I read Johnathan Cook journalist
This is his take on Isreal Palestine. Worth a read.
One final, horrifying subtext to Miliband’s speech announcing a trade ban on the settlements should not go unremarked.
In desperately trying to keep alive the West’s two-state solution, Burnham’s government is not just ignoring reality: the fact that there is no partner in Israel – electable or otherwise – to implement such a vision.
Burnham and Miliband are also insisting, in the entirely improbable event that a Palestinian state can be extracted from Israel, that the Palestinian people should be required to make peace with an unrepentant, heavily militarised, racist state that has recently committed genocide in Gaza.
None of the 11 states that joined the UK this week in sanctioning the settlements can apparently imagine Palestinians ever living in anything more than a small, demilitarised, economically dependent pseudo-state, with no real choice over its leaders, or control over its borders and economy.
Similarly, there is no suggestion that a neighbouring, territorially reduced Israeli state would need to be reformed ideologically, or made to engage in any kind of truth and reconciliation process, or face sanctions until it sees the error of its genocidal ways.
The Jewish supremacist ideology of Zionism, the dehumanising logic of the Israeli settler-colonial mindset, and the religious fundamentalism of large swaths of the Israeli population - all critical to the rationalisation of the Gaza genocide - would remain unchallenged.
On this view, it seems, long-established impulses towards apartheid and genocide would simply evaporate, even as the West continues to indulge Israel’s every whim.
This isn’t a recipe for peace, even of the flawed kind. It is a demand that the Palestinian lamb continue to dwell with the Israeli wolf.
The truth that Burnham’s government refuses to face, as with every government before it, is that peace won’t magically arrive with Palestinian statehood. A Palestinian state – or, more likely, a single state embracing Palestinians and Israeli Jews – can emerge only when Israel has been dismantled as a heavily armed settler-colonial state, as happened with apartheid South Africa.
Israeli society will need to be re-educated through a painful truth and reconciliation process, as also happened in apartheid South Africa. Israelis will have to be made to confront the facts about a century of atrocities committed against the native Palestinian people.
Britain is not contemplating doing any of this – because the threads from unravelling the crimes of Israel and the Zionist movement would lead straight to the door of 10 Downing Street and other western powers.
This is an extract from my latest article. Read more here: www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/milibands-settlement-trade-ban-cosmetic-work-must-sanction-israel