For Two States and Equal Rights

Submitted by AWL on 4 March, 2020 - 11:33
Two States demo in solidarity with the Palestinians

On Thursday 27 February, activists responding to a call "For Two States and Equal Rights" protested near the Israeli Embassy in London against the Trump Plan and the threats by Israeli political leaders to annex large areas of the 80%-Palestinian West Bank.

The planned annexations would reduce the residual autonomy of the Palestinian cities, towns, and villages to that of disjointed patches of land surrounded by and completely dominated by areas claimed permanently for Israel.

We thought it urgent to get onto the streets before Israel's elections on 2 March, because annexation is likely to follow very fast after the election results are in.

As we go to press, Israel's long-standing right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has made slight gains, but with his established allies is still short of a majority. However, his main opponent, Benny Gantz of Blue and White, has already endorsed annexation of the Jordan Valley.

The turnout by Arab voters was markedly up, and the mostly-Arab Joint List came in as the third largest party. Palestinians living in Israel, and democratically-minded Israeli Jews, will continue fighting for two states and equal rights.

The Jewish-Arab movement Standing Together commented: "There are no shortcuts. What is needed after the elections is the hard work of building a grassroots movement from the bottom up. A Jewish-Arab people's movement that will transform Israel and create change. Where there is struggle, there is hope".

They need our active support.

Comments

Submitted by John Scott (not verified) on Fri, 13/03/2020 - 04:25

You must be the only people left in the world pushing the fantasy of a two-state solution, except for people like Hillary Clinton, who doesn't actually believe in it. Such a solution might have been a goer up to the 90s but it isn't now because of settler squatting, land theft, and creeping annexation. The future of the Palestine/Israel area is one in which a unitary state is brought about either by Yugoslavia-style ethnic cleansing, probably using the cover of a future war, producing a Jewish-only state which would be an international pariah, or by abandoning the race/confessional criteria and bestowing full citizenship on the Palestinians. It is not possible to construct a Jewish and democratic state, any more than a Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist state can be democratic if it denies full citizenship to minorities, as the looming catastrophe in India should tell us. Unlikely? Less unlikely than two-statism. The political establishment in Israel, and unfortunately, for the time being, a majority of the Jewish-Israeli population, have a similar attitude to Palestinians that white people had in the Jim Crow South; you would be making better use of your energies encouraging a bi-ethnic Civil Rights movement, rather than engaging in an unachievable wild goose chase.

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