Our Wednesday News Analysis | The West won’t punish the settlements. Its two-state solution was always a sham

If I asked you to cut off your arm, would you do it?

What if I pointed out that your arm regularly punched a neighbour in the face so violently that it broke their nose and teeth, and left them unconscious? Would you cut your arm off then?

I’m guessing the answer to both questions is a firm, “No.”

Which is exactly why the European Union, Britain and the United States have precisely no intention of severing their support for Israel’s illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, however violent the Jewish colonisers who live on stolen Palestinian land prove to be.

For decades, settler militias – backed by Israeli soldiers – have beaten up Palestinians, shot them, poisoned their wells, chopped down their olive groves, torched their homes, all in an attempt to ethnically cleanse them from their historic homeland.

The relentless expansion of these illegal settlements has left any hope of a two-state solution in tatters. The West Bank is now an archipelago of Palestinian villages and towns isolated from one another by marauding violent settlers, apartheid roads only for Jews, steel and concrete barriers, and army checkpoints.

All of this has happened in full view of Western states over many decades. The International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, ruled back in 2004 – nearly a quarter of a century ago – that these Jewish settlements violated international law and needed to be dismantled.

It reiterated that demand in a decision two years ago in which it identified Israel as an apartheid state ruling over Palestinians. It warned states to “take steps to prevent trade or investment relations that assists in the maintenance of the illegal situation created by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory”.

And yet the West has done nothing meaningful year after year as the settlements have stolen more land from Palestinians, made their lives there ever more miserable, and trashed any chance of the West’s supposed ambition of two states living alongside each other.

Remember this when Israel’s apologists tell you to wait for the same court’s definitive ruling – in a year or two, or maybe three – on what it deemed in early 2024 to be a “plausible” genocide in Gaza, just three months into Israel’s mass slaughter there.

Not only will any such ruling be far too late to make any difference to the victims of the genocide, but the US, Britain and Europe will do precisely no more to punish Israel for this crime of crimes – one we can see for ourselves without an ICJ ruling – than they have done in punishing Israel for the settlements...

Read more: The West won’t punish the settlements. Its two-state solution was always a sham

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ILAN PAPPÉ: THE CRISIS OF ZIONISM AND THE FUTURE OF PALESTINE – EXCLUSIVE

Source: Palestine Chronicle
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/ilan-pappe-the-crisis-of-zionism-and-the-future-of-palestine-exclusive/

By Ilan Pappe – The Palestine Chronicle
Published July 15, 2026

Editor’s Note: The Palestine Chronicle is publishing exclusively the full text of a recent speech delivered by renowned Israeli historian Professor Ilan Pappé at the 2026 Marxism Festival in London. In this wide-ranging address, Pappé examines the historical evolution of Zionism, arguing that its current brutality reflects a profound structural crisis rather than enduring strength. The text has been lightly edited for clarity while preserving the author’s arguments and voice.

Professor Ilan Pappé examines the historical evolution of Zionism. (Illustration: Palestine Chronicle)

Zionism is in crisis, and that crisis has given rise to a more violent, racist, and brutal form of it. This follows a familiar dialectic of history: a regime’s final chapter is often its most vicious.

As activists, we must first recognize that the inhumanity unfolding in Palestine today is also a symptom of the looming collapse of those who perpetrate it. This may offer us some hope, but it brings no comfort to those who suffer its consequences.

We must therefore pursue two goals: to shorten this period as much as possible, and to curb its brutality through civic and legal action, as well as solidarity with Palestinians on the ground who are defending themselves against genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid.

What is Zionism Today?

Like any ideology, Zionism consists both of enduring principles and of their ongoing translation into changing realities on the ground. That translation shifts with circumstances: the size of the ideological movement, the level of resistance it faces, the strength of the global and regional coalitions supporting it, its material and human resources, and its internal cohesion.

Zionism’s core principles recast Judaism as a form of European nationalism; one that could not be fulfilled in Europe and therefore had to be pursued in Palestine. Its claim to Palestine was expressed in religious terms, even though the movement was secular and aimed to secularize and modernize Jewish life through the colonization of Palestine.

The paradox of appealing to a divine authority the movement itself did not accept in order to justify colonization was made to seem logical by presenting Zionism as a response to European antisemitism. Its early supporters, including both antisemites and a minority of Jews, accepted the claim that Jews could become equal Europeans only by being pushed out of Europe and assisted in building a new Europe in the land that had rejected them.

This fragile logic of turning religion into nationalism in response to European antisemitism, by claiming another people’s homeland long inhabited by an indigenous nation, was presented to the world as both rational and moral. Some still accept this narrative today, whether from ignorance or cynicism.

Even then, as now, selling this bizarre logic required a powerful lobby.

In Zionism’s early years, the idea was easier to promote because it emerged at a time when the immorality of colonialism was widely ignored. More importantly, from the start, Zionist planners understood that turning the idea into a project on the ground in Palestine would require force and coercion.

This exposes one of Zionism’s central falsehoods: force was not adopted in response to Palestinian resistance; the settlers arrived already prepared to impose themselves on the native people of Palestine...

Read more: Ilan Pappé: The Crisis of Zionism and the Future of Palestine – EXCLUSIVE

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THE ARCHITECTURE OF MORAL AMNESIA: ISRAELIS CAN'T FORGET WHAT THEY NEVER KNEW

Source: Haaretz
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2026-07-21/ty-article-opinion/.premium/the-architecture-of-moral-amnesia-israelis-cant-forget-what-they-never-knew/0000019f-8062-d316-a9df-a26fa2e60000

By Adam Raz
Published July 21, 2026

Israeli soldiers in Gaza. Credit: IDF Spokesperson's Unit

Since October 7, the Israeli government has been conducting an ongoing campaign of making Israelis forget the failure and its responsibility for it: Netanyahu's "accidental" mistakes regarding the date, the attempt to remove the word "massacre" from the draft bill to commemorate its victims (which incidentally wasn't approved by the conclusion of the current Knesset session because a bill to weaken the attorney general is more important), the attempt to rebrand the war under the name "The Tekuma War" (Revival or Rebirth), and the stubborn refusal to establish a state commission of inquiry – and in any case, there's no need to investigate what never happened.

All of this at least receives proper attention. Few people speak about making us forget what Israel has done in Gaza since the massacre. Recently, Hebrew University historian Lee Mordechai wrote here that the media and academia "assist the forgetting" of the genocide in Gaza, but to forget, you first have to know, and Israelis have trained themselves not to know.

More than half of Israelis living today were born after the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and for them, 1948, the First Intifada, and the Oslo Accords are ancient history.

Ignorance is not only a self-inflicted mutilation by Israelis, but also a deliberate action by the state. For several months, information hasn't been available on the website of the Israel Defense Forces and Defense Establishment Archives. It's impossible to search for historical documentation on various topics in Israel's largest archive, or to conduct research.

In the case of the non-military State Archives, its website only returned to operation this past year, after about two years of being disabled following a "cyberattack." Even then, there were problems, and who cares about historical research anyway, right? Israel prides itself on its ability to plant bombs in pagers, but not on making sure its archives serve the public.

As of early 2026, out of about 17 million files stored in the State Archives and the IDF Archives, only about 4 percent are accessible to the public. In the IDF Archives, less than 1 percent of the files are open. There's no need to get into the intricacies of the Archives Law and viewing regulations, but put simply, government archives are violating the law and aren't hiding the fact...

Read more: The Architecture of Moral Amnesia: Israelis Can't Forget What They Never Knew