Many of us have spent our whole lives hearing about Israel and Palestine through an overtly biased framing. It’s not until we get older that we start to understand the situation better only to find out that nothing is as we have been told. There is no better example of that than what happened on October 7, which as we all know, did not happen in a vacuum.
In the two years leading up to the attack by Hamas, dozens of children and hundreds of adults were killed by Israel in the West Bank where Palestinian homes are routinely stolen and sold to Westerners. To say that the situation is much more complicated than the sloganeering we so often hear is being simplistic about it. Simply put, it’s standard Western propaganda that we have also come to understand much better.
First, Europeans occupied the Americas, attacked, murdered, and raped only to later refer to resistance fighters as savages which eventually became the traditional U.S. line. The history of the United States and its treatment of nonwhite people have been adopted by many fascists throughout history including the Nazis who copied many of his ideas from the KKK. Similarly, if any country wanted to occupy and colonize a country, like Israel is doing, they could just copy what the U.S. did.
These complexities must be discussed in the context of the entire picture dating back nearly 100 years – a history that if ignored only costs more innocent lives. This brings us to the untenable two-state solution and the farce that it is being pushed on the public. Israel has no interest in protecting Palestinian lives just as any government before Netanyahu’s far-right Likud Party didn’t seem to care. Blaming the current government as if it’s an anomaly is disingenuous.
Israel and the West will never agree to allow Palestine self-determination because it would then have to allow the country to acquire resources to defend itself from foreign invasions – like any other country on Earth. Western powers are also not interested in granting Palestine the sovereignty that it stole some 75 years ago. The idea that Israel would somehow govern two states is a mockery proven through its actions in the West Bank, Gaza, and beyond.
While the U.S. has its population convinced that a two-state solution is the answer to peace in the Middle East, the reality is that there is no peace in the region because of the U.S. and its Western allies. No other countries have done more harm over the last century to myriad Arab countries than Western powers have. Suggesting otherwise is again, colonialist propaganda.
The United States’ support for Israel is based on protecting its interests in the region. Much like Israel, the U.S. occupying Iraq, for example, often claims to be defending itself against fighters who, much like the majority of Iraqis, don’t want them there. Recently, the U.S. launched missiles in what it called a “defensive air strike” on soft targets. Like Israel, under international law, the U.S. can’t claim self-defense as an occupier and yet, it does.
Colonialist forces don’t adhere to international law because if they did, they wouldn’t be able to do what they do. This is yet another reason to believe that the so-called two-state solution is but a mere tool to buy time in the public’s eyes while the slaughter of innocents continues. At no point will Western countries truly allow for a two-state solution in Palestine as evidenced by their long history of backing Israeli assassinations targeting the chief negotiators pushing for peace.
Theocracies and ethnostates have historically been responsible for much of the world’s worst atrocities including countless genocides. Why anyone in their right mind would ever agree that any group of people is “chosen” is antithetical to peace. Whether it’s white Christian nationalists in Western countries, Christofascists in Latin America, Islamic theocracies in the Middle East, or a Jewish theocracy in Palestine, people who don’t fit the profile will never be safe.
As we see all over the world, those beliefs are used as justification to oppress, murder, rape, and slaughter entire populations of people. Abiding by any of it makes us all complicit. With Israel seemingly hell-bent on expanding its war against civilians, the prospect of a two-state solution is all but dead.
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