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<h1 id="reader-title">Kerry gives eulogy for two-state solution</h1>
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<p class="node__submitted">
<span class="field field-author"><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/ali-abunimah"
typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label
skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ali Abunimah</a></span>
<span class="field field-blog"></span><span class="field
field-publication-date"><span
class="date-display-single" property="dc:date"
datatype="xsd:dateTime"
content="2016-12-28T23:22:50+00:00">28 December 2016</span></span><br>
<br>
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<p>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 <a
href="https://www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2016/12/266119.htm">speech</a>
in Washington on Wednesday.</p>
<p>But whether he intended it or not, Kerry also delivered
a eulogy for the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/two-state-solution">two-state
solution</a> and set the stage for the emergence of
the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/one-state-solution">one-state
solution</a> as the most realistic path to justice and
peace in historic Palestine.</p>
<p>Speaking for more than an hour, Kerry defended the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/us-lets-security-council-pass-resolution-against-israeli-settlements">US
decision to abstain</a> 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. (<a
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30zsPq6Z6gQ">video</a>)</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<h2>One-state reality</h2>
<p>“The two-state solution is the only way to achieve a
just and lasting peace between Israelis and
Palestinians,” Kerry insisted.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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, <a
href="https://www.amazon.com/One-Country-Proposal-Israeli-Palestinian-Impasse/dp/0805086668">including</a>
<a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/my-new-book-battle-justice-palestine">this
one</a>, have discussed and developed over many years,
based on <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/putting-away-partitionists-knife-palestine-and-approaches-ethnic-conflict">lessons</a>
drawn from South Africa, Ireland and other places.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>This powerfully evokes <a
href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/separate-and-unequal/">the
language of US segregation</a> 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.</p>
<p>What he offers Palestinians is a demilitarized <a
href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/homelands">bantustan</a>
with the singular pupose of preserving an all-powerful
Israel as a racist state with a permanent Jewish
majority.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://mondoweiss.net/2014/03/abunimahs-justice-palestine/">right
to discriminate against Palestinians and anyone else
who is not Jewish</a>.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>By contrast, the US-brokered <a
href="https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/bostalk.htm">1995
Dayton peace agreement</a> that ended the war in
Bosnia <a
href="http://thehill.com/opinion/op-ed/95055-breaking-the-middle-east-impasse">guaranteed
the right of refugees</a> 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.</p>
<p>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?”</p>
<p>A better question is, how <em>should</em> Israel
respond?</p>
<p>If Israel actually held democratic ideals, the obvious
answer would be for everyone to have the right to vote
in a decolonized, nonsectarian state.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>It was white supremacists who used the cover of “<a
href="http://www.npr.org/2013/01/14/169080969/segregation-forever-a-fiery-pledge-forgiven-but-not-forgotten">states’
rights</a>” 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.</p>
<p>Today it is still white supremacists, including <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/us/alt-right-salutes-donald-trump.html">Nazi
sympathizers</a> like “<a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/alt-right">Alt-Right</a>”
leader <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/richard-spencer">Richard
Spencer</a>, who <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/trump-bringing-white-zionism-white-house">argue</a>
that the United States should be partitioned so that
there can be an “ethno-state that would be a gathering
point for all Europeans.”</p>
<p>Spencer even has a name for this ideology: White
Zionism.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>After the two-state solution</h2>
<p>In any case, the US vision of two states is dead and
the Obama administration helped bury it.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>Things are not about to get any brighter for those who
still believe in the two-state fantasy.</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and his ministers have <a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.761880">angrily
rejected</a> Kerry’s speech.</p>
<p>Even before the Secretary of State spoke,
President-elect Donald Trump <a
href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/814113616110751744">tweeted</a>
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 <a
href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/814114980983427073">urged</a>.</p>
<p>The reality is this: Israel cannot be sweet-talked into
ending its brutal regime of occupation, apartheid and
settler-colonialism.</p>
<p>Like apartheid South Africa, it must be placed under
increasing isolation and pressure until it is compelled
to change.</p>
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