about to blow up. . . . Another soldier prided himself upon having raped an Arab woman before shooting her to death. Another Arab woman with her newborn baby was made to clean the place for a couple of days, and then they shot her and the baby. Educated and well-mannered commanders who were considered "good guys". . . became base murderers, and this not in the storm of battle, but as a method of expulsion and extermination. The fewer the Arabs who remain, the better. (quoted in Davar, 9 June 1979)

Let no-one believe that Israel’s atrocities in Lebanon and Gaza are new or the product of ‘right-wing’ Zionism. Rokach described how

‘War with Egypt was to remain a major ambition of Israel's security establishment, but the time was not yet ripe. On February 25, Ben Gurion, himself put the brakes on his collaborators' impatience when he rejected Lavon's proposal "to go ahead immediately with the plan for the separation of the Gaza Strip from Egypt." The Old Man was determined to stick to his timetable. Now, Sharett noted later, "Ben Gurion suggested to concentrate on action against Syria." (27 February 1954)

Rokach described a ‘historic opportunity to occupy Southern Syria’. On January 31, 1954 Moshe Dayan went on to outline his war plans.

The second plan-action against the interference of the Syrians with our fishing in the Lake of Tiberias. . . .The third-if, due to internal problems in Syria, Iraq invades that country we should advance [into Syria] and realize a series of "faits accomplis." . . . The interesting conclusion to be drawn from all this regards the direction in which the new Chief of Staff is thinking. I am extremely worried. (31 January 1954)

On February 25, 1954, Syrian troops stationed in Aleppo revolted against Adib Shishakly's regime. After lunch Lavon took me aside and started trying to persuade me: This is the right moment to act. This is the time to move forward and occupy the Syrian border positions beyond the Demilitarized Zone. Syria is disintegrating. A State with whom we signed an armistice agreement exists no more. Its government is about to fall and there is no other power in view. ... This is an historical opportunity, we shouldn't miss it. I was reluctant to approve such a blitz-plan and saw ourselves on the verge of an abyss of disastrous adventure. I asked if he suggests to act immediately and I was shocked when I realized that he does. I said that if indeed Iraq will move into Syria with its army it will be a revolutionary turn which will ... justify far reaching conclusions, but for the time being this is only a danger, not a fact. It is not even clear if Shishakly will fall: he may survive. ... He repeated that time was precious and we must act so as not to miss an opportunity which otherwise might be lost forever. Again I answered that under the circumstances right now I cannot approve any such action. ... I saw that he was extremely displeased by the delay. However, he had no choice but to agree. (25 February 1954)

President Eisenhower and Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser

Lavon was Defence Minister. He left the Israeli government owing to the scandal of the Lavon Affair when an Israeli terror cell, comprising Egyptian Jews who Israel had recruited, were arrested in the summer of 1954. They had planned to plant bombs in movie houses, a post office, and U.S. institutions in Cairo and Alexandria. The purpose was to create the impression that Egypt under the nationalist Gamal Abdel-Nasser was unstable and thus undermine Cairo’s relations with the United States and Britain.

Unfortunately for Israel its agents were caught red-handed planting bombs and two members of the Zionist terror cell, Moshe Marzouk and Shmuel Azar, were executed in Egypt. Six others were sentenced to long prison sentences and only released in 1968.

In the 1950’s Israel was not a super-power. It could not bomb its neighbours with impunity. At that time the United States was more interested in preventing the Arab countries aligning with the Soviet Union than Arab nationalism and relying on Israel to intimidate the Arabs and protect the oil. Thus Eisenhower told Israel to withdraw its army from the Sinai Desert and the Gaza  Strip saying that territorial aggrandisement could not be rewarded. He even threatened to withhold $100m in aid.

From the start Israel was an aggressive, militaristic state seeking to expand its borders. Israel has permanently engaged in a search for  lebensraum. Whereas the US did not rely on Israel in its early stages, today Israel is the main pillar on which western imperialism relies in the Middle East.

Theodor Herzl - founder of Political Zionism

Why Zionism is the ideological and political reflection of Nazi ideology

That Zionism is a political ideology based on race not religion is not open to dispute. From Moses Hess, the first political Zionist, who wrote in Rome & Jerusalem that ‘race is primary, class is secondary’ to Herzl’s Deputy, Max Nordau who was a strong believer in eugenics, Zionism as a settler colonial movement based its right to displace the indigeous Palestinians on racial supremacy.

Early Zionist felt a particular attraction to the same ideas that motivated the most virulent anti-Semites. Nordau’s theories on art and illness ‘ripple through the writings of Nazi race ideology, including Mein Kampf...’ [Jason Farrago] In an interview with La Libre Parole [21.12.1903] Nordau explained that Zionism

is not a question of religion but exclusively of race, and there is no-one with whom I am in greater agreement on this position than M. Drumont.

Eduard Drumont was the leader of the anti-Drefussards in France. Zionism was a ‘blood and soil’ form of nationalism (blut und boden). None more so than Zionist Federation of Germany [ZVfD] which on June 21 1933 wrote to Hitler explaining their kinship:

Zionism has no illusions about the difficulty of the Jewish condition, which consists above all in an abnormal occupational pattern and in the fault of an intellectual and moral posture not rooted in one’s own tradition… an answer to the Jewish question truly satisfying to the national state can be brought about only with the collaboration of the Jewish movement that aims at a social, cultural and moral renewal of Jewry… On the foundation of the new state, which has established the principle of race... fruitful activity for the Fatherland is possible…. Our acknowledgement of Jewish nationality provides for a clear and sincere relationship to the German people and its national and racial realities. Precisely because we don’t wish to falsify these fundamentals, because we, too, are against mixed marriage and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group… The realization of Zionism could only be hurt by resentment of Jews abroad against the German development. Boycott propaganda… is in essence unZionist, because Zionism wants not to do battle but to convince and to build.

This letter was sent in an attempt to curry favour with the Nazi leadership. No one forced the ZVfD to send it. Germany’s Zionists wanted the Nazis to know that there was a group, a tiny group of German Jews (approximately 2%) which was friendly to the Nazi racial experiments. It was never replied to. It can be found in Lucy Dawidowicz’s Holocaust Reader pp. 151-153.

Once it is accepted that the same principles of racial purity that underlay the Nazi experiment also motivated Zionism, then it is clear that Israel can never live in peace with either the Palestinians nor its Arab neighbours. In its eyes they are racially inferior.

The driving force behind Hitler’s war on neighbouring European states was lebensraum, the search for ‘living space’, as Hitler outlined in the Hossbach memorandum. During the war Germany engaged in vast resettlement schemes that led to thousands of German colonists settling in places like the Warthegau, the annexed part of Poland from which the Poles and Jews were expelled.

This of course is exactly what is and has happened in the West Bank. Jews have been resettled from pre-1967 Israel to the Territories on the pretext that god gave it to them! It is the settler right which has risen to power in Israel.

Similarly the motive behind Israel’s war against Lebanon, its house demolitions and destruction in Jerusalem, is simply a Zionist version of lebensraum. As former Israeli Minister Yossi Saridwrote in 2011:

Suddenly we are short of space here in Israel, which has become full to capacity and needs lebensraum. Every cultured person knows that this is a despicable German concept, banned from use because of the associations it brings up. Still, people are starting to use it, if not outright then with a clear implication: We are short of land, we are short of air, let us breathe in this country.

When we embarked on the Six-Day War did we want to remove a threat or did we want to gain control in order to spread out? That's what happens after 44 years of mire and moral corruption, which distort things and make us forget the original objective and replace it with an entirely different one. We were fortunate when we occupied the West Bank because had we not done so, where would we have come to live? And who knows how high housing prices would have risen? The divine promise is now being revealed in all its ability to prophesy about real estate.

The original Zionist aim was to conquer Eretz Yisrael (the Biblical Land of Israel) which god apparently promised to Abraham in a fit of madness. This promise stretched from the Litani river in South Lebanon down to the Brook of the Nile in Egypt and across to the Euphrates in Iraq. So there is lots of room to grow in future years!

Of course even Netanyahu is not so crude as to admit that he is aiming to conquer all of this territory. Instead Israel’s steady expansion is dressed up as ‘the right to self-defence’ or ‘security’ but the aim is clear. Gaza is to be cleared of its indigenous population in order to allow Israelis to settle it once again. The far-right is even talking seriously in terms of settling South Lebanon.

Always you understand it is ‘security’ never lebensraum that is their concern. Israel conquers a territory, as it did in 1967, which unsurprisingly provokes resistance. This is immediately termed ‘terrorism’ and that in turn results in Israel’s ‘right to self-defence’. In the course of ‘defending’ itself Israel expands a little bit further.

One sometimes has to feel sorry for Hitler and Goebbels. If only they had ‘genocide’ Joe and his partner, serial liar Anthony Blinken, then history might have looked on them in a more favourable light.

It is true that Hitler’s Final Solution meant gassing and shooting the Jews and Roma (who the Zionist historians insist did not suffer a holocaust). However the Nazis also experimented with blowing up Jews with explosives. Unfortunately their explosives weren’t powerful enough which was why they opted for gas, first Carbon Monoxide and then Zyklon B, hydrogen-cyanide.

However if Biden and Kamala Harris had been around to provide them with 2,000 bombs of high explosives who knows? Perhaps they would have settled on blowing the Jews up. In self-defence of course. But to those who find killing people by gas as opposed to explosives especially abhorrent ask yourself this – which is more cruel? Killing someone with poison gas, which is relatively quick or burying people alive under rubble to die a lingering, painful death. I just ask of course because we know that Biden and Netanyahu are civilised people.

Next Tuesday Jewish Network for Palestine and the Socialist Labour Network are holding a webinar on why, after the genocide in Gaza, there is only one goal that the Palestine solidarity should set and that is the de-Zionisation of the Israeli state. The two-state solution is an apartheid, neo-colonial solution which envisages a tamed, civilised State of Israel co-existing side by side with a Palestinian state.

Just as it is impossible to tame the appetite of a fox for chickens and lions for lambs, so Israel becoming a peace-loving, non-racist state is equally impossible. A rabid dog cannot be cured. Israel was flawed from the start. As a settler colonial, ethno-religious Jewish state, it could not be other than an inherently racist state.

Romanian Roma children deported to Transnistria and murdered

Any state which defines its national collectivity in terms of religion will automatically discriminate against those who aren’t of that religion. Israel is not a theocracy, although it is heading that way, but it is a state no different to the Christian ethno-nationalist states of Eastern Europe – Romania, Slovakia, Croatia in the 1930s and 1940s. 

Without exception they were the most enthusiastic participants in the Nazi holocaust. Slovakia was the first to deport its Jews – it asked the Nazis to take them off their hands. Romania didn’t ask the Nazis to exterminate its Jews, it managed that task all on its own as did Croatia, the only Nazi occupied state to set up its own extermination camp, Jasenovac.

Of Romania’s 600,000 Jews, it butchered 300,000 without any need for Nazi help. Even Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor of Poland, who was hanged at Nuremberg, remarked of Romania’s Jassi pogrom, that ‘we practice surgery, they practice butchery’.

Israel’s Jewish Nation State Law, passed in 2018 is quite clear:

The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.

The other 20% of Israel’s population, its Arab/Palestinian citizens can go to hell. In the words of Netanyahu, Israel is a state, not of all its citizens, but its Jewish citizens.

They have individual, not national rights. What does that mean? That the 93% of Israeli land which is owned by the State and the Zionist institutions like the Jewish National Fund belong only to the metaphysical Jewish people.

That is why to this very day, Bedouin living in the ‘unrecognised’ villages of the Negev are evicted to make way for Jewish  towns. Al Hiram was evicted to make way for the Jewish-only town of Hiram. The Bedouin were considered to be squatting on land that did not belong to them, because state land is Jewish state land.

The idea that a Jewish state could accord its non-Jewish inhabitants equality is pure fantasy. The two-state solution embodies this fantasy. The guiding ideology of Israel is Zionism and the responsibility of the Israeli state is to give effect to Zionism. 

Yair Lapid is the leader of Israel's opposition and in Zionist terms is on the 'left'. Yet  his declared principles are no different from the Zionist right:

My principle says maximum Jews on maximum land with maximum security and with minimum Palestinians.

Palestine Solidarity Campaign has fought bitterly against adopting a one-state solution. If it is to have any political credibility after the current genocide and ethnic cleansing it has to jettison this reluctance. Its pretext has always been that it is up to the Palestinians to decide what they want but Palestinians are in no position to decide anything. It is an abdication of responsibility.

A solidarity movement does not have to adopt the slogans of those they support. Whereas the Palestinians may be forced into all sorts of compromises, the solidarity movement is under no such pressures. Our duty is to exert pressure on Zionism and its backers.

The Vietcong were forced to accept the presence of the South Vietnamese government after the January 1973 Paris Peace Talks. The Vietnam Solidarity movement though called for reunification of Vietnam.

The real reason why PSC has refused to support a one-state solution has nothing to do with the Palestinians. They have not defended Hamas as the choice of the Palestinians. The real reason for their hostility to a single state solution and the abolition of a Jewish state relates to their appeal to reformist politicians and trade union leaders, for whom the two-state solution is sacrosanct.

Even the most left-wing of British politicians, such as Jeremy Corbyn, are pro-Palestinian but not anti-Zionist. They have no analysis or understanding of why Israel behaves as it does. They are therefore intimidated by accusations that opposition to a ‘Jewish’ state is anti-Semitic. They cling to the idea that Israel can be reformed, even though this belief is evidence free. The same politicians would never have dreamed of calling for a two-state solution in Apartheid South Africa to include a White state but they do with Israel.

PSC refuses to challenge these fundamental beliefs of the British Establishment because, in so far as it has any strategy, it believes it can win them over. They call it ‘mainstreaming’. PSC supports the Palestinians but at the same time has nothing to say about the Zionist nature of a state whose very existence guarantees continued genocide and ethnic cleansing.

What this has meant in practice is that trade union leaders and left-reformists, such as Corbyn and McDonnell, have been able to ‘both sides’ the Palestinian struggle. You can support a Jewish state and a Palestinian state. You don’t have to touch the thorny question of Zionism. This is what happened during Corbyn’s years of retreat. He accepted Zionism as a valid expression of Jewish identity resulting in a Jewish state. It meant that he succumbed to the fake ‘anti-Semitism’  smear campaign. The rest is history.

Supporters of the Palestinians must break from both Zionism and the two-state solution. There is only one solution, a democratic, secular state. That is the purpose of this webinar. The terrible ordeal of the Palestinians of Gaza and now Lebanon must be ended once and for all. Just as the Nazi state was destroyed so too must the Israeli state. Its continued existence means continued genocide. The two-state solution is an apartheid solution and those who support it should be asked what price they are willing to see the Palestinians pay.

Tony Greenstein