Kerry gives eulogy for two-state solution

Ali Abunimah Power Suits 28 December 2016

US Secretary of State John Kerry delivers remarks on Middle East peace, at the State Department in Washington, DC, on 28 December 2016.

State Department photo

Outgoing Secretary of State John Kerry delivered some of the harshest criticism ever heard from a US official of Israel’s settlements in the occupied West Bank, in a closely watched speech in Washington on Wednesday.

But whether he intended it or not, Kerry also delivered a eulogy for the two-state solution and set the stage for the emergence of the one-state solution as the most realistic path to justice and peace in historic Palestine.

Speaking for more than an hour, Kerry defended the US decision to abstain in last Friday’s UN Security Council vote, thereby allowing the body to pass a resolution that for the first time in years demanded that Israel halt settlement construction. (video)

“The vote in the UN was about preserving the two-state solution,” Kerry said. “That’s what we were standing up for: Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state, living side by side in peace and security with its neighbors.”

“Let’s be clear: settlement expansion has nothing to do with Israel’s security,” Kerry said, arguing that the land grabs are motivated by “ideological imperatives,” including preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state.

One-state reality

“The two-state solution is the only way to achieve a just and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians,” Kerry insisted.

But in attempting to make that case, Kerry proved the opposite. He described in detail how Israel’s settlements are “increasingly cementing an irreversible one-state reality.”

“Today … there are a similar number of Jews and Palestinians living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea,” Kerry said, referring to the land that makes up present-day Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“They can choose to live together in one state, or they can separate into two states. But here is a fundamental reality: if the choice is one state, Israel can either be Jewish or democratic – it cannot be both – and it won’t ever really be at peace.”

Kerry’s insistence that a one-state solution would be a disaster is supposedly self-evident conventional wisdom. But it ignores the ideas that many Palestinian, Israeli and other writers and scholars, including this one, have discussed and developed over many years, based on lessons drawn from South Africa, Ireland and other places.

“If there is only one state,” Kerry warned, “you would have millions of Palestinians permanently living in segregated enclaves in the middle of the West Bank, with no real political rights, separate legal, education and transportation systems, vast income disparities, under a permanent military occupation that deprives of them of the most basic freedoms. Separate and unequal is what you would have.”

This powerfully evokes the language of US segregation and the civil rights struggle against it. But what Kerry was describing is already the reality in historic Palestine. His two-state solution would cosmetically repackage this injustice as Palestinian “independence,” without fundamentally altering it.

What he offers Palestinians is a demilitarized bantustan with the singular pupose of preserving an all-powerful Israel as a racist state with a permanent Jewish majority.

Kerry’s parameters for a two-state solution make clear that its goal is ethnic gerrymandering: it would have to include Palestinian “recognition of Israel as a Jewish state,” which means, in effect, recognizing Israel’s right to discriminate against Palestinians and anyone else who is not Jewish.

Kerry called for “a just, agreed, fair and realistic solution to the Palestinian refugee issue.” But he made clear that “the solution must be consistent with two states for two peoples, and cannot affect the fundamental character of Israel.”

In plain English, this means that Palestinian refugees would not be allowed to go home, solely because they are not Jews. There is nothing just or democratic about that. It is raw racism that tramples universal human rights.

By contrast, the US-brokered 1995 Dayton peace agreement that ended the war in Bosnia guaranteed the right of refugees to return to their homes, even if they were in areas ruled by authorities dominated by a different ethnic community – that is as it should be.

Kerry posed the following scenario under the supposedly nightmarish one-state reality: “How would Israel respond to a growing civil rights movement from Palestinians, demanding a right to vote, or widespread protests and unrest across the West Bank?”

A better question is, how should Israel respond?

If Israel actually held democratic ideals, the obvious answer would be for everyone to have the right to vote in a decolonized, nonsectarian state.

Instead of urging Israel to move in that direction, Kerry called for “advancing the process of separation now” – another term for that would be apartheid.

In the American civil rights struggle that Kerry invoked, the position of those holding democratic ideals was for the US to end all forms of legalized racial discrimination, to grant the vote to every person and to guarantee full and equal citizenship.

It was white supremacists who used the cover of “states’ rights” to argue that they should be allowed to continue segregation and other racist policies that guaranteed their power and privilege in Alabama, Mississippi or Georgia.

Today it is still white supremacists, including Nazi sympathizers like “Alt-Right” leader Richard Spencer, who argue that the United States should be partitioned so that there can be an “ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans.”

Spencer even has a name for this ideology: White Zionism.

Kerry and President Barack Obama, as good liberals, would certainly reject these ideas for Americans. But their two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians is just another form of segregation.

After the two-state solution

In any case, the US vision of two states is dead and the Obama administration helped bury it.

As Kerry confessed, the outgoing administration has done everything in its power to provide Israel with unconditional support and to frustrate any initiative to hold it accountable.

“We have strongly opposed boycotts, divestment campaigns and sanctions targeting Israel in international fora,” Kerry boasted, adding that the Obama administration recently signed a $38 billion arms giveaway to Israel that “exceeds any military assistance package the US has provided to any country, at any time.”

Things are not about to get any brighter for those who still believe in the two-state fantasy.

Unsurprisingly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers have angrily rejected Kerry’s speech.

Even before the Secretary of State spoke, President-elect Donald Trump tweeted that “We cannot continue to let Israel be treated with such total disdain and disrespect” as the Obama administration supposedly has. “Stay strong Israel, January 20th is fast approaching,” Trump urged.

The reality is this: Israel cannot be sweet-talked into ending its brutal regime of occupation, apartheid and settler-colonialism.

Like apartheid South Africa, it must be placed under increasing isolation and pressure until it is compelled to change.

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Sage replied on

This should have been the speech we heard years ago. Now the damage is done, and the zionists have no regard for international laws. If the US had stopped the aid and weapons, until the zionists sat down at a peace table even hundred times, until a resolution was achieved, we would not be seeing acres and acres of illegal settlements. The leader of the zionists has thumbed his nose, once again at Obama, and is kissing up to Trump. Ah cunning.

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thai dog replied on

Worse still, Trump has just tweeted his latest counter.

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Nikolaos Balaskas replied on

For Israel to comply to the UN resolution, it may NOT be necessary to dismantle the illegal Israeli settlements built on lands Palestinians were evicted from and had their homes destroyed. The best and simplest solution would be to force the Israeli government to hand over the Deeds and the KEYS to all these new Israeli-only houses, built with U.S. taxpayer's money, to the Palestinians as compensation for their suffering and ongoing theft of their lands. Then Israel should agree to give Israelis and Palestinians equal rights with guarantees agreed to by ALL that everyone can live in peace together again in a single united and non-racist/apartheid State, just like before 1948, with Jerusalem as its capital...

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larry white replied on

Nikolas --correction.

You should have said "For Jewish Israelis only" .

I doubt you will find one non Jew in those illegal Jewish communities.

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larry white replied on

"In plain English, this means that Palestinian refugees would not be allowed to go home, solely because they are not Jews. There is nothing just or democratic about that. It is raw racism that tramples universal human rights." Ali'

Thanks for clearing my mind.I was so ensconced in the euphoria of seeing Israel get a long overdue dose of reality , the obvious racist element of Kerry,s plan got by me.

I believe that Kerry knows Israel is going to ignore him and end up with a 1SS and the end of Israel but has just put it on record so he can assuage his conscience when it all goes south for the zionists.

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tom hall replied on

In urging a wiser course, Kerry evokes (while seeming to condemn) the example of the American South in the days of formal segregation. This historical analogy cuts both ways, however. If his proposed solution to the Israel/Palestine issue had been applied to Dixie, the outcome would have seen African Americans confined to impoverished, undefended enclaves under a spuriously designated "nationhood".

What Secretary Kerry fails to acknowledge is that the present situation in Israel/Palestine constitutes the very outcome he advocates. The two state solution is here today. This is what it looks like. This is how it smells. One one side, a racist military juggernaut sponsored by the United States, with colonies strategically distributed throughout the territory of its neighbor. On the other, an impotent local authority overwhelmed by the ongoing catastrophe of occupation.

The "settlements" are permanent. The theft of land is all but irreversible. The real task now is to covert this state of affairs into an arrangement whereby every person has the same rights and protections under the law- one law for all the people.

Ali Abunimah

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine, now out from Haymarket Books.

Also wrote One Country: A Bold-Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. Opinions are mine alone.