Vital webinar ‘Israel-Palestine: Who still espouses the two-state solution? Why? What are alternative futures?’
4pm Tuesday 12th March by the Open University Palestine Solidarity Group
Registration link: https://events.teams.
Western politicians have recurrently espoused ‘the two-state solution’ since the 1967 Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, especially now again during Israel’s genocide there. What does this proposal mean? In the late 1960s the Palestine Liberation Organization promoted a single democratic state in all of historic Palestine.
After abandoning this stance, the PLO envisaged an independent Palestinian state with a vibrant economy and military force to protect its borders from Israel. Such a potential future has been rendered ever-more unfeasible. Israel has continuously extended its settler-colonial regime by expanding its illegal settlements, violently displacing Palestinians, stealing their water and constraining their economy. Its brutal colonization agenda has received military, economic and political support from Western governments. This support has helped Israel to fulfil the 1997 manifesto of Netanyahu’s Likud Party: ‘From the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, there shall be Jewish sovereignty’. Indeed, historic Palestine has become a single entity for Jewish Israelis. All these changes have precluded an independent Palestinian state, an essential component of any authentic two-state solution.
Questions: Despite that political reality, why do Western politicians still espouse a ‘two-state solution’? What are possible alternative futures? Who would need to create them?
Co-Chairs: Kristina Hultgren and Les Levidow, Open University
Speakers:
Gilbert Achcar, Professor of Development Studies and International Relations, SOAS, University of London. Before joining SOAS in 2007, he taught and/or researched in various universities and research centres in Beirut, Berlin and Paris. His most recent books include: Perilous Power: The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy, co-authored with Noam Chomsky (2007, 2008); The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (2010); Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism (2013); The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising (2013); and Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising (2016).
Jeff Halper, anthropologist. Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICHAD). Co-founder (with Ilan Pappe & others) of the One Democratic State Campaign (ODSC). His books include: War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification (Pluto, 2015); and Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism, and the Case for One Democratic State(Pluto, 2021).
Adnan Al-Sabah, is a Palestinian solicitor practising law in the UK specialising in civil and administrative and human rights law. He is a legal researcher and writer of legal analysis on Palestinian issues; also a political and rights activist and media commentator on Palestinian affairs. He is a UK coordinator of the One Democratic State Campaign (ODSC) https://onestatecampaign.org/
Background reading:
Gilbert Achcar, Israeli far right’s plans for expulsion and expansion, 12.02.2024, https://mondediplo.com/2023/
Jeff Halper, Israel-Palestine war: Why Biden’s ‘day after’ means two-state apartheid, 15.12.2023,
https://www.middleeasteye.net/
Saree Makdisi, If not two states, then one, 05.12.2012
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/
In the wake of the war in Gaza, is the two-state solution still viable? Foreign Affairs asks the experts, February 2024, https://www.foreignaffairs.
What Comes Next?: A forum on the end of the two-state paradigm, 2013, https://mondoweiss.net/forum-
