November 23, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
A Pro-Palestinian student holds placard saying ‘Free Palestine’ as Pro-Palestinians students, holding banners and Palestinian flags, in front of the White House in Washington D.C., United States on May 24, 2024 [Celal Güneş/Anadolu Agency]
Leila Farsakh is professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts and the author of the pioneering work Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel: Labour, Land, and Occupation that remains a necessary read. In this interview she explains how the use and control of the Palestinian workers has become part of the Israeli system of apartheid and why the two-state-solution has been an important part of the Palestinians’ struggle for their rights but it is now time to find courage to move beyond it. In 2021 she has edited and contributed to a publication Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: Self-Determination and Decolonization Beyond Partition. Having spent summer in the West Bank she described what the international community allows to continue in Gaza as unfathomable.
In the book Rethinking Statehood in Palestine you write that partition as a solution for Palestine has failed but the one-state solution has not yet politically matured. It needs not only to become mainstream but Israel will have to accept it. This means it will have to “give up its privileges, uphold its international obligations, and renounce the ethno-racist definition of identity that Israel’s 2018 nationality law enshrined”. International Court of Justice reaffirmed the two-state-solution in its July’s opinion on the illegality of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. Why is it so hard to move beyond the two-states?
It has been the mantra of the last 30 years. And it has been the legal framework for the question of Palestine since 1947. The UN resolution 181 from 1947 did not say that there should be one, binational or federative, state. It said there should be two states – an Arab and a Jewish. This resolution has been very important for the international legal legitimacy of the state of Israel. Israel declared its independence in line with it.
The legal framework was reiterated in 1967 with the UN resolution 242 on the right of states to exist in peace and security. The resolution 242 denied the Palestinian existence, it omitted the Palestinian state and previous General Assembly Resolutions. It talked about the land-for-peace formula that gives land, occupied by Israel, in exchange for the recognition of Israel by neighbouring states. It eliminated the Palestinian question. The defeat of 1967 was in many ways worse than 1948. There was a realisation and a resolution to fight Zionism. Then, four Arab armies got crushed within 6 days. The message was that Israel was there to stay and Arab countries needed to find a way to live with it. The importance of the resolution 242 is that it denies the Palestinians a voice and delegates the solution to Israel and Arab countries.
But this did not happen?
No. The Palestinians asserted themselves globally in just seven years after that. In 1974 the PLO was invited to speak at the UN. It received an observer status. This recognition was incredible for a revolutionary movement. In 1974 Yasser Arafat was in the UN and said that the goal of the Palestinian struggle was to establish a democratic state inclusive of Jews, Muslims and Christians. The PLO programme was always a one state programme. However, Arafat was aware that international consensus was on partition.
Palestinians now see Arafat as trying to prepare them to accept that the only achievable goal was a Palestinian state on a small part of Palestine. Better than no state. A state gives you passport, rights, freedom from exile …
But a Palestinian state as one of the two states is a compromise?
Yes. Palestinians made this historical compromise in 1988 and again in Oslo. They renounced the idea of liberating all of Palestine so that Jews, Muslims and Christians could live together in a single state. Instead they acquiesced in creation of a Palestinian state on 22 percent of historic Palestine. This pragmatically played into the international consensus that Israel is here to stay and Arab countries will not defeat but make peace with it.
Some state is better than no state. People with no state have no rights. State bestows rights and ends refugee status. It gives passports and institutions to build autonomy, economy … All these are reasons why the Palestinian struggle was for a state – and the paid price has been very high. Israel tried to eliminate PLO in 1982. It was horrific. 15.000 people killed in Beirut in about 88 days.
The struggle has been long. Everybody says, that to accommodate the Palestinian rights to the land and the Zionist claim for their own state, the only solution is a two-state-solution. The tragedy is that Israel has proven time and again that it is not interested in it.
I claim that the Oslo Agreement might have been a bad thing but it has contributed something important – it was the first time the Zionists admitted there are the Palestinian people. Until then the Israel and Zionism relegated Palestinians as Arabs, as people from Jordan, or from the 22 countries they can go to …
Oslo changed this?
Yes. There was an official state recognition that there are Palestinian people with a right to self-determination. Israel’s rationale was that maybe it cannot eliminate the Palestinian people but it can contain them – with a promise of a statehood, which it never allows. Israel gave Palestinians a bantustan.
Palestinians have resisted the occupation but Israel has continued building settlements and it further divided Gaza from the West Bank. Israel has formally absolved itself of the responsibilities it has to the Palestinian population under its occupation by relegating these to the Palestinian Authority. And this is a model Israel is interested in pursuing: delegate to Palestinians to manage themselves while it controls more and more of their land.
And the EU and the US are covering the costs for Israel?
Yes, mostly the Europeans. During the 25 Oslo years there were 44 billion dollars given to the Palestinian Authority. European and American money sustain the occupation and try to build Palestinian institutions, infrastructure and compensate Israel’s destructions.
But with growing Israeli settlements it has become how to square a circle. In 2000s with Israel’s expansion of settlements people started to say that the two-state-solution was foregone. If we do not fool ourselves, we have a one state with apartheid reality. Between the river and the sea there is only one sovereign state and it is Israel: a state that privileges Jewish rights over all others’, especially over Palestinian rights. It grants Palestinians an amount of autonomy but no sovereignty.
Objections have grown that it is nice to wish for two states; but if no one stops Israel from building settlements, there will be no two states – while apartheid exists.
Politicians know this?
The international community is aware that the two-state-solution is not viable. In 2011 at a conference in Europe I said that doors on the two-state-solution were closing. They knew it. Everybody is aware that the two-state-solution is dead. The problem is no one is able to talk about one state.
Why?
First, a one-state-solution is much more difficult to implement than the two-state-solution. It demands answers to serious questions, with the key one being how to ensure Israel becomes a democratic state. How to ensure rights of Israelis and rights of Palestinians in a common state?
Second, what is missing, is a political party, a Palestinian coalition to come forward in support of a one-state-solution. We need something similar to The Freedom Charter in South Africa. There the African National Congress (ANC) was created in 1923 and it supported a partition. Only in 1956 they said no: “We want a democratic South Africa for everybody.” That was The Freedom Charter and it is what we lack currently among the Palestinians.
What are the reasons for this?
To name two: first, the last 35 years with all that has been invested in the belief in a state and in building institutions. Second, one state requires tackling Palestinian-Israeli rights. Palestinians never had problems with Jewish rights but how to ensure that Israelis accept to have equal instead of superior rights to Palestinians?
The current war on Gaza has made this even more difficult. It has shown that Zionism is genocidal. Even liberal Zionists say that Nakba is bad but Holocaust is worse, this is our ancestral land and we are the only indigenous. Such lines of arguing do not promote living with each other but eliminating the other. How to talk to people who are racist and narcissist and justify the massacres and the genocide of Palestinians in the name of their survival?
Therefore, it is first important to emphasize that Palestinians live in an Israeli apartheid regime. The more it becomes clear that Israel is a pariah the more we can seriously think and debate how to turn this pariah state into a democratic one. International community is not pushing this forward because it does not want to pressure Israel. But Israel must be shown that this is unacceptable. Israel has to be forced to stop. It has to stop receiving weapons.
Why has this not happened yet?
Because Israel serves geo-strategic interests of the US and Europe, and because of the long-present fears of anti-Semitism labels in the shadows of the historical crimes, which have been misused and weaponized by Israel, conflating anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. To counter this we need a strong and clear, principled vision from politicians. Something the ICJ decision could embolden.
Today every recognition of the Palestinian statehood is symbolic but not irrelevant as it reaffirms the Palestinians’ right to self-determination.
But how can a fulfilment of this right be ensured?
Turning the Palestinians’ right to self-determination into real actions demands one of two: either forcing Israel to stop what it has been doing and penalize it, or propose a new configuration that recognizes the state of Palestine and the state of Israel together
Some propose a confederation: Israel does not recognize a Palestinian state. However, if we recognize the 1948 borders, remove checkpoints and illegal settlements with setters and allow refugees to return – and then each group manages its affairs. Palestinians already do it in a way in Area A in the West Bank, less so in Areas B and C. Israelis do it in Knesset. What is further needed is a federal common parliament, common foreign and defence policy. Different institutional arrangements are possible and so the two-state-solution can be joined into a one state reality. Organizations One Democratic State Campaign and A Land For All work in this direction. We do not lack options – the problem is the lack of will and the racist, exclusionary project that Zionism has proven to be.
You write that partitions are intrinsic to imperial colonialisms. Europe has imposed divide-and-rule tactics on Palestine but the two-states-solution also follows the ethno-nationalistic European model. Currently, the two-state-solution is presented as the only option but also demilitarization of Nazi Germany or Japan might have appeared as impossible at one point as demilitarization of Israel seems today. Does challenging a two-state-solution challenge also the existing world order, colonial matrix and ethno-national states?
The international pressure is of utmost importance. Israel was a product of nationalism, the ideology of 19th and 20th centuries. In the 21st century two forces are at play. The first strengthens nationalisms – the collapse of Yugoslavia might be the best example of how a different state model was collapsed into an ethno-national states. But the second force aims for unification: the EU, but also the United States of America, Germany has been unified in a federation.
With genocide unfolding in Gaza there is undoubtedly a lot of hatred, but hatred existed also between Nazi Germany, France and Poland. Yet, these countries made peace when they had got rid of the racist, fascist regimes. It is not easy but it is possible and feasible. In South Africa the driving force behind the ANC to end apartheid was not to ensure everybody loves one another but for all to have equal rights. This is very important. People want to live. And they accommodate. The problem is extremists.
The challenge for the Palestinians is how to overcome the mentality of defeat. How to reach beyond the acceptance that Zionism cannot be defeated and that the two-states-solution must be accepted as the least terrible offer?
The struggle for a Palestinian state was not in vain. It played an important role of affirming Palestinian political existence and our rights, but now its role is finished. It could not bring liberation as partition was based on colonial domination. If Oslo had been framed on Israel’s retreat from the West Bank and Gaza, it could have been different. But the Israeli retreat never occurred. Partition based on colonial structure made independence impossible and we have seen the high price of partition in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. An additional complication in Palestine is that Zionism as a national liberation project for some Jewish people has proven to be eliminationist – it wants to eliminate the Palestinian people. Physically. In the past, in 1967, before the Oslo the Zionists believed that they had eliminated the Palestinians by not talking to them, by fighting and dispersing them, by ignoring them and talking only to other Arab states. Benjamin Netanyahu had in the last twenty years before October last year said so himself; forget the Palestinians, we have the Arab countries on our side. But the Palestinians were and are still there. Palestinians are not going to die out unless Israel eliminates all seven million of us.
What is needed to overcome this impasse that brings destruction, humiliation and killings for Palestinians?
Courage. We need courage from political leaders across the board and across the world.
Another complication is the regional configuration – Arab states are willing to accept Israel as a state, with the exception of the Axis of Resistance, which has a wide popular support among Arabs and Palestinians. Supporting Israel has become important for the USA and for the West in this configuration of the regional balance. Iran must not become more powerful than Israel and no country should have the power to disturb this balance.
You have mentioned Iran and before Yugoslavia. In the book you refer to the book on Palestine as a bi-national state by Martin Buber, Judas Magnus and Moses Smilansky, as well as the publications by the Palestine Liberation Organization. The confederative model for Palestine was proposed and supported in 1947 also by Yugoslavia, India and Iran at the UN. Yugoslav diplomat Vladimir Simič wrote about joint, Jewish and Palestinian workers’ strikes against the British capitalist rulers during the British mandate. What importance do these experiences and ideas have today?
They are important because people forget – especially now, in a war. Palestinian workers who work in Israel are workers who build houses and roads there. These relations have always transcended divisions.
The problem is exclusion, and the core problem is the nation state. Hannah Arendt wrote about this as a Jewish author and as a Zionist up to a point, claiming similarly like Magnus and others, that Jewish people are a nation but do not need a Jewish state to exist. They saw a problem in Zionism as it tried to compress the richness of the Jewish history into a history of European Jews and universalize their ideas among all Jews. Jews have always been part of the Middle East and Palestine. Arab Jews had existed for two thousand years until Israel proclaimed everybody to be Israelis. However, an Israeli is supposed to be a white, civilized man.
Zionism eliminated all histories of cooperation and lives lived together. It negated all non-Zionist histories. Zionists claimed to be the indigenous and believed this gave them the right to displace and eliminate all other people from the land. The non-Zionist histories of cooperation and coexistence have always existed. The problem arises when you create an exclusionary state built on the idea of a supremacist right of the Jews to have a state of their own. This negates historical developments and processes. Creation of a Jewish state emerged at a certain historical time. But if a state does not adapt to the reality, history tells us, it will eventually vanish.
Israel has been trying to create a reality to claim it is a Western state, the only democracy in the region of Arab savages where it serves the interests of Europe. Isaac Herzog, president of Israel, said after 7th October that Israel was dealing with barbarians and defending Europe – a repeat of a Theodor Herzl phrase from his 1896 book The Jewish State. But we are not in the 1930s or 1940s Europe, when racism was legitimate. Almost 130 years later, in times of post-racism, repeating such a phrase is problematic and emblematic of two things. First, of innate racism, and second, of Europe’s dire involvement in the creation of the Jewish state.
The problem will not be solved unless Europe deals with its history and not in a way Germany does it, trying to whitewash its responsibility for the Holocaust by throwing it onto Palestinians. The European origin is partly why the occupation of Palestine has been with us for so long. Europe is responsible but does not solve it. And the present war proves yet gain how Israel is dependant on imperial support.
Israel is a technological and surveillance strongman – it exports military technology to Europe, the USA and around the world. Yet it was defeated. The October 7 pushed Israel into a big crisis but instead of learning from it Israel is doubling down on its violence.
Trauma can teach humility, but in Israel we see only arrogance and more narcissism with a growing sense of superiority and uniqueness. Israelis do not recognize that there are structures that create either oppression or stability and liberation. One’s liberation can never be at the expense of someone else’s liberation.
And creating trauma in others does not bring security …
At all. Survival does not depend on the elimination of the other but on learning how to live together, with one another.
You write that the Palestinian citizens of Israel could be best placed to lead the movement for a different, not a two-states model. However, Palestinians of ’48 have been for decades humiliated, subjugated and conditioned to reject their Palestinian identity. Since Oslo the Palestinian Authority has left them to be a domestic Israeli issue. What do you recognize in their position?
The Palestinians of ’48 are very important although, they are undoubtedly under great pressure. Why I believe they can lead the movement for a one democratic state is that they best understand the Israeli society as they have lived in it. They remain also part of the Palestinian political community, wanting to be free from the Israeli oppression.
Despite the oppression and discrimination they have the freedom of movement with a passport they might not really like. They live this combination of ‘privilege’ and bare survival.
However, they exemplify what a one state could look like. Israel is very scared of them and represses them whenever they start to be politically active for a Palestinian cause and for a one state. This happened to Azmi Bishara, who was among the first to call on Israel to become a state of all its citizens. He was stripped of his diplomatic immunity as a member of Knesset and has been exiled in Qatar for over 15 years.
We have seen the repercussions during the Second Intifada when Palestinians of ’48 demonstrated in support of the Palestinians in the West Bank – 12 were killed.
This violence serves to scare and to convey the message that no solidarity is to be shown with other Palestinians.
In 2021, during the Dignity Intifada, people said, we are all Palestinians, we are all discriminated against and we will all fight for our rights. The October 7 surged the Israeli repression of the ’48 and ’67 Palestinians. People have ended up in prison for online posts.
Politics in the context of colonial confrontation involve violence. It is a tragedy that you cannot liberate yourself from colonialism without paying a very high price. For Palestinians just organizing has become a challenge. The Palestinian political parties in Israel try to accommodate Zionism and support the two state solution. Most of the Israelis cannot conceive of themselves living as equals with the Palestinians – they have been taught that they can be safe only if they have a state of their own. This belief needs to change – safety does not come from having a state for oneself but from having a state of democracy for everyone. This Zionist argument is the same as the argument of the white supremacists in America, it is the same argument that white nationalists had in South Africa. It is an argument of every racist. Palestinians in 1948 are facing a big challenge but I do not see how else the shift can happen.
Some put their hopes in the Diaspora but I see it only as a support. We play an important role and there have been mass mobilizations in America and Europe, but it is the people on the land who need to figure out how to live together.
And they know the reality of the everyday life?
Yes. In the Diaspora we have passports. We can move freely. The Palestinians on the ground are without their basic freedoms and live under the Zionist oppressor state. Our struggle is connected but different.
In 2005 you published a pivotal work Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel. What stirred your interest?
It was an intriguing question I have researched in my PhD. Why are Palestinians building homes of Israelis? In my fieldwork I focused on the illegal settlements. I wanted to understand the economic forces that made Palestinians work for Israeli companies.
The situation in Palestine has always been presented as a conflict about land. The economic dimensions, though, also how you acquire the land, were not well understood. My interest was workers. Labour and land together give economic power. Israel opened the borders to Palestinians after 1967 and during the 1980s and 1990s somewhere between a third and two fifths of all Palestinians worked at one point in Israel. After Oslo, for the workers from Gaza this percentage dropped to a tenth in 1996. In the West Bank this drop came later. I wanted to understand this change.
I researched the history, the sectors in which the Palestinians worked …
And these were?
Mostly construction. Workers were therefore the majority men. For Israel it was cost-effective because the Palestinian workers had homes and the Israeli employers did not have to pay for their social insurance, making them cheaper than immigrant workers. Israel has built itself cheaply by exploiting Palestinian workers.
During my research the illegal settlements were expanding. It was clear how Israel used economic mechanisms to ascertain and decide a political project of settlements to assert their presence on the land – by using the Palestinian labour. It also deepened the integration.
I found the process that started in 1995 fascinating because some years before Israel severed its connection to Gaza. The removal of the illegal settlements in Gaza in 2005 was not a 21st century project. Israel was preparing for it much before that. There is a 2002 document on Israeli political establishment’s decision to reduce the reliance on Gaza workers but continue these relations in the West Bank. They wanted to get out of Gaza, which they had already depleted at that point but the West Bank they wanted to integrate into Israel. Settlements were a tool for that and to build them cost effectively they needed Palestinian workers. Simultaneously, these workers were made more dependent on Israel. Thus, Israel did not foster a two state solution or a separation between the Palestinians and the Israelis. It built an apartheid reality and killed a two state solution.
By using economic rationale?
Yes. The killing of the two state solution happened with an economic and not just the territorial mechanisms and tools. This fascinated me. By coincidence the book was published in the year Israel disengaged its physical presence from Gaza. How this happened and how they prepared for it, was all explained. I had built on the work of Sara Roy but focused on the labour. I wanted to show how labour and land are integrated.
Was there also a psychological rationale for Israel? To create self-blame, dependency, cynicism…
Of course. Relying on the Palestinian labour from the West Bank created the basis for cooptation. The Palestinian workers do not want to lose their salaries and livelihoods. You rely on them. At the same time you build the Palestinian Authority and the Europeans help finance it, while you control how far this can develop.
It creates a dependency but it also betters the quality of life. People become busy with their individual rights and put aside the collective political project. Not the least because Israel makes them pay dearly if they do not.
This worked up to a point. In 2000s with the Second Intifada it broke but it was later rebuilt and continued successfully under the Fayyad government. After Covid, for the first time, there were 250.000 Palestinians working in the Israeli economy, including the illegal settlements. The message was clear: you keep quiet and you get a good life.
On the other hand, there was a lack of Palestinian workers in the Palestinian economy. Working for Israel paid double. After last October people again work wherever they can because the Palestinian economy is completely repressed by Israel.
Israel thought it had solved the “problem” of Gaza by confining it behind a big wall and putting it under a siege. It thought Hamas was contained in Gaza by threatening the PA with the same consequences if there was an engagement with Hamas.
This has been the Zionist mantra: we want to have nothing to do with the Palestinians, they can deal with themselves; we will just take their land. My research showed however, that to appropriate land you need labour and you cannot have the land without the people. Israel used the carrot-and-stick technique. It managed to prevent all reconciliation attempts between Palestinian political factions because it had ensured that Fatah and the PA have too much to lose. It divided and conquered.
Did it surprise you after the October 7 that there were around 17. 500 day workers from Gaza in Israel?
No. It is part of the pacification. Occupation does not work only on the macro level but happens on the micro level as well. The construction companies want cheap labour, soldiers make deals here and there with permits. It is business, not even corruption. Issuing permits brings money. Moreover, it is about sustaining the population. Israel’s approach towards Palestinians, especially in Gaza has been to give enough to survive but not to thrive.
Shocking was that Gaza was despite the Israeli policies able to have 36 hospitals and 12 universities, defying the siege in ways we never thought possible. The most important is the desire to live no matter what and Gaza has shown incredible resilience and ingenuity. It built its own recycling economy.
The tragedy is the Palestinian disunity that effects the national movement. The October 7 events were catastrophic. One year later there might be a way to demand the Palestinian rights in a broader way beyond the statehood. Today even Hamas supports the two-state-solution.
Important is the BDS movement, calling for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions as it relies on the international law and is non-violent. Especially lately but ever since it started in 2005 it galvanized populations in America, Europe and around the world. Israel’s attempts to mark it as anti-Semitic do not work. The example of South Africa is strong. At the end of the day it is the civilian means that hold states accountable to international law, especially if they claim to be democratic.
Just to return for a moment to the Palestinian workers in Israel and in the illegal settlements. Is their work perceived as a betrayal?
No, this has passed. It was considered a betrayal in the 1970s, as something shameful in the 1980s but now people see it simply as a way to survive. People would do anything to stay on the land and if this is the only way, then let it be. Especially as there is the awareness that the Palestinian Authority is both illegitimate and incapable. It is an early confirmation of a one state. We have the reality of a one state despite the discourse set on the two-state-solution. It is a mantra, void except for reaffirming the Palestinian political agency.
How important is the aspect of class struggle in this combination of capitalist and colonial apartheid oppression?
It is important, as it is a global question. Workers organizing and trade union solidarity are important everywhere. In the Palestinian society capitalism is strong and alive. There are investment funds, more than 25 banks and the Palestinian economy today is an indebted economy. This makes political organizing much more difficult. The neoliberal capitalist economy devastates everybody. It enriches few and makes everyone else poorer, also in Palestine.
Unions as a form of collective organizing are very important. They generate solidarity and are a step away from neoliberal individualized sense of fulfilment and prosperity.
Since your book was published have there arose aspects that need to be better understood?
Many things have changed but the dynamics of relying on cheap Palestinian labour to build illegal Israeli settlements remain, as does the maintenance of the apartheid system.
Walid Habbas has since written on this topic, introducing a very important dimension of the securitization industry. With the wall and the checkpoints, the goods terminals and the automated recognition technology it represents a whole new economic sector that relies on labour, on the Israel’s security agencies and Israeli security companies. What has changed is also how the Palestinian workers are paid and this entrenches the control over the banks. The management of the labour flow, which was more flexible in the past, now fuels this new, securitization economy that is more invasive, controlling and prevalent.
You have mentioned the Israel’s control over the Palestinian economic development. How important is to match the BDS movement with a support for the Palestinian economy and producers – is it at all possible?
It is very important, as it is a form of support. But the boycott is pivotal. If we want to help the Palestinian economy, we need to boycott the Israeli goods and products, and defend the Palestinian ones. We all have to do our part. Europe, the EU and the Europeans. Accusations of anti-Semitism should be tackled head on. No, it is not reminiscent of the boycott of the Jewish products in the Nazi Germany. This is a boycott of products from Israel because Israel violates the international law and is committing genocide. Israel has elaborated the system to constrain the Palestinian export by making everything cumbersome. It is strategic. There are hundreds of forms and checks and policies of monitoring and controlling the goods going in and out of the illegally occupied Palestinian territories. It is a fascinating sector of the occupation and apartheid. But the only way to stop a bully or an aggressor is to put up limits to them and not indulge them in their behaviour.
A Pro-Palestinian student holds placard saying ‘Free Palestine’ as Pro-Palestinians students, holding banners and Palestinian flags, in front of the White House in Washington D.C., United States on May 24, 2024 [Celal Güneş/Anadolu Agency]
Leila Farsakh is professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts and the author of the pioneering work Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel: Labour, Land, and Occupation that remains a necessary read. In this interview she explains how the use and control of the Palestinian workers has become part of the Israeli system of apartheid and why the two-state-solution has been an important part of the Palestinians’ struggle for their rights but it is now time to find courage to move beyond it. In 2021 she has edited and contributed to a publication Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: Self-Determination and Decolonization Beyond Partition. Having spent summer in the West Bank she described what the international community allows to continue in Gaza as unfathomable.
In the book Rethinking Statehood in Palestine you write that partition as a solution for Palestine has failed but the one-state solution has not yet politically matured. It needs not only to become mainstream but Israel will have to accept it. This means it will have to “give up its privileges, uphold its international obligations, and renounce the ethno-racist definition of identity that Israel’s 2018 nationality law enshrined”. International Court of Justice reaffirmed the two-state-solution in its July’s opinion on the illegality of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. Why is it so hard to move beyond the two-states?
It has been the mantra of the last 30 years. And it has been the legal framework for the question of Palestine since 1947. The UN resolution 181 from 1947 did not say that there should be one, binational or federative, state. It said there should be two states – an Arab and a Jewish. This resolution has been very important for the international legal legitimacy of the state of Israel. Israel declared its independence in line with it.
The legal framework was reiterated in 1967 with the UN resolution 242 on the right of states to exist in peace and security. The resolution 242 denied the Palestinian existence, it omitted the Palestinian state and previous General Assembly Resolutions. It talked about the land-for-peace formula that gives land, occupied by Israel, in exchange for the recognition of Israel by neighbouring states. It eliminated the Palestinian question. The defeat of 1967 was in many ways worse than 1948. There was a realisation and a resolution to fight Zionism. Then, four Arab armies got crushed within 6 days. The message was that Israel was there to stay and Arab countries needed to find a way to live with it. The importance of the resolution 242 is that it denies the Palestinians a voice and delegates the solution to Israel and Arab countries.
But this did not happen?
No. The Palestinians asserted themselves globally in just seven years after that. In 1974 the PLO was invited to speak at the UN. It received an observer status. This recognition was incredible for a revolutionary movement. In 1974 Yasser Arafat was in the UN and said that the goal of the Palestinian struggle was to establish a democratic state inclusive of Jews, Muslims and Christians. The PLO programme was always a one state programme. However, Arafat was aware that international consensus was on partition.
Palestinians now see Arafat as trying to prepare them to accept that the only achievable goal was a Palestinian state on a small part of Palestine. Better than no state. A state gives you passport, rights, freedom from exile …
But a Palestinian state as one of the two states is a compromise?
Yes. Palestinians made this historical compromise in 1988 and again in Oslo. They renounced the idea of liberating all of Palestine so that Jews, Muslims and Christians could live together in a single state. Instead they acquiesced in creation of a Palestinian state on 22 percent of historic Palestine. This pragmatically played into the international consensus that Israel is here to stay and Arab countries will not defeat but make peace with it.
Some state is better than no state. People with no state have no rights. State bestows rights and ends refugee status. It gives passports and institutions to build autonomy, economy … All these are reasons why the Palestinian struggle was for a state – and the paid price has been very high. Israel tried to eliminate PLO in 1982. It was horrific. 15.000 people killed in Beirut in about 88 days.
The struggle has been long. Everybody says, that to accommodate the Palestinian rights to the land and the Zionist claim for their own state, the only solution is a two-state-solution. The tragedy is that Israel has proven time and again that it is not interested in it.
I claim that the Oslo Agreement might have been a bad thing but it has contributed something important – it was the first time the Zionists admitted there are the Palestinian people. Until then the Israel and Zionism relegated Palestinians as Arabs, as people from Jordan, or from the 22 countries they can go to …
Oslo changed this?
Yes. There was an official state recognition that there are Palestinian people with a right to self-determination. Israel’s rationale was that maybe it cannot eliminate the Palestinian people but it can contain them – with a promise of a statehood, which it never allows. Israel gave Palestinians a bantustan.
Palestinians have resisted the occupation but Israel has continued building settlements and it further divided Gaza from the West Bank. Israel has formally absolved itself of the responsibilities it has to the Palestinian population under its occupation by relegating these to the Palestinian Authority. And this is a model Israel is interested in pursuing: delegate to Palestinians to manage themselves while it controls more and more of their land.
And the EU and the US are covering the costs for Israel?
Yes, mostly the Europeans. During the 25 Oslo years there were 44 billion dollars given to the Palestinian Authority. European and American money sustain the occupation and try to build Palestinian institutions, infrastructure and compensate Israel’s destructions.
But with growing Israeli settlements it has become how to square a circle. In 2000s with Israel’s expansion of settlements people started to say that the two-state-solution was foregone. If we do not fool ourselves, we have a one state with apartheid reality. Between the river and the sea there is only one sovereign state and it is Israel: a state that privileges Jewish rights over all others’, especially over Palestinian rights. It grants Palestinians an amount of autonomy but no sovereignty.
Objections have grown that it is nice to wish for two states; but if no one stops Israel from building settlements, there will be no two states – while apartheid exists.
Politicians know this?
The international community is aware that the two-state-solution is not viable. In 2011 at a conference in Europe I said that doors on the two-state-solution were closing. They knew it. Everybody is aware that the two-state-solution is dead. The problem is no one is able to talk about one state.
Why?
First, a one-state-solution is much more difficult to implement than the two-state-solution. It demands answers to serious questions, with the key one being how to ensure Israel becomes a democratic state. How to ensure rights of Israelis and rights of Palestinians in a common state?
Second, what is missing, is a political party, a Palestinian coalition to come forward in support of a one-state-solution. We need something similar to The Freedom Charter in South Africa. There the African National Congress (ANC) was created in 1923 and it supported a partition. Only in 1956 they said no: “We want a democratic South Africa for everybody.” That was The Freedom Charter and it is what we lack currently among the Palestinians.
What are the reasons for this?
To name two: first, the last 35 years with all that has been invested in the belief in a state and in building institutions. Second, one state requires tackling Palestinian-Israeli rights. Palestinians never had problems with Jewish rights but how to ensure that Israelis accept to have equal instead of superior rights to Palestinians?
The current war on Gaza has made this even more difficult. It has shown that Zionism is genocidal. Even liberal Zionists say that Nakba is bad but Holocaust is worse, this is our ancestral land and we are the only indigenous. Such lines of arguing do not promote living with each other but eliminating the other. How to talk to people who are racist and narcissist and justify the massacres and the genocide of Palestinians in the name of their survival?
Therefore, it is first important to emphasize that Palestinians live in an Israeli apartheid regime. The more it becomes clear that Israel is a pariah the more we can seriously think and debate how to turn this pariah state into a democratic one. International community is not pushing this forward because it does not want to pressure Israel. But Israel must be shown that this is unacceptable. Israel has to be forced to stop. It has to stop receiving weapons.
Why has this not happened yet?
Because Israel serves geo-strategic interests of the US and Europe, and because of the long-present fears of anti-Semitism labels in the shadows of the historical crimes, which have been misused and weaponized by Israel, conflating anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. To counter this we need a strong and clear, principled vision from politicians. Something the ICJ decision could embolden.
Today every recognition of the Palestinian statehood is symbolic but not irrelevant as it reaffirms the Palestinians’ right to self-determination.
But how can a fulfilment of this right be ensured?
Turning the Palestinians’ right to self-determination into real actions demands one of two: either forcing Israel to stop what it has been doing and penalize it, or propose a new configuration that recognizes the state of Palestine and the state of Israel together
Some propose a confederation: Israel does not recognize a Palestinian state. However, if we recognize the 1948 borders, remove checkpoints and illegal settlements with setters and allow refugees to return – and then each group manages its affairs. Palestinians already do it in a way in Area A in the West Bank, less so in Areas B and C. Israelis do it in Knesset. What is further needed is a federal common parliament, common foreign and defence policy. Different institutional arrangements are possible and so the two-state-solution can be joined into a one state reality. Organizations One Democratic State Campaign and A Land For All work in this direction. We do not lack options – the problem is the lack of will and the racist, exclusionary project that Zionism has proven to be.
You write that partitions are intrinsic to imperial colonialisms. Europe has imposed divide-and-rule tactics on Palestine but the two-states-solution also follows the ethno-nationalistic European model. Currently, the two-state-solution is presented as the only option but also demilitarization of Nazi Germany or Japan might have appeared as impossible at one point as demilitarization of Israel seems today. Does challenging a two-state-solution challenge also the existing world order, colonial matrix and ethno-national states?
The international pressure is of utmost importance. Israel was a product of nationalism, the ideology of 19th and 20th centuries. In the 21st century two forces are at play. The first strengthens nationalisms – the collapse of Yugoslavia might be the best example of how a different state model was collapsed into an ethno-national states. But the second force aims for unification: the EU, but also the United States of America, Germany has been unified in a federation.
With genocide unfolding in Gaza there is undoubtedly a lot of hatred, but hatred existed also between Nazi Germany, France and Poland. Yet, these countries made peace when they had got rid of the racist, fascist regimes. It is not easy but it is possible and feasible. In South Africa the driving force behind the ANC to end apartheid was not to ensure everybody loves one another but for all to have equal rights. This is very important. People want to live. And they accommodate. The problem is extremists.
The challenge for the Palestinians is how to overcome the mentality of defeat. How to reach beyond the acceptance that Zionism cannot be defeated and that the two-states-solution must be accepted as the least terrible offer?
The struggle for a Palestinian state was not in vain. It played an important role of affirming Palestinian political existence and our rights, but now its role is finished. It could not bring liberation as partition was based on colonial domination. If Oslo had been framed on Israel’s retreat from the West Bank and Gaza, it could have been different. But the Israeli retreat never occurred. Partition based on colonial structure made independence impossible and we have seen the high price of partition in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. An additional complication in Palestine is that Zionism as a national liberation project for some Jewish people has proven to be eliminationist – it wants to eliminate the Palestinian people. Physically. In the past, in 1967, before the Oslo the Zionists believed that they had eliminated the Palestinians by not talking to them, by fighting and dispersing them, by ignoring them and talking only to other Arab states. Benjamin Netanyahu had in the last twenty years before October last year said so himself; forget the Palestinians, we have the Arab countries on our side. But the Palestinians were and are still there. Palestinians are not going to die out unless Israel eliminates all seven million of us.
What is needed to overcome this impasse that brings destruction, humiliation and killings for Palestinians?
Courage. We need courage from political leaders across the board and across the world.
Another complication is the regional configuration – Arab states are willing to accept Israel as a state, with the exception of the Axis of Resistance, which has a wide popular support among Arabs and Palestinians. Supporting Israel has become important for the USA and for the West in this configuration of the regional balance. Iran must not become more powerful than Israel and no country should have the power to disturb this balance.
You have mentioned Iran and before Yugoslavia. In the book you refer to the book on Palestine as a bi-national state by Martin Buber, Judas Magnus and Moses Smilansky, as well as the publications by the Palestine Liberation Organization. The confederative model for Palestine was proposed and supported in 1947 also by Yugoslavia, India and Iran at the UN. Yugoslav diplomat Vladimir Simič wrote about joint, Jewish and Palestinian workers’ strikes against the British capitalist rulers during the British mandate. What importance do these experiences and ideas have today?
They are important because people forget – especially now, in a war. Palestinian workers who work in Israel are workers who build houses and roads there. These relations have always transcended divisions.
The problem is exclusion, and the core problem is the nation state. Hannah Arendt wrote about this as a Jewish author and as a Zionist up to a point, claiming similarly like Magnus and others, that Jewish people are a nation but do not need a Jewish state to exist. They saw a problem in Zionism as it tried to compress the richness of the Jewish history into a history of European Jews and universalize their ideas among all Jews. Jews have always been part of the Middle East and Palestine. Arab Jews had existed for two thousand years until Israel proclaimed everybody to be Israelis. However, an Israeli is supposed to be a white, civilized man.
Zionism eliminated all histories of cooperation and lives lived together. It negated all non-Zionist histories. Zionists claimed to be the indigenous and believed this gave them the right to displace and eliminate all other people from the land. The non-Zionist histories of cooperation and coexistence have always existed. The problem arises when you create an exclusionary state built on the idea of a supremacist right of the Jews to have a state of their own. This negates historical developments and processes. Creation of a Jewish state emerged at a certain historical time. But if a state does not adapt to the reality, history tells us, it will eventually vanish.
Israel has been trying to create a reality to claim it is a Western state, the only democracy in the region of Arab savages where it serves the interests of Europe. Isaac Herzog, president of Israel, said after 7th October that Israel was dealing with barbarians and defending Europe – a repeat of a Theodor Herzl phrase from his 1896 book The Jewish State. But we are not in the 1930s or 1940s Europe, when racism was legitimate. Almost 130 years later, in times of post-racism, repeating such a phrase is problematic and emblematic of two things. First, of innate racism, and second, of Europe’s dire involvement in the creation of the Jewish state.
The problem will not be solved unless Europe deals with its history and not in a way Germany does it, trying to whitewash its responsibility for the Holocaust by throwing it onto Palestinians. The European origin is partly why the occupation of Palestine has been with us for so long. Europe is responsible but does not solve it. And the present war proves yet gain how Israel is dependant on imperial support.
Israel is a technological and surveillance strongman – it exports military technology to Europe, the USA and around the world. Yet it was defeated. The October 7 pushed Israel into a big crisis but instead of learning from it Israel is doubling down on its violence.
Trauma can teach humility, but in Israel we see only arrogance and more narcissism with a growing sense of superiority and uniqueness. Israelis do not recognize that there are structures that create either oppression or stability and liberation. One’s liberation can never be at the expense of someone else’s liberation.
And creating trauma in others does not bring security …
At all. Survival does not depend on the elimination of the other but on learning how to live together, with one another.
You write that the Palestinian citizens of Israel could be best placed to lead the movement for a different, not a two-states model. However, Palestinians of ’48 have been for decades humiliated, subjugated and conditioned to reject their Palestinian identity. Since Oslo the Palestinian Authority has left them to be a domestic Israeli issue. What do you recognize in their position?
The Palestinians of ’48 are very important although, they are undoubtedly under great pressure. Why I believe they can lead the movement for a one democratic state is that they best understand the Israeli society as they have lived in it. They remain also part of the Palestinian political community, wanting to be free from the Israeli oppression.
Despite the oppression and discrimination they have the freedom of movement with a passport they might not really like. They live this combination of ‘privilege’ and bare survival.
However, they exemplify what a one state could look like. Israel is very scared of them and represses them whenever they start to be politically active for a Palestinian cause and for a one state. This happened to Azmi Bishara, who was among the first to call on Israel to become a state of all its citizens. He was stripped of his diplomatic immunity as a member of Knesset and has been exiled in Qatar for over 15 years.
We have seen the repercussions during the Second Intifada when Palestinians of ’48 demonstrated in support of the Palestinians in the West Bank – 12 were killed.
This violence serves to scare and to convey the message that no solidarity is to be shown with other Palestinians.
In 2021, during the Dignity Intifada, people said, we are all Palestinians, we are all discriminated against and we will all fight for our rights. The October 7 surged the Israeli repression of the ’48 and ’67 Palestinians. People have ended up in prison for online posts.
Politics in the context of colonial confrontation involve violence. It is a tragedy that you cannot liberate yourself from colonialism without paying a very high price. For Palestinians just organizing has become a challenge. The Palestinian political parties in Israel try to accommodate Zionism and support the two state solution. Most of the Israelis cannot conceive of themselves living as equals with the Palestinians – they have been taught that they can be safe only if they have a state of their own. This belief needs to change – safety does not come from having a state for oneself but from having a state of democracy for everyone. This Zionist argument is the same as the argument of the white supremacists in America, it is the same argument that white nationalists had in South Africa. It is an argument of every racist. Palestinians in 1948 are facing a big challenge but I do not see how else the shift can happen.
Some put their hopes in the Diaspora but I see it only as a support. We play an important role and there have been mass mobilizations in America and Europe, but it is the people on the land who need to figure out how to live together.
And they know the reality of the everyday life?
Yes. In the Diaspora we have passports. We can move freely. The Palestinians on the ground are without their basic freedoms and live under the Zionist oppressor state. Our struggle is connected but different.
In 2005 you published a pivotal work Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel. What stirred your interest?
It was an intriguing question I have researched in my PhD. Why are Palestinians building homes of Israelis? In my fieldwork I focused on the illegal settlements. I wanted to understand the economic forces that made Palestinians work for Israeli companies.
The situation in Palestine has always been presented as a conflict about land. The economic dimensions, though, also how you acquire the land, were not well understood. My interest was workers. Labour and land together give economic power. Israel opened the borders to Palestinians after 1967 and during the 1980s and 1990s somewhere between a third and two fifths of all Palestinians worked at one point in Israel. After Oslo, for the workers from Gaza this percentage dropped to a tenth in 1996. In the West Bank this drop came later. I wanted to understand this change.
I researched the history, the sectors in which the Palestinians worked …
And these were?
Mostly construction. Workers were therefore the majority men. For Israel it was cost-effective because the Palestinian workers had homes and the Israeli employers did not have to pay for their social insurance, making them cheaper than immigrant workers. Israel has built itself cheaply by exploiting Palestinian workers.
During my research the illegal settlements were expanding. It was clear how Israel used economic mechanisms to ascertain and decide a political project of settlements to assert their presence on the land – by using the Palestinian labour. It also deepened the integration.
I found the process that started in 1995 fascinating because some years before Israel severed its connection to Gaza. The removal of the illegal settlements in Gaza in 2005 was not a 21st century project. Israel was preparing for it much before that. There is a 2002 document on Israeli political establishment’s decision to reduce the reliance on Gaza workers but continue these relations in the West Bank. They wanted to get out of Gaza, which they had already depleted at that point but the West Bank they wanted to integrate into Israel. Settlements were a tool for that and to build them cost effectively they needed Palestinian workers. Simultaneously, these workers were made more dependent on Israel. Thus, Israel did not foster a two state solution or a separation between the Palestinians and the Israelis. It built an apartheid reality and killed a two state solution.
By using economic rationale?
Yes. The killing of the two state solution happened with an economic and not just the territorial mechanisms and tools. This fascinated me. By coincidence the book was published in the year Israel disengaged its physical presence from Gaza. How this happened and how they prepared for it, was all explained. I had built on the work of Sara Roy but focused on the labour. I wanted to show how labour and land are integrated.
Was there also a psychological rationale for Israel? To create self-blame, dependency, cynicism…
Of course. Relying on the Palestinian labour from the West Bank created the basis for cooptation. The Palestinian workers do not want to lose their salaries and livelihoods. You rely on them. At the same time you build the Palestinian Authority and the Europeans help finance it, while you control how far this can develop.
It creates a dependency but it also betters the quality of life. People become busy with their individual rights and put aside the collective political project. Not the least because Israel makes them pay dearly if they do not.
This worked up to a point. In 2000s with the Second Intifada it broke but it was later rebuilt and continued successfully under the Fayyad government. After Covid, for the first time, there were 250.000 Palestinians working in the Israeli economy, including the illegal settlements. The message was clear: you keep quiet and you get a good life.
On the other hand, there was a lack of Palestinian workers in the Palestinian economy. Working for Israel paid double. After last October people again work wherever they can because the Palestinian economy is completely repressed by Israel.
Israel thought it had solved the “problem” of Gaza by confining it behind a big wall and putting it under a siege. It thought Hamas was contained in Gaza by threatening the PA with the same consequences if there was an engagement with Hamas.
This has been the Zionist mantra: we want to have nothing to do with the Palestinians, they can deal with themselves; we will just take their land. My research showed however, that to appropriate land you need labour and you cannot have the land without the people. Israel used the carrot-and-stick technique. It managed to prevent all reconciliation attempts between Palestinian political factions because it had ensured that Fatah and the PA have too much to lose. It divided and conquered.
Did it surprise you after the October 7 that there were around 17. 500 day workers from Gaza in Israel?
No. It is part of the pacification. Occupation does not work only on the macro level but happens on the micro level as well. The construction companies want cheap labour, soldiers make deals here and there with permits. It is business, not even corruption. Issuing permits brings money. Moreover, it is about sustaining the population. Israel’s approach towards Palestinians, especially in Gaza has been to give enough to survive but not to thrive.
Shocking was that Gaza was despite the Israeli policies able to have 36 hospitals and 12 universities, defying the siege in ways we never thought possible. The most important is the desire to live no matter what and Gaza has shown incredible resilience and ingenuity. It built its own recycling economy.
The tragedy is the Palestinian disunity that effects the national movement. The October 7 events were catastrophic. One year later there might be a way to demand the Palestinian rights in a broader way beyond the statehood. Today even Hamas supports the two-state-solution.
Important is the BDS movement, calling for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions as it relies on the international law and is non-violent. Especially lately but ever since it started in 2005 it galvanized populations in America, Europe and around the world. Israel’s attempts to mark it as anti-Semitic do not work. The example of South Africa is strong. At the end of the day it is the civilian means that hold states accountable to international law, especially if they claim to be democratic.
Just to return for a moment to the Palestinian workers in Israel and in the illegal settlements. Is their work perceived as a betrayal?
No, this has passed. It was considered a betrayal in the 1970s, as something shameful in the 1980s but now people see it simply as a way to survive. People would do anything to stay on the land and if this is the only way, then let it be. Especially as there is the awareness that the Palestinian Authority is both illegitimate and incapable. It is an early confirmation of a one state. We have the reality of a one state despite the discourse set on the two-state-solution. It is a mantra, void except for reaffirming the Palestinian political agency.
How important is the aspect of class struggle in this combination of capitalist and colonial apartheid oppression?
It is important, as it is a global question. Workers organizing and trade union solidarity are important everywhere. In the Palestinian society capitalism is strong and alive. There are investment funds, more than 25 banks and the Palestinian economy today is an indebted economy. This makes political organizing much more difficult. The neoliberal capitalist economy devastates everybody. It enriches few and makes everyone else poorer, also in Palestine.
Unions as a form of collective organizing are very important. They generate solidarity and are a step away from neoliberal individualized sense of fulfilment and prosperity.
Since your book was published have there arose aspects that need to be better understood?
Many things have changed but the dynamics of relying on cheap Palestinian labour to build illegal Israeli settlements remain, as does the maintenance of the apartheid system.
Walid Habbas has since written on this topic, introducing a very important dimension of the securitization industry. With the wall and the checkpoints, the goods terminals and the automated recognition technology it represents a whole new economic sector that relies on labour, on the Israel’s security agencies and Israeli security companies. What has changed is also how the Palestinian workers are paid and this entrenches the control over the banks. The management of the labour flow, which was more flexible in the past, now fuels this new, securitization economy that is more invasive, controlling and prevalent.
You have mentioned the Israel’s control over the Palestinian economic development. How important is to match the BDS movement with a support for the Palestinian economy and producers – is it at all possible?
It is very important, as it is a form of support. But the boycott is pivotal. If we want to help the Palestinian economy, we need to boycott the Israeli goods and products, and defend the Palestinian ones. We all have to do our part. Europe, the EU and the Europeans. Accusations of anti-Semitism should be tackled head on. No, it is not reminiscent of the boycott of the Jewish products in the Nazi Germany. This is a boycott of products from Israel because Israel violates the international law and is committing genocide. Israel has elaborated the system to constrain the Palestinian export by making everything cumbersome. It is strategic. There are hundreds of forms and checks and policies of monitoring and controlling the goods going in and out of the illegally occupied Palestinian territories. It is a fascinating sector of the occupation and apartheid. But the only way to stop a bully or an aggressor is to put up limits to them and not indulge them in their behaviour.
