By Ghada Karmi
Ghada Karmi argues that a democratic state in Palestine requires truth, accountability and reparations for victims of Israel’s genocide.
The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has proved virtually impossible to resolve. That is because it is unique, without a historical precedent to guide its solution. It does not wholly fit into the settler colonialist paradigm, nor into the classic mould of imperialist ventures.
Israel is the product of an experiment in nation-building for a nation which had never existed before and had to be newly created. Its building blocks were an imported collection of Jewish communities of various origins who were moved into a land not their own. They were then conditioned into learning to adopt the norms of a nation, and melded into an invented cohesiveness to be one people.
The consequences of enabling this artificial nation to develop and thrive have been an Israeli state bristling with an aggressive, militaristic, entitled population that currently occupies the whole of historic Palestine.
In 78 years of statehood, Israel caused the expulsion of a majority of the native population and is now intent on expelling the rest. The Palestinian natives meanwhile fought to stay on their land, with the result that the populations of Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Arabs living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, Palestine’s original geography, are roughly equal. Neither side is willing to give up their presence on the land, leading to an intractable conflict that defies resolution.
It is in this context that the idea of a shared state between the protagonists has been proposed as the fairest and most practical way out of this quagmire. The one democratic state solution with equal rights for all its citizens, including the return of Palestinian refugees and exiles, has become the only feasible and humane solution for the conflict.
The two-state solution, recommended repeatedly and vacuously by the international community, is neither equitable, feasible, nor possible anymore, if it ever was.
After October 7, 2023, is the one-state solution still valid given Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza, its assaults on the West Bank, the cruelty and barbarity of its army on shameless public display for three years? Opinion polls show the majority of Jewish Israelis approve of and support their government’s genocidal actions against Palestinian civilians, including children and even babies.
If at some future time the single democratic state were ever to be established, can one really ask Palestinians who have endured Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing to live with their perpetrators? Are they supposed to forgive and forget?
I would contend that, without a Truth Commission on the lines of the one set up in South Africa at the end of apartheid, and a mechanism for Israel to make reparations to the victims of its crimes against them, no single democratic state can be set up in Palestine. The alternative will be a fight to the death between the two sides, a truly tragic end to a tragic conflict.
– Ghada Karmi is a Palestinian doctor and academic, born in Jerusalem and displaced with her family in 1948. Raised in England, she specialized in migrant and refugee health and held research appointments at several British universities. She is a Research Fellow at the University of Exeter’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies.