The Israelis are telling us this is the case themselves, right to our faces. It’s time to wake up.
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
The only real benefit to this latest western “recognition” of Palestine is that it drew out high-profile Israeli politicians to explain to western liberals in plain English that the entire state of Israel stands opposed to their vision of a two-state solution.
Former Israeli defense minister Benny Gantz has a new op-ed in The New York Times where he explicitly states that opposition to the creation of a Palestinian state is “the heart” of a national consensus among Israelis across the mainstream political spectrum, and that this isn’t an obstacle that will go away once Netanyahu is out of power.
“Too often, Western leaders view our policies in this war not through the lens of national security, but through the prism of individuals — and, in particular, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu,” Gantz writes. “The conversation is often framed as a question of what serves the prime minister, as if Israel’s national security begins and ends with one man. This view is mistaken and counterproductive to global stability, regional normalization and Israel’s own security.”
“I myself have been a vocal critic of Mr. Netanyahu,” says Gantz. “But the nation’s core security interests are not partisan property. Today more than ever, they are anchored by a national consensus that is rooted in the hard realities of our region. Opposition to the recognition of Palestinian statehood stands at the heart of that consensus.”
He’s spelling it out in black and white. The Bernie Sanders-style framing of the nightmare in Palestine as a Netanyahu problem which can be remedied in short order by a two-state solution is a fairy tale that western liberals tell each other so they don’t have to face the cold hard reality that the problem is the state of Israel itself.
This comes after Netanyahu publicly stated that “There will be no Palestinian state to the west of the Jordan River,” and after former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant proclaimed that “There will never be a Palestinian state.”
Israel is the problem. Not Netanyahu. Not Hamas. Not that both sides have tragically failed to sit down and find common ground in good-faith negotiations. The problem is that the west established a state in the middle east which holds as its foundational ideology that the people who were living there before that state was created are less than human, and must never have access to the full spectrum of human rights.
The problem is Israel. A state which has always been a racist endeavor from its very inception. A state whose Jewish citizenry are indoctrinated from birth into accepting the hateful, supremacist worldview that is necessary for apartheid and abuse to be accepted as the status quo.
No solutions are going to emerge until the west gets real about this. As long as western liberals are still buying into the fuzzbrained escapist fantasy that Israel is just an election away from a two-state solution if the US simply keeps funding the Iron Dome and making nice with Tel Aviv, we’re going to continue seeing Israel inflicting the nonstop violence and abuse that is necessary for it to exist in its present iteration as a state.
Any actual, reality-based solutions are not going to make liberal Zionists happy like their daydream about a two-state solution does. Israel simply cannot continue to exist as a Zionist entity. It needs to be disarmed, dramatically restructured, and comprehensively denazified as a society. This isn’t going to happen without force, and that necessary force isn’t going to be forthcoming from the western world as long as we are deluding ourselves with infantile fantasies.
The Israelis are telling us this is the case themselves, right to our faces. It’s time to wake up.
____________
The best way to make sure you see everything I write is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Feature image via Adobe Stock.
Read the full article here