Finally, a ‘Solution’: Confronting the Source of Injustice in Palestine

By Jeremy Salt

What sane, balanced person wouldn’t want that? As the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’, how could Israel object to such a just, democratic solution?

The time has obviously come for some fresh thinking on the question of Palestine. Actually it’s the question of Israel, if we are to locate what is often incorrectly called ‘the Palestine problem’ at its true source. After all, there wasn’t a Palestine problem beyond the normal range until the Zionists turned up.

For nearly 80 years, Israel has demonstrated its opposition to any solution consistent with law, morality, and justice. The reason is not hard to understand. If these principles were applied, there could not be an Israel.

Its own solutions are criminal, yet it is enraged at criticism. Its envoy at the UN tears up the charter on the podium and says outright that the UN should be destroyed. Why Israel is allowed to remain a member of an organization it hates and constantly undermines is only part of the indulgence of this lawless state.

It’s not just the UN, of course, but the entire foundations of ‘the

rules-based international order’ that Israel is collapsing, with the support of those who profess to uphold it.

Genocide is the worst crime that can be committed under international law, but no ‘civilized’ government is lifting a finger to stop it, except Yemen, which the ‘civilized’ genocide-supporting ‘west’ hardly regards as civilized. For opposing genocide, Yemen is being bombed by the US and the UK. Hundreds of air attacks have been launched, with civilians virtually the only victims.

About 50 aid trucks are presently lined up at the Gaza fence, on both the Egyptian and the occupied Palestinian side. They can’t reach the starving Palestinians because Israel won’t let them through. Most of the food will have passed its use-by date by now, as the Israelis will have calculated.

Cutting off all possibilities of food and medical supplies being delivered to the Palestinians, Israel has just bombed an aid ship off Malta. ‘Accused’ of bombing it, says the media, as if someone else might have done it.

Children are dying of starvation in Gaza. Thousands are so severely undernourished that they are under care in the partly functional hospitals Israel has not completely destroyed. Starvation is Israeli government policy, supplementing the mass murder of civilians, but watching governments still remain unmoved.

They seem to agree with Israel that the solution to ‘the Palestine problem’ is to punish the victim, not the perpetrator. Thus encouraged, Israel is now planning the complete occupation/annexation of Gaza in an operation called Gideon’s Chariots, based on the biblical defeat of the Midianite hosts by a few hundred Hebrew heroes. The choice might, more than anything, reflect serious manpower problems and the refusal of many reserve soldiers to return to Gaza.

First, the land will have to be completely cleared of its population, which will be done by raising the level of terror even higher, if that can be imagined, and herding all the Palestinians into the south. Then Israel will bomb the Rafah border gate, so they will pour into Sinai to save their lives and the lives of their children. This is the infernal solution in the minds of the criminals occupying Palestine.

The stench of the Gaza genocide is also the stench of corruption in the governments that are allowing it. Through its lobbyists and wealthy, well-placed supporters, Israel has penetrated parliaments, universities, the media, and political parties, rotting them from the inside.

It is not remotely possible that the politicians cannot see what is right in front of their eyes. These are the worst atrocities in modern history, repeated day after day and incrementally lifted to even higher levels of calculated cruelty.

The inhumanity of the Israeli government and military, and – to a large extent – the people, should be a flashing red light to the entire world. This is a deranged society, born of a deranged ideology.

If Israel can get away with genocide, it can get away with anything, yet instead of taking a principled stand, the politicians and the media cover for Israel. They lie for it, they suck up to it, they hide its crimes or deny them.

Of course, Israel should never have been created in the first place, at least not in Palestine. If Jews were to be compensated for a genocide committed by Germans, not Palestinians, why not give them Bavaria, about the same size as Palestine, agriculturally rich and a fine piece of real estate, as Donald Trump would say?

Alternatively, as the UK and the US were so strong in their support of Zionism, why not a Jewish homeland somewhere in their midst?

Of course, the reality is that they had enough Jews and didn’t want more. That was the message Balfour sent out in 1905 when sponsoring the Aliens Act, whose precise purpose was to stop Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms in eastern Europe from entering the UK.

That was the precise reason for the shifting and shuffling at the Evian conference in 1938, convened to find a place for Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.

The delegates failed to agree on anything except forming a committee. The richest countries in the world refused to take in more than a small number of refugees. The Australian delegate remarked that “as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one.”

There was no “real racial problem” in Australia because white settlers had reduced the ‘first people’ on the land to remnant communities and because the ‘white Australia’ pigmentation policy, in place since 1901, forbade the entry of anyone with a black or brown skin.

The only country that opened its doors wide to Jewish refugees was one of the poorest in the world, the Dominican Republic. Costa Rica followed to a limited degree, but only because its dictator, Rafael Trujillo, wanted to whiten the population.

What the reluctance to take in persecuted European Jews exposed was the private anti-semitism hidden by public philo-Semitism.

“Generally speaking you can’t trust the Jews,” Richard Nixon said in private, along with pejorative references to “kikes” and “rich Jews”, yet only Lyndon Johnson before him was more fulsome in his praise of Israel, backed up by a steady flow of money and arms and feigned ignorance of Israel’s atomic weapons.

Anti-semitism is deeply ingrained in ‘western’ civilization, of course. Jews were useful to kings and princes as moneylenders, and in modern times, they remain an indispensable source of finance for political parties. The Zionists among them use their money to put politicians in parliament or to drive them out, in the interests of Israel, not the country in which they live.

They fund universities and under the lie of ‘anti-semitism’ are currently using their cash and connections to drive out anyone critical of Israel, from students up through professors to provosts and presidents. In the US, encouraged by open-ended support from Trump, they are more openly aggressive than ever before.

At some point, someone has to say ‘enough.’ They should have said it before, long before October 8, 2023, but even now, with children being deliberately starved to death, the politicians are still behaving like paralyzed mice, not twitching a whisker in the face of the vilest crimes.

Fresh thinking requires attention to the requisites of a solution that accords with justice and the law, not the deformed versions of both that characterize Israeli society. To begin with, justice and the law would be served by allocating to the Israelis the 5–6 percent of land their forebears actually bought in various parts of Palestine, while returning the stolen 95 percent to its owners.

The 5–6 percent could be compressed into one composite block, with Tel Aviv as its capital. A tight squeeze for six million people, but possibly they could be given 10 percent as a goodwill gesture, the Palestinians being a generous people.

As they themselves have squeezed the Palestinians into shrinking pieces of land over nearly 80 years, they could hardly complain about unfair treatment and they could always turn to the Palestinians for advice on how to manage.

Anyone not happy with this arrangement could emigrate to one of the countries that would have them, or have them at a price, which is the future for the Palestinians, Israel is trying to negotiate right now.

While the final settlement in accordance with the precepts of law and justice is being worked out, a large portion of the settler state would have to be set aside so the Palestinians of Gaza will have somewhere to live. As Israel destroyed their homes, Israel will have to find space for them.

The coast all the way up to Tel Aviv would probably be sufficient. The Israeli Jewish population would have to be transferred, but having settled there once, it will know how to settle somewhere else. Once again, the land having been cleared of its Palestinian population so European settlers could take their place, accusations of unfair treatment would ring a bit hollow.

Once a final agreement is worked out, the Palestinians will again be free to live wherever they want. The same will be true of the Israelis, within the 5–6 percent they actually bought, along with the extra four percent they might get.

Of course, compensation will have to be part of the deal. The Israelis will have to pay for all the property they have destroyed since 1948. The exploitation of stolen agricultural lands will have to be taken into account, as well as personal restitution for the loss of life and suffering of the Palestinian people.

Stolen buildings will have to be returned, which would account for the finest structures in Jerusalem and many other cities. Government ministers and senior bureaucrats squatting in Palestinian-owned mansions with their families will have to be turned out onto the streets, just as their forebears turned the owners of these houses and their families onto the streets long ago. They could hardly say “How dare you!” and there will always be space for them somewhere around Tel Aviv.

Such a settlement would return law, morality, and justice to a lawless, immoral, and unjust situation. There will be unavoidable costs, of course, but no genuine peace comes without a price.

With almost 80 years of interest added to the value of stolen or destroyed property, compensation would add up to hundreds of billions of dollars. The Israelis could never pay it by themselves, but as they have never paid for anything by themselves, they should be okay.

If these principles of law, justice, human rights, and equity are applied, a final settlement in line with the foundational principles of ‘western civilization’ will be within reach. What sane, balanced person wouldn’t want that? As the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’, how could Israel object to such a just, democratic solution?

– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.

The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.