The fake promise of a ‘two-state solution’

Palestinians have been here before, and must not take the bait again

They failed to destroy Hamas militarily on the battlefield after four months in which they employed all their weapons, old and new, replenished by US airlift. Now they want to destroy it and its rule in the Gaza Strip through a political ruse: a ‘technocratic’ government led by the Palestinian Authority (PA), including some of its ministers and headed by a US-approved prime minister, to oversee so-called administrative reform and the rebuilding of Gaza after a cease-fire on Israel’s terms.

That is a summary of the plan US Secretary of State Antony Blinken began marketing in his latest tour of the region, which took in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, and the UAE and culminated in a meeting of intelligence chiefs in Cairo to concoct this poisoned dish.

The bait in the trap is for this technocratic government to lay the basis for an independent Palestinian state while completely excluding Hamas and all the other resistance groups that took part in Operation al-Aqsa Flood, the greatest Palestinian military achievement since the Arab-Israeli conflict began 75 years ago.

Bizarrely, the exclusion of Hamas is now being openly touted by the Arab states complicit in this scheme. Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman al-Safadi was quoted as saying “The reconstruction stage means keeping Hamas in its military dimension, and even political its political dimensions away from these files. This also means its exclusion from the administration of the Strip to seek funding for reconstruction projects while avoiding the reservations of Arab and Western states along with the reservations of the US administration.”

In other words, reconstruction is conditioned on the total elimination, both political and military, of Hamas and other resistance factions, especially Islamic Jihad, because they are on Israel’s ‘terrorist’ list which the US and some European countries have adopted. Briefly: no reconstruction so long as Hamas exists.

Is this the Palestinians’ compensation for four months of Israeli ethnic cleansing and genocidal war? The eradication and uprooting of all and any resistance, the West Bank and Gaza put under an Israeli security mandate, restoration of the status quo ante, and total submission to the dictates of Benjamin Netanyahu and his extreme right-wing government — as though the situation before October 7 was ideal in every respect.

Not a word can be found in this Israeli-US plan, which supposedly speaks for the liberal democratic world, about elections or even a referendum to ask what the Palestinian people think after losing nearly 29,000 martyrs, 100,000 injured, and 86% of their homes in the Gaza Strip. It’s as though these people are juveniles who have not reached maturity, and need others to determine their fate and decide how their lives are run, how they are governed, and how to dress.
The main objectives of Blinken and his demented boss are as follows:

— To disarm the Palestinian resistance in the Gaza Strip, especially Hamas and Islamic Jihad, under the pretext of bringing calm, preventing an invasion of Rafah and avoiding more major massacres, and enabling reconstruction.

— Comprehensive Israel-Arab normalisation — the jewel in the crown being Israeli-Saudi normalisation — in the fake guise of initiating steps towards a two-state solution.

— The Gaza Strip, West Bank, and the entire Palestinian people must renounce anything related to resistance and accept US-Israeli dictates, including a technocratic government featuring a group of Western-oriented and -affiliated ‘talents.’

— Continuing the expulsion process using wilier means, in order to depopulate the Gaza Strip as a prelude to full Israeli occupation and seizure of its offshore oil and gas resources.

The PA ‘reform’ under discussion means taking away the representative status of the Palestinian resistance, abandoning forever any thought of military action to liberate the land, and reverting to the ‘peaceful popular resistance’ rhetorically espoused by Mahmoud Abbas’ PA that reduced us to our current state of humiliation, colonisation, and subjugation.

Those with failing memories should be reminded that we’ve been there before, in every detail. They brought us Dr. Salam Fayyad as a prime minister tasked with building the infrastructure for a Palestinian state that would be established within two years. Twenty years later, we are still waiting for that state and for the US to deliver on its promises in that regard. We were rewarded for this submissiveness with the settling of 800,000 colonists in the West Bank with US encouragement.

Hamas must beware not to fall into this trap by abandoning its legitimate demands for a full Israeli withdrawal and permanent ceasefire, or by succumbing to pressure from the Arab middlemen. It is a Zionist trap in conception and formulation that Arab states beholden to the US are helping to set. Some of them have been paid their fee in advance.

Israel is in crisis, and the Americans and some of their Arab clients are trying to save it after the al-Aqsa Flood undermined the very foundations of its existence.

The Palestinian people in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and in exile do not want a ‘technocratic’ government or the lie of a two-state solution. They want self-determination and a genuinely independent state that achieves their demands for sovereignty and returns to all their national territory, like all other peoples that fought colonialism and were victorious.

The US administration, which has yet to utter the word ‘ceasefire’, is no honest broker. It aims to rescue Israel, not the Palestinian people, and to extricate it from its predicament, prevent it from unravelling or collapsing, and halt the countdown in that direction.

The fake promise of a ‘two-state solution’