Two State Solution | UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM

Axis of Resistance: from Donbass to Gaza

Posted on February 17, 2024 by uprootedpalestinians

FEB 16, 2024

The resistance in Donbas and Gaza share an essential common vision: overthrowing the unipolar hegemon that has quashed their national aspirations.

The resistance in Donbas and Gaza share an essential common vision: overthrowing the unipolar hegemon that has quashed their national aspirations.

During my recent vertiginous journey in Donbass tracking Orthodox Christian battalions defending their land, Novorossiya, it became starkly evident that the resistance in these newly liberated Russian republics is fighting much the same battle as their counterparts in West Asia.

Nearly 10 years after Maidan in Kiev, and two years after the start of Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine, the resolve of the resistance has only deepened.

It’s impossible to do full justice to the strength, resilience, and faith of the people of Donbass, who stand on the front line of a US proxy war against Russia. The battle they have been fighting since 2014 has now visibly shed its cover and revealed itself to be, at its core, a cosmic war of the collective West against Russian civilization.

As Russian President Vladimir Putin made very clear during his Tucker Carlson interview seen by one billion people worldwide, Ukraine is part of Russian civilization – even if it is not part of the Russian Federation. So shelling ethnic Russian civilians in Donbass – still ongoing – translates as attacks on Russia.

He shares the same reasoning as Yemen’s Ansarallah resistance movement, which describes the Israeli genocide in Gaza as one launched against “our people”: people of the lands of Islam.

Just as the rich black soil of Novorossiya is where the “rules-based international order” came to die; the Gaza Strip in West Asia – an ancestral land, Palestine – may ultimately be the site where Zionism will perish. Both the rules-based order and Zionism, after all, are essential constructs of the western unipolar world and key to advancing its global economic and military interests.

Today’s incandescent geopolitical fault lines are already configured: the collective west versus Islam, the collective west versus Russia, and soon a substantial part of the west, even reluctantly, versus China.

Yet a serious counterpunch is at play.

As much as the Axis of Resistance in West Asia will keep boosting their “swarm” strategy, those Orthodox Christian battalions in Donbass cannot but be regarded as the vanguard of the Slavic Axis of Resistance.

When mentioning this Shia–Orthodox Christianity connection to two top commanders in Donetsk, only 2 kilometers away from the front line, they smiled, bemused, but definitely got the message.

After all, more than anyone else in Europe, these soldiers are able to grasp this unifying theme: on the two top imperial fronts – Donbass and West Asia – the crisis of the western hegemon is deepening and fast accelerating collapse.

NATO’s cosmic humiliation-in-progress in the steppes of Novorossiya is mirrored by the Anglo–American–Zionist combo sleepwalking into a larger conflagration throughout West Asia – frantically insisting they don’t want war while bombing every Axis of Resistance vector except Iran (they can’t, because the Pentagon gamed all scenarios, and they all spell out doom).

Scratch the veneer of who’s in power in Kiev and Tel Aviv, and who pulls their strings, and you will find the same puppet masters controlling Ukraine, Israel, the US, the UK, and nearly all NATO members.

Lavrov: ‘No perspectives’ on Israel–Palestine

Russia’s role in West Asia is quite complex – and nuanced. On the surface, Moscow’s corridors of power make it very clear that Israel–Palestine “is not our war: Our war is in Ukraine.”

At the same time, the Kremlin continues to advance itself as a mediator and trusted peacemaker in West Asia. Russia is perhaps uniquely situated for that role – it is a major global power, highly vested in the region’s energy politics, a leader of the world’s emerging economic and security institutions, and enjoys robust relations with all key regional states.

A multipolar Russia – with its large population of moderate Muslims – instinctively connects with the plight of the Palestinians. Then there’s the BRICS+ factor, where the current Russian presidency can draw full attention from new members Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt to advance fresh solutions to the Palestine conundrum.

This week in Moscow, at the 13th Middle East Conference of the Valdai Club, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov went straight to the point, stressing cause, the Hegemon’s policies; and effect, pushing Israel–Palestine toward catastrophe.

He played the role of Peacemaker Russia: we are proposing “holding an inter-Palestinian meeting to overcome internal divisions.” And he also delivered the face of Realpolitik Russia: There are “no perspectives for an Israel–Palestine settlement at the moment.”

A detailed Valdai report opened a crucial window for understanding the Russian position, which links Gaza and Yemen as “epicenters of pain.”

For context, it is important to remember that late last month, Putin’s special representative for West Asian affairs, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs ML Bogdanov, received an Ansarallah delegation in Moscow led by Mohammed Abdelsalam.

Diplomatic sources confirm they talked in-depth about everything: the fate of a comprehensive settlement for the military-political crisis in Yemen, Gaza, and the Red Sea. No wonder Washington and London lost their marbles.

‘Disappearing the Palestine question’

Arguably, the most critical round table at Valdai was on Palestine – and how to unify the Palestinians.

Nasser al-Kidwa, a member of the Palestinian National Council (PNC) and former minister of foreign affairs of the Palestinian Authority (PA) (2005–2006), stressed Israel’s three strategic positions, all of which are aimed at maintaining a dangerous status quo:

First, Tel Aviv seeks to maintain the split between Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Second, per Kidwa, is to “weaken and strengthen one or the other, preventing national leadership, using force and only force to suppress Palestinian national rights and prevent a political solution.”

Third on Israel’s agenda is to actively pursue normalization with a number of Arab countries without dealing with the Palestinian issue, that is, “disappearing the Palestinian question.”

Kidwa then stressed the “demise” of these three strategic positions – essentially because Netanyahu is trying to prolong the war “to save himself” – which leads to other likely outcomes: a new Israeli government; a new Palestinian leadership, “whether we like it or not”; and a new Hamas.

Implied then are four vast fields of discussion, according to Kidwa: the state of Palestine; Gaza and the Israeli withdrawal; changing the Palestinian situation, a process that should be domestic-based, “peaceful,” and harboring “no revenge”; and the overall mechanism ahead.

What is clear, says Kidwa, is that there will be no “two-state solution” in the offing. It will be back to the very basics, which is affirming “the right of national independence for Palestine” – an issue already ostensibly agreed on three decades ago in Oslo.

On the mechanism ahead, Kidwa makes no bones about the fact that “the Quartet is dysfunctional.” He pins his hopes on the Spanish idea, endorsed by the EU, “that we modified.” It is, broadly, an international peace conference in several rounds based on the situation on the ground in Gaza.

That will imply several rounds, “with a new Israeli government,” forced to develop a “peace framework.” The end result must be the minimum acceptable to the international community, based on UNSC resolutions galore: 1967 borders, mutual recognition, and a specific timeline, which could be 2027. And crucially, it must establish “commitments respected from the beginning,” something the Oslo crowd couldn’t possibly fathom.

It is fairly obvious that none of the above will be possible under Netanyahu and the current dysfunctional White House.

But Kidwa also admits that on the Palestinian side, “we don’t have a maestro that puts these elements together, Gaza and West Bank together.” This, of course, is a strategic policy success of the Israelis, who have long toiled to keep the two Palestinian territories at odds and have assassinated any Palestinian leader able to surmount the divide.

At Valdai, Amal Abou Zeid, an advisor to the former Lebanese president General Michel Aoun (2016–2022), noted that “as much as the war in Ukraine, the Gaza war disrupted the foundations of the regional order.”

The previous order was “economic-centric, as the pathway to stability.” Then came Hamas’ 7 October operation against Israel, which triggered a radical transformation. It “suspended the normalization between Israel and the Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia,” and revived the political resolution of the Palestine crisis. “Without such a resolution,” Zeid stressed, the threat to stability is “regional and global.”

So we’re back to the coexistence of two states along the 1967 borders – the impossible dream. Zeid, though, is correct that without closing the Palestinian chapter, it’s “unattainable for the Europeans to have normal relations with Mediterranean nations. The EU must advance the peace process.”

No one, from West Asia to Russia, is holding their breath, especially as “Israel extremism prevails,” the PA has a “leadership vacuum,” and there’s an “absence of American mediation.”

Old ideas vs new players

Zaid Eyadat, director of the Center for Strategic Studies at The University of Jordan, tried to adopt a contrarian “rationalist perspective.” There are “new dynamics” at play, he argued, saying “the war is much bigger than Hamas and beyond Gaza.”

But Eyadat’s outlook is bleak. “Israel is winning,” he insists, contradicting the region’s entire Axis of Resistance and even the Arab street.

Eyadat makes the point that “the Palestinian question is back on the stage – but without the desire for a comprehensive solution. So Palestinians will lose.”

Why? Because of a “bankruptcy of ideas.” As in “how to transform something from untenable to more reasonable.” And it is the “rules-based order” which is at the heart of this “moral deficit.”

These are the kinds of yesteryear statements that are at odds with today’s resistance-minded, mutlipolar visionaries. While Eyadat frets about Israel and Iran competition, an extremist and uncontrolled Tel Aviv, splits between Hamas and the PA, and the US pursuing its own interests, what’s missing in this analysis is the ground arena and the surge in multipolarism globally.

The Axis of Resistance “swarm” in West Asia has barely started and still carries a slew of military and economic cards yet to come into play. The Slavic Axis of Resistance has been fighting nonstop for two years – and only now are they starting to glimpse a possible light, linked to the fall of Adveevka, at the end of the (muddy) tunnel.

The resistance war is a global one, played out – so far – in only two battlefields. But their state supporters are formidable players on today’s global chessboard and are slowly racking up victories in their respective domains. All while the enemy, the Hegemon, is in economic free-fall, lacks domestic mandates for its wars, and offers zero solutions.

Whether in the muddy black soil of Donbass, the Mediterranean shores of Gaza, or the world’s essential shipping waterways, Hamas, Hezbollah, Hashd al-Shaabi, and Ansarallah will take all the time they need to turn “epicenters of pain” into “epicenters of hope.”

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.

The ‘Western’ Racist Roots of Israeli Apartheid

Posted on February 7, 2021 by Zara Ali

by Jeremy Salt

Source

Joe Biden supports a two-state solution to the ‘Palestine problem’. Well, first of all, it never was a Palestine problem. It was a zionist problem, leading to the colonization and takeover of Palestine by a settler minority.

Second, the two-state solution is a chimera. Israel is not interested and by supporting a two-state solution that is a delusion, Biden is actually supporting the continuation of a policy of no solution. In fact, his bogus two-state solution is no more than a mask drawn over the face of his real policy, of continuing lavish support for Israel whatever it does. The one issue Biden does have to face is the Israeli threat to attack Iran if he dares to take the US back into the nuclear agreement breached by Trump. We have to wait to see how he works this out.

By themselves, the Palestinians have never counted for less in the strategic and political calculations of the zionists. They are treated as a defeated people who should have surrendered long ago and true, the zionists have never been stronger at the material level, the Palestinians never weaker.

Only the Palestinians have the right to decide what to do next in the current calamitous situation, but friends can make suggestions and an obvious one would be the need to reconstitute themselves as a national community, building tactical and strategic consensus, before going any further.

In the absence of a two-state solution, the pendulum swings back to one state, either one Jewish national state or one state for all. This second aspiration takes the issue back to the 1960s and the one secular state advanced at that time by the PLO.

This soon foundered on the reef of zionist ideology, which from the beginning was based on a Jewish state established over all of Palestine. That was the whole point of taking the land in the first place: it was a delusion to think the zionists would ever accept anything less than a Jewish state. Israel’s extended dissembling over the past two decades has merely enabled what was intended, its colonization of east Jerusalem and the West Bank to reach the point of what many believe to be irreversibility.

Irreversibility has no meaning in history, of course. The examples are too numerous even to bother proving the point but apparent irreversibility manifested in the 600,000 settlers occupying East Jerusalem and the West Bank has led many Palestinians back to the idea of one state for all across all of Palestine.

The pooling of resources in one state with equal rights for Jews, Muslims and Christians (and anyone else) is an attractive and sensible option, of course, even with all the immense practical difficulties that such an idea entails, beginning with acceptance of the right to return of Palestinians (and their heirs) to the places they came from, taken over by Jewish settlers in 1948/9 as illegally as the settlers living in east Jerusalem or the West Bank since 1967.

However, even if all this could be sorted out theoretically (and a new name devised for this shared land), the Jews of today’s Israel do not want it any more than their forebears did.

For secular Jews living in pre-1967 Israel/occupied Palestine, the ‘right’ of Israel to exist as a Jewish state is the rock of their collective existence: for religious Jews living in the territories taken in 1967, God’s mandate and not Israel’s ‘right’ to exist explains their position but the two positions dovetail in the belief of the necessity of a Jewish state, across all if not most of Palestine.

Just as there were a handful of brave Afrikaners who fought white settler apartheid, so there have always been Jews who challenge zionist racism: Judah Magnes and the small circle around him in the 1920s-40s who believed in a binational state, Uri Avnery and the peaceniks in the 1960s and 1970s and currently, the scholar Ilan Pappe and the journalists Amira Hass and Gideon Levy. They expose the lies of the state and the endorsement of its crimes by the people but they represent a tiny minority, allowing the state and the people to shrug them off.

The similarities between apartheid South Africa and apartheid Israel should not blind people into thinking that the outcome will be the same, that one day, like the white settlers in South Africa, the zionists will voluntarily see the error of their ways and change course.

As far as we can see ahead, this would be another delusion. By 1990 the small white minority of South Africa had declined to about 13 percent of the total population. Apart from the numbers, the apartheid regime was isolated internationally, with sanctions being imposed that spelled economic ruin: ultimately it had no choice but to give in to what was manifestly inevitable.

By comparison, while the demographics continue to change against them all the time, Jews still constitute about 50 percent of the population of Palestine between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. They still have sufficient numbers as well as the armed might for Israel to be able to put down any Palestinian challenge from inside.

Furthermore, there is little effective pressure on Israel from the ‘western’ world to change its ways. BDS has damaged Israel, but at the cost of a counter-reaction which has resulted in Israel being given additional protection by the passage of anti-BDS measures by state legislatures across the US and by parliaments in Canada, Britain, France and Germany. The gains have been heavily offset by the cost.

The cash flow from the US continues undiminished, and neither the UN as a collective body or any of its member governments seeks to restrain Israel in any serious way. Not only that, but they give their fervent support to the charge of anti-semitism which Israel continues to use unscrupulously to destroy those who stand against its racism, the most recent high profile scalp being Jeremy Corbyn’s.

In such an environment of international indulgence, with only notional marginal interest at home in a genuine one-state settlement, the Israeli government sees no need to change course. It knows it can do virtually whatever it wants without the ‘international community’ stepping forward to stand in its way. Not even the killing of children on the West Bank or in Gaza have been sufficient to push it into making Israel pay for the consequences of its actions.

Holocaust guilt helps to explain indulgence of Israel but so does the racism of the ‘west,’ past and present, as manifested yet again by the recent slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Middle Eastern lands.

Far from generating absolute horror at such crimes, these deaths count for little in the ‘western’ homeland. Black lives in the US, Canada, or Australia might matter but black or brown lives destroyed in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Palestine and numerous other places count for very little in these same countries.

The deaths of 3000 people on 9/11 were widely described as a turning point. By comparison, no episode of the mass killing of people of color has ever been described as a turning point in history.

These deaths have little impact in the countries where they are decided: the faces are faceless, the names nameless, the features featureless, the deaths not counted, no more than an estimate if someone asks.

There is no turning point for these victims of racist wars: their world will continue to turn the same way it always has done. Their deaths do not register because they are not exceptional – as the deaths on 9/11 were – but only the normal continuation of what has been going on for centuries in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and South-east Asia, with no end in sight even now, and one does not sit up and take notice of the normal.

The ending of these lives of unequal value at the hands of ‘western’ armies is ignored or quickly forgotten: no-one in the ‘western’ homeland is ever held responsible, not the politicians launching the wars, not the pilots firing the missiles, and not the media giving encouragement on the home front.

These two complementary forms of racism, zionist apartheid on one hand and deeply imprinted ‘western’ racism on the other, have been fundamental to the success of Zionism from the beginning.

With support continuing from the US at all levels, and with the ‘international community’ reluctant to intervene, it would be a delusion to think that Israel will one day voluntarily accept a genuine one-state settlement. The great bulk of Jewish Israelis do not want it and the state will fight it tooth and claw if it ever becomes a serious threat (an extremely remote prospect at the moment).

There are no signs that sufficient momentum can be developed to compel Israel to accept such a solution. BDS is effective but only up to a certain point. The ‘international community’ is not interested in challenging Israel in any meaningful way. Arab governments never genuinely committed to the Palestine cause in the first place are now coming out of hiding and signing agreements with the enemy who never was.

To see where any prospect of breaking this deadlock might lie, one has to look at the regional strategic situation as seen through Israeli eyes. The dominant feature in military circles is alarm, born not just of Israel’s failure to intimidate its enemies but the fact that they are stronger now than they were a decade ago.

The exception is Syria, which has withstood the most determined attempt ever made to destroy an Arab government, has had to pay a terrible price in the loss of life and destruction of its towns and cities and is still battling armed takfiri groups in different parts of the country. It has to concentrate on its own recovery: there is not much else it can do at the moment but its strategic allies, Iran and Hizbullah, remain a standing cause of active preparation for war in Israel.

Inside their homeland, the Palestinians can be killed, bullied and beaten, and otherwise oppressed by a suffocating network of pseudo-legal ‘laws’ but Israel has no such control beyond Palestine’s borders. This external dimension of the Palestinian question – as an Arab question, historically, politically, culturally, and geographically; as a Muslim question, with the enormous weight that this signifies; and as a human rights question that resonates around the world – has always represented the greatest threat to the zionist state, as by themselves the Palestinians would never have been capable of overcoming the vast power wielded against them after 1918.

Resistance to Israel by Iran and Hizbullah arises from the centrality of Palestine in Arab and Muslim consciousness. They have paid heavily for their commitment but they have not backed off because, to put it as it is understood in Iran and by Hizbullah, the cause is sacred. Their resistance is deeply principled, something the ‘western’ homeland cannot allow itself to understand if Israel is to be defended, but as much as they are demeaned and abused in the ‘western’ homeland as ‘terrorists’ it is they who have human rights and international law on their side, not Israel.

In this external form, from beyond Palestine’s borders, the Palestinian phoenix rises again from the ashes of its suffering to haunt its enemy. An idea can be much harder to crush than a people, because it has to be countermanded by ideas and Israel has none in its armoury, at least not any good ones.

In the event of another regional war, unfortunately, a probability more than a possibility, on the basis of all past experience, Iran and Hizbullah have the missile capacity to damage Israel well beyond anything it has ever experienced.

Only the trauma of such an experience is likely to push Israel in the direction of one state for everyone living in the land of Palestine, with the doors of return opened to the refugees. This is clearly the common-sense solution, the humane solution, but it is not one that Israel is likely to embrace voluntarily.