Our Wednesday News Analysis | Israeli academic Shlomo Sand: ‘Jews and Palestinians will have to live together’

Israeli soldiers on guard near the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem in November 2023 (AFP)

Academic Shlomo Sand's latest work, Deux Peuples Pour un Etat? Relire l’histoire du sionisme in French (Two Peoples for One State? Rereading the History of Zionism), was written before 7 October.

"Since 1967, more than 875,000 settlers have occupied the West Bank.

Four current government ministers and a chief of staff even live there.

That undermines any viability of a two-state solution.

'We are de facto in a binational state,' Sand insists.

'We are now so irreversibly intertwined with each other that, deep down,
I tell myself that the occupation that began in 1967 revealed [the state] that could have happened in 1948 [during the Nakba]
if there had not been the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians.'”

However, the professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University told Middle East Eye he would not have “changed a theoretical line” if he had published it after the Hamas-led attack on Israel and the subsequent war on Gaza.

“Perhaps I would have specified that 7 October is a confirmation of my fears,” he clarified in a conversation with Middle East Eye.

“We can only move towards a political organisation of the two peoples in a federation or confederation. Otherwise, there will always be more disasters like 7 October and its consequences in Gaza,” he added, further cautioning:

“Before reaching this historic compromise between the two peoples, we will experience other disasters that will make this political solution indispensable.”

In his voluntarist pessimism, the Israeli historian, who claims to be a realist and rejects utopia, remains convinced that Jews and Palestinians are "condemned to live together, otherwise, they will disappear together".

"I do not think that a Jewish state alone can survive in the Middle East. No more than a Palestinian state, for that matter," he declares.

Having established this need for a binational state, the historian makes an appeal for Zionism. But not just any Zionism...

Read more: Israeli academic Shlomo Sand: ‘Jews and Palestinians will have to live together’

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MESSAGE FROM THE DNC: THE DEMOCRATS DO NOT CARE ABOUT PALESTINIANS

Source: Mondoweiss
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/08/message-from-the-dnc-the-democrats-do-not-care-about-palestinians/

By Mitchell Plitnick
Published August 23, 2024

The Democratic National Convention did not go well for supporters of Palestinian rights where Democrats were largely successful in burying their deep complicity in the Gaza genocide.

Kamala Harris speaking to the Democratic National Convention on August 22, 2024. (Photo: Twitter/KamalaHarris)

"One hardly needs a degree in international affairs to recognize that these are not 'bridging proposals' but are conditions Hamas couldn’t possibly accept. "

The Democratic National Convention did not go well for supporters of Palestinian rights.

"It is disappointing and dangerous that, in the face of progressives,
Palestinians, Muslims, Arabs, and a whole lot of anti-genocide Jews and allies are almost begging the Democrats to stop taking their votes for granted and give them some reason to vote for Harris rather than just voting against Donald Trump; Kamala Harris is failing even to get over even that shallow bar."

The one positive to emerge from the DNC was that the first panel on Palestinian rights officially sanctioned by the DNC marked a major political step forward and was the result of a powerful grassroots movement to get Palestine mentioned in some official capacity at the Convention.

But aside from that small but still significant victory, the Democrats were largely successful in burying their deep complicity in the genocide in Gaza. Protesters outside clashed occasionally with police, and some protesters inside the convention and some associated events caused brief disruptions, but little attention was paid to Gaza on the whole, either from the stage or in the media.

That doesn’t mean the political situation remained stagnant, however, even while Israel was continuing its merciless slaughter, targeting schools and other places of refuge. Unfortunately, politics have taken an even grimmer turn, leaving little hope that the killing will end soon...

Read more: Message from the DNC: The Democrats do not care about Palestinians

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EVIL FRUIT OF SEEDS SOWN LONG AGO – WHAT MAKES GAZA GENOCIDE DIFFERENT?

Source: Palestine Chronicle
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/evil-fruit-of-seeds-sown-long-ago-what-makes-gaza-genocide-different/

By Jeremy Salt
Published August 18, 2024

Massive destruction in Gaza City. (Photo: Mahmoud Ajjour, The Palestine Chronicle)

"Now, we can actually watch as a missile destroys an apartment building, as a sniper cuts down a young man watching on the beach, as a missile strikes a hospital compound, as body parts are strewn across a street. The soldiers themselves proudly record their own evil deeds, from the destruction of homes and classrooms to the demolition of government offices and universities."

Every genocide is different from the one before. Organized extermination is their similarity, but no two genocides are the same. They are not unique except in themselves.

In fact, history is in part a running sequence of genocides or ‘mass killings’ or ‘extermination events,’ if you can’t make up your mind how to describe them. There is nothing unusual about them. It is what we “human animals” – to apply Yoav Gallant’s pejorative description to the reality of what we all are – regularly do to each other.

Genocides (to use the word) are usually described as such only after the event. They are never stopped in progress, a curiosity in itself. It is not that they can’t be stopped. They aren’t stopped because the people who could stop them choose not to stop them, for different reasons on every occasion.

How is the current genocide in Gaza different from previous genocides? Does it have a specific character, set against the benchmark of the ‘industrial’ genocide of Jews by the Nazis. It was its assembly-line nature, not numbers that defined that particular event. Otherwise, a far greater number of human beings were killed in other genocides.

The European genocide of Africans in the 19th century was a long-running affair that took the lives of perhaps 60 million people. Black lives were hardly worth counting at the time, by Europeans, and now there are only estimates that 10-12 million died just in King Leopold’s ‘Congo Free State.’

Of course, ‘died’ is a completely dissociative word to describe the gruesome reality of how they ‘died.’...

Read more: Evil Fruit of Seeds Sown Long ago – What Makes Gaza Genocide Different?