The time has come to imagine a world without the apartheid State of Israel

The time has come to imagine a world without the apartheid State of Israel.

States come and states disappear in a never ending cycle that has marked human history since the modern nation-state came into being with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Many states that once believed themselves to be permanent and perpetual since have collapsed due to the contradictions sown by their very existence.

In modern times alone the world has witnessed the demise of a slew of states, among them the Soviet Union and the apartheid state of South Africa. And what these two particular examples have in common is that their demise came peacefully, without either the spilling of an ocean of blood or the genocide of an entire people.

Thus the idea that states are immutable and permanent entities, and that they cannot be disestablished peacefully, is entirely false. What is immutable — or at least what should be — is not the existence of any given state but of a given people. Which brings us, in our time, to the white supremacist apartheid State of Israel.

The depth and breadth of the brutality and savagery being visited on the Palestinians is now so great that even a one-state-solution is impossible to achieve, never mind the two state solution that has been floated around since the Oslo Accords of 1993.

Instead, the only way this tragedy can now end is with the complete and peaceful disestablishment of Israel, the dismantlement of its state institutions, and the return of all the land to the indigenous Palestinian people. Israeli citizens with second passports would under these circumstances have the option of returning to whence they came from around the world, while those Israeli citizens without second passports could be taken in by Western countries according to a quota system.

This reasoning is based on the understanding that the vast majority of Israelis, having experienced being the supposed beneficiaries of a supremacist apartheid status quo, would have no desire to live in a unitary state on the basis of equal civil, social and economic rights with a Palestinian population they’ve been conditioned to believe are of a lower caste and character.

Of course, the Palestinians would rightfully be the final arbiters of the political and civil contours of any such new Palestinian state, which would be outlined and developed in conjunction with regional actors, the United Nations and the international community in general. And of course, appropriate reparations would by necessity be required to be paid to the Palestinians by the US and the UK — both key in Israel’s establishment and continued existence — if such a process was to meet the demands of historical justice.

In other words, we are talking a complete reversal of the Nakba of 1948, involving the return of all Palestinian refugees to the homes confiscated from them by white European settlers in the name of Zionism, which as an ideology is a subset of white supremacy, a supremacist doctrine informed by the structural oppression of another people on the grounds of might is right. Here, we must understand that white supremacy is more than a merely racial construct, it is also an ideological one.

This development of reversal and redress will clearly not come to pass any time soon. But given where we are in terms of the sheer scope of the brutality currently underway, and how it will only succeed in inculcating hatred and fear of both by both to unprecedented levels, this I firmly believe is the trajectory we are now on.

Israel is a state that has been on Western life support since it was established on ethnically-cleansed Palestinian land in 1948. It has never in its history enjoyed full economic or political independence since. First the British — as mentioned, the original author of this colonialist crime with the passage of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 — and then the Americans have been its geopolitical overlord, without whose economic, geopolitical, military and diplomatic support its mode of existence as an apartheid, ethno-religious, white supremacist state would have been unsustainable.

The grim irony for Jewish citizens of Israel is that a state established on the premise that it will provide a safe haven for same has proved anything but. Indeed, there is and has been no more an unsafe place for Jewish people to reside than in the State of Israel, given that its existence is predicated on the negation of an indigenous people it dispossessed yet whom stubbornly refuse to go quietly into the night of history.

No, a state whose mode of existence is such that war and brutality and injustice are its chief characteristics is completely and totally unsustainable in the long term. In the short term, Palestinian lives up to and including those of babies are currently being violated and extinguished one after the other as in a perpetual ‘immorality play’.

Hope resides in the fact that the unprecedented violence and slaughter being visited on the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank has been met with unprecedented levels of support for the Palestinian people around the world. In the West and US in particular the mass demonstrations that have taken place throughout have done so in the teeth of an international political and media class that has never stood more discredited and maligned on any issue than the issue of Israel/Palestine. This in itself marks a major inflection point in human affairs.

Western regimes, specifically the one based in Washington, will sooner rather than later be forced to wake up to the fact that in this age of late capitalism and fading Western hegemony, rather than any kind of strategic asset, Israel is a strategic liability. Despite the subvention of untold billions to Tel Aviv, despite the unending military support, and despite the best efforts of the Israel lobby to shape the narrative, the die is well and truly cast in this regard.

Ultimately, until the Palestinian flag is flying over Jerusalem, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jaffa — over every part of Mandate Palestine — the barbarism of occupation, settler violence and collective punishment will continue. Meanwhile, the racially supremacist character of Israel is of such magnitude that a process of re-humanisation of the Israeli people is of critical importance — for them, the Palestinians, and the region entire.

The root of the crisis lies not in Israel’s actions, it lies in Israel’s very existence. It is a failed experiment in white supremacy and settler colonialism, and as such must be brought to an end in the interests of the long-suffering Palestinian people, the region, and by extension the world entire.

If there is any justice in this world, fifty years from now people will view the apartheid State of Israel in the same way that we, today, view the US Confederacy, white Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. In other words, gone, non-existent, relegated to that dustbin otherwise known as history.

End.

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