Annexation, no! Reunification, yes!
The next stage in the Israel-Palestine conflict
As Peter Beinart has argued convincingly, Trump’s choice of advisors, combined with the messianic fanatics who hold the balance of power in the Israeli government, virtually guarantee the annexation by Israel of the West Bank, and, ultimately Gaza.
Annexation will completely expose the apartheid nature of the State of Israel. Today There are approximately 7.2 million Jews and 6.3 million Arabs between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. All of the Jews are citizens of Israel with full rights and access to public services. The myth of Israel as a “Jewish Democracy” depends on the fact that the 2.1 million of the Arabs are citizens of Israel, though with fewer rights and less access to public services than Israeli Jews. It erases the other Palestinians ruled by Israel. 362,000 Arabs in East Jerusalem are citizens of the city but not of the state. The remaining approximately 4 million Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza are stateless, subject to military rule and open aggression.
The lack of an agreed international status for the territories conquered by Israel in 1967 has left them with a maliciously ambiguous status. Their Palestinian residents have a supposedly interim status as subjects of Israeli occupation (a term Israel rejects), pending a mutually agreed solution to the conflict. In a two-state solution their ambiguous status would supposedly turn into citizenship of a Palestinian state. The malicious way they are ruled, allows Israel to hold so-called “democratic” elections in which more than a third of the population under its rule is ineligible to vote.
Defenders of Israel rebut charges of apartheid as ridiculous: Palestinian Arab citizens have the right to vote, they are represented in the Knesset, some are judges and members of the armed forces. This specious argument depends on the fiction that the West Bank and Gaza are not in Israel. In fact, Palestinians constitute nearly 49 percent of the population ruled by the State of Israel, and most of them cannot vote or participate in the government that rules them.
Annexation of these territories will officially recognize that they are part of Israel. But annexation will not extend citizenship and its rights to all Palestinians. Members of the Israeli cabinet like Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir have been openly calling for the “voluntary” transfer of the Palestinians out of Gaza. The genocidal campaign in Gaza and the accelerating ethnic cleansing of the West Bank provide a glimpse of what they mean to do: confront Palestinians with a choice of emigration or perpetual violence, so that their expulsion can be camouflaged as “voluntary” emigration, as Israel’s apologists to this day falsely characterize the Nakba of 1948.
Most of those who oppose such an outcome advocate the two-state solution. But Ian Lustick, in his book “Paradigm Lost,” shows that the long-dead corpse of the two-state solution lies buried in the rubble of Gaza. Rashid Khalidi, in his book, “The Hundred-Years War on Palestine,” characterizes the Oslo Accords and the mirage of a peace process as the “Fifth Declaration of War” on Palestine. The two-state solution reminds me of a Soviet joke recounted by Aleksander Zinoviev in his novel, “Yawning Heights.” Communism is the “radiant horizon of mankind,” was a slogan. And a “horizon” as an imaginary line that recedes as one approaches it. Once the camouflage of a fake peace process is ripped away, the two-state solution is not a solution but an obstacle to the only alternative to apartheid: equality.
Opposition to the Jewish supremacist policy of annexation should organize not around the now-empty slogan of “two states for two peoples,” but around the slogan: “No to Annexation, Yes to Reunification.” Reunification was what happened in Germany. East Germans were not kept as stateless serfs of the West Germans; they received the full rights of citizenship.
It is not hard to show that it might be just as difficult for these two peoples to coexist in a single state of Palestine/Eretz Yisrael as it would be to disentangle them to form two separate states. But the deceptively named “two-state solution” never offered Palestinians a sovereign state; at most it dangled before them the false hope that they might one day pick up their own garbage, while Israel controlled their borders, limited their security forces, and controlled their economy.
The rights of the Palestinians require not mere opposition to annexation, but that the inevitable annexation become an initial step toward the democratic reunification of Palestine. The naked racism of the one-state reality would shatter the now crumbling pro-Israel consensus in the United States and occasion a global movement as powerful as that against South African apartheid.
Reunification will not happen under the Trump-Netanyahu duopoly but it is time to cut through the confusion, recognize the irreversibility of today’s (in Lustick’s words) One-State Reality, and demand that rule by a single state between the river and the sea will come as a blessing, and not a curse.
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I am for reunification. When I told my Palestinian friends of my changed views in 2022 from 2 state solution, they were furious. I came to conclusion after going through the election voting data of Israel's many election. The Arab-Jewish voting percentages are close to 40%-60%. If Arab voting increases to 50% they would gain 6-8 seats and better bargaining power in a coalition Governments.