In what way can the UN now argue that its diplomatic strategy is viable for Palestinians and the creation of an independent Palestinian state?
In what way can the UN now argue that its diplomatic strategy is viable for Palestinians and the creation of an independent Palestinian state?
Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz spoke inaccurately when he described a future in which a “two-entity solution” would emerge.
Speaking at the Munich Security Conference last February, Gantz’s choice of words prompted a request for clarification – the media is used to the two-state politics when referring to a hypothetical solution as endorsed by the international community.
“Eventually we will find ourselves in a two-entity solution, in which we respect Palestinian sovereignty and governance, but we will be respected for our security needs,” Gantz told the conference.
The choice of words was intentional, as Gantz clarified to a reporter, “To speak of a two-state solution takes us to a former framework. It’s a phrase that gives the illusion of [a return to]1967 with the border lines etc.; things that cannot happen.”
There has never been a clearer departure from the two-state compromise on Israel’s behalf. For decades, the two-state narrative has suited Israel’s needs, as the emphasis on negotiations rather than solutions allowed Israel to colonise most of Palestinian territory.
The Trump administration’s so-called “deal of the century” shifted attention away from the international consensus while building upon the defunct politics to introduce a new method of keeping Palestinians enslaved to humanitarian projects.
Gantz’s choice of a two-entity “solution”, however, is not entirely correct. Israel has been legitimised as a state, despite its inception being steeped in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population. Palestine has been colonised, its population displaced, and those who remain are living an apartheid reality that cannot be dissociation from Israel’s colonial origins.
Recognition of Palestinian statehood has been largely symbolic and far from unanimous; it is the Palestinian Authority that has created an illusion of symbolism as being tantamount to the realities of statehood. In truth, the international community is solely beholden to Israel, and funding illusory state-building projects for the PA is just a veneer obscuring the reality that Israeli demands will always take precedence.
If Palestinian statehood is symbolic and the two-state compromise is defunct, there is a possibility of a Palestinian entity that would be demilitarised, completely subjugated to Israel under illusions of Palestinian autonomy. However, Gantz cannot pretend that a “two-entity solution” is the correct way to define any future mangled, and still colonised Palestinian entity.
Israel’s recognition at an international level would not result in a two-state entity as Gantz stated, because there is no political equivalence between a state that gained international legitimacy and an entity that may come into existence solely through subjugation and concessions.
What stands out the most is how Israel controls what becomes of Palestine, if anything. For all the UN speaks of the right to self-determination, it does not apply political rights to the Palestinians, whose only political relevance has been determined according to Israel’s colonisation.
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Additionally, Gantz knows that if half the “entity” equation comes into being, the international community would have no qualms about the discrepancy of Palestine being less than a state. What Israel says is never contradicted at an international level, and definitely not politically.
Therefore, just as the international community has substituted colonisation for military occupation, the same would occur in the scenario erroneously depicted by Gantz, so that both Israel and the UN would be able to blur the distinction between a state and a demilitarised entity.
So in a way, Gantz has revealed the outcome of the defunct two-state compromise which was never intended to give Palestinians a state of their own with full political rights. In what way can the UN now argue that its diplomatic strategy is viable for Palestinians and the creation of an independent Palestinian state?
The UN has toyed with countless resolutions pretending to support Palestinian rights, but the international institution’s treachery of the 1947 Partition Plan needs to be recognised as the root of how Gantz is now speaking of purported “entities” with impunity.
