Israel/Palestine and settler-colonialism

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Return of property could get extremely complicated at this point. Perhaps monetary compensation for any lost property, together with the legal right to live anywhere "from the river to the sea" (and a guarantee of NO MORE EVICTIONS for such reasons as "a Jew once lived here"), might be the most reasonable solution, in the context of a single bi-national Israel-Palestine state with equal rights for all.


The "right of return" would need to happen in phases, in any case. It probably would not be feasible for the Israeli economy to be able to handle the sudden return of all 5 million Palestinian refugees all at once.

In any case, if Israel were to make a good-faith effort to integrate even half of the 5 million Palestinian refugees into a united Israel-Palestine, then, hopefully, the neighboring countries might also become less wary of giving full citizenship rights to at least some of the remaining Palestinian refugees.


Unfortunately the two-state solution is pretty much dead, thanks to all the settlers. There are just too many of them who have lived in the West Bank for too damned long.


I'm not sure exactly what it will take to ensure that neither side tries to ethnically cleanse the other. There will probably need to be lots of dialogue between religious leaders, as well as negotiations between political leaders.

Also, IMO, both Gaza and Areas A and B of the West Bank will need to become what Indian Reservations currently are here in the U.S.A., i.e. places reserved for indigenous Palestinians, but no longer places that they are confined to. This will be necessary to help ensure that Palestinians don't get completely crowded out through sheer gentrification, even in a world where Israeli Jewish settlers
no longer have government-backed privileges over indigenous Palestinians.

No way the Palestinians would accept anything like the American system. The American system is not a one state solution. The Indians on reservations in America are considered separate nations they have no representation in Congress and no military.

Native Americans, like all citizens of the United States, have the right to vote in federal, state and local elections. Native Americans may also vote in tribal elections and may have dual citizenship in two sovereign nations, the U.S. and their tribe.

A federal Indian reservation is an area of land reserved for a tribe or tribes under treaty or other agreement with the United States, executive order, or federal statute or administrative action as permanent tribal homelands, and where the federal government holds title to the land in trust on behalf of the tribe.

The United States Constitution clearly states that Native American tribes are a recognized political entity of the nation. Yet, tribes are the only such political entity that has absolutely no structural representation in Congress. Even Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C., Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands each get one delegate, even though Natives account for 6.6 million of our national population and 2% of United States geographical land is Native trust land.

According to a federal court ruling in the 1830’s, “tribes possess a nationhood status and retain inherent powers of self-government”, ensuring that tribes can make their own decisions in regard to their property and citizens. However, current federal policy contradicts this by stripping away the authority to protect their own people. Though the rate of violent crime against First People is twice the national average, tribal nations are for the most part unable to prosecute criminal offenders for violent crimes that occur within tribal borders. In 1978, the Supreme Court case Oliphant v. Suquamish stripped tribes of the right to arrest and prosecute non-natives who commit crimes on reservation. The only legal weapon at a tribal officer’s disposal (without state or federal interference) is a traffic ticket or ejecting a perpetrator from the reservation.

LACK OF AUTONOMY & REPRESENTATION - THE SILENCING OF NATIVE VOICES

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A reservation system no matter how humane inherently conflicts with the goal of a one-state solution where all citizens are considered equal. Voluntary segregation is still segregation or othering in today's parlance.

"This is what it means to destroy a people!" Dr Sai Englert unpacks the root causes of Israel's decades of continuous violence wielded against Palestinians amid its ongoing genocide on Gaza, with a special focus on Zionism, Settler Colonialism and Imperialism.

Dr Sai Englert is a lecturer in political economy of the Middle East at Leiden University. He is the author of Settler Colonialism: an Introduction (2022, Pluto Press). His research focusses on the consequences of neoliberalism on the labour movement in Israel. He also works on settler colonialism, the transformation of work, and anti-Semitism. He is a member of the editorial board of both the Historical Materialism journal and Notes from Below.

Ahmed Alnaouq is a Palestinian journalist from Gaza.

A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history

In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.

Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process.

Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.

Rashid Khalidi is the author of Palestinian Identity, Brokers of Deceit, and The Iron Cage, among others. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and many other journals. He is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University in New York and editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies.