ISRAEL has been wrong for so long that it thinks it is right. A thousand lies of the same kind later, Tel Aviv has finally made it public: Israel would never allow the Palestinians to have a state of their own.
Ironically, Defence Minister Benny Gantz chose to make the announcement on Sunday in Germany, the land of the Jewish Holocaust. The erasure of the Palestinians by the Zionists has come full circle. There was something else odd about the place and time of the disclosure. Gantz was fresh out of Bahrain, where he met the people who mattered.
And on stage with him at the Munich Security Conference, the venue of the announcement, was an Emirati diplomat and a Bahraini under-secretary.
Was Gantz trying to embarrass them or was all this part of a well-crafted Zionist message? We will not speculate. Only in a world of speculation does everything remain a possibility.
So what will the Palestinians have, if not a state? "Entity" was Gantz's word of choice. "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," The Jerusalem Post quotes him as saying. Palestinian sovereignty and yet an entity? A Goliath with security needs? Word games are as old as Israel. Gantz's English vocabulary is good, but he wants to give the pretence that he is not adept at using it.
Or is he playing the dirty old Zionist game? How could Israel, which is already a state, be part of a "two-entity" solution? Is it a Freudian slip, an admission by Gantz that Israel is built on stolen Palestine land? Or is it a Zionist trickery that gives the world the impression that Palestine and Israel are equal? All of the above, we have to say.
A deluded nation is often a manufacturer of illusions. Tel Aviv, being inundated with the label of apartheid of late, had to find the appropriate words to create the necessary illusion. Appropriation of space requires the appropriation of language and so Gantz got caught up in his own web of words.
He wasn't the only one flummoxed. According to the Israeli newspaper, a stunned moderator, Souad Mekhennet, asked: "Did you say a two-state solution is possible?" Mekhennet is no ordinary wordsmith, having been the security correspondent for The Washington Post for a time. Gantz was not going to allow anyone to go away with the idea that he was talking about a Palestinian state.
Correcting Mekhennet, he made it clear that he had chosen to speak of two entities and not two states, by way of underscoring his rejection of an Israel returning to the pre-1967 lines.
Never mind if Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories are illegal under international law. Never mind, too, that the international discourse is centred on two states and not entities. "I hope that one day we can create a new reality... to take the realities on the ground (into account)." And by that Gantz means, as the Zionists have always meant, a fully colonised Palestine.
The new reality of apartheid. Now that the Zionists have made their ambition for Greater Israel public, of all places in Germany, will the West put an end to the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians or will it be complicit?
The question has long ago answered itself.
