Palestinians collect their belongings after Israeli authorities demolished Palestinian houses in the West Bank village of Mufagara, near Hebron, 11 September 2019. The Israeli army deny Palestinians from building and infrastructure in area C of the west bank since they do not have the Israeli needed permits.- EPA Pic
Palestinians collect their belongings after Israeli authorities demolished Palestinian houses in the West Bank village of Mufagara, near Hebron, 11 September 2019. The Israeli army deny Palestinians from building and infrastructure in area C of the west bank since they do not have the Israeli needed permits.- EPA Pic

THE International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People is commemorated on every November 29th to mark the day upon which the United Nations had passed Resolution 181, calling for the partition of the state of Palestine between the indigenous Arabs and Zionist colonialists.

The annual observance was established in UN General Assembly Resolution 32/40 B of December 2, 1977 with the commencement in 1978. It is, quite explicitly, a ceremonial reiteration of the proposal for a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

This, we must acknowledge, makes the name of this auspicious day more than a little awkward. Advocating the surrender of Palestinian territory to Zionist adventurers in 1947 represents an odd form of solidarity with the Palestinians. A more accurate word might be 'abandonment' - but we have all gotten used to the genocidal utility of euphemisms in this near century-long catastrophe in the Holy Land.

It is noteworthy that the UN did not designate May 15th as the day of international solidarity, Nakba Day, on which the Palestinians and people around the world remember Israel's declaration of independence and dominion over Palestine.

That would be a day far better suited to express solidarity with the wronged and the oppressed. But, you see, this day is not actually intended to demonstrate solidarity with the Palestinians. Rather, it is to reinforce the concept of the two-state solution.

It behoves us to reflect, then, on the wisdom of this insistence in 2021, and on just how much genuine comradery with the Palestinian people it evidences. With over 600,000 settlements outside the Green Line, complete Israelis' control over water and electricity to the Palestinians, the blockade of Gaza, and the utter dissection of the West Bank - the reality is that there is more contempt than hope, and more derision than solidarity in repeating the two-state mantra to Palestinians today.

Historic Palestine is one state. The occupation is the Israeli government - the entirety of the land is under the control and authority of Israel, but that land's Palestinian population has no citizenship rights, no voice, no representation, no security and no safety.

The longstanding policy of the Israelis to "create facts on the ground" has resulted in this fact - there is only one state on the ground, and it is a brutally oppressive and bigoted one.

Calling for a two-state solution reveals either a delusional denial of existing and irreversible realities, or else the recognition of those realities. Indeed, it is a matter of unjustly fact of a desire to mislead and delude the Palestinians and their supporters around the world in order to prevent them from recognising those realities.

The two-state solution slogan drummed up since the past 20 years has acted as a sort of trance-inducing incantation that instantly blurs the judgment and perception of anyone sympathetic with the Palestinian cause.

It blinds them to not only the incrementally assured impossibility of that outcome but also of how horrendously inhumane, unjust, and unliveable such a state would be, were the Israelis ever to slap the label "state" on the open-air prisons of the Palestinian Territories.

The time is past due for us to acknowledge that those who continue today to call for a two-state solution are not expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people, but with the Israelis.

Solidarity today must mean seeing the daily realities of the Palestinians as they see them, as they experience them, and, except for a select few millionaire politicians in Ramallah, what the Palestinians have gone through and experienced is life under the authoritarian Israeli state. The fact is it is not a temporary military occupation.

Solidarity means demanding that the Israeli government which wields absolute sovereignty over the Palestinian Territories, must treat the Palestinians equally and justly and as citizens of the one existing state.

The Israeli government must give every Palestinian their rights and afford them equal treatment under the law. Solidarity means standing with the Palestinians against apartheid in the state under whose authority they are suffering.

It does not mean rubbing their wounds with lye and telling them it is a balm - which is exactly what we are doing when we encourage a two-state solution that will not, and at this point, should not have happened.

* The writer is founder, Centre for Human Rights Research and Advocacy (CENTHRA)