Canada will join the US in opposing statehood for the Palestinian people within the 1967 borders established between Israel and Palestine—the so-called Green Line.
Those borders, previously a basic principle underpinning negotiations, are now up for grabs. And I do mean grabs.
And so the naked truth emerges: Palestine is to be forever relegated to helot status, a Middle East Bantustan whose inhabitants can be alternatively used for cheap labour or expelled from their homes on whim as Israeli mini-colonies continue to be built and expanded. Their land may be taken with impunity, piece by piece by piece.
Palestinians are already under sustained assault by Israeli colonists, with the IDF winking at the latter’s escalating campaign of violence against men, women and children.
“Peace talks,” precisely as intended, have gone nowhere: Benjamin Netanyahu has utterly no interest in them—indeed, has subverted them beyond repair.
To the West and to Israel, its Middle Eastern geopolitical beachhead, Palestinians are expendable, “drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” They have no human rights. Occupied Palestine is a zone of exception, Palestinians having been reduced to what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life,” excluded not only from the comity of nations, but from human society per se. Effectively banished by the world, they can be mistreated and killed without care or consequence.
An egregious double standard is everywhere in evidence. The West does not cavil in the least at the exclusionist notion of a “Jewish state,” and indeed regards all such criticism as “anti-Semitic.” But it recoils in horror at the notion of an exclusionary Palestinian state, regarding that as—you guessed it—“anti-Semitic.”
The sheer chutzpah of ethnic cleansing enthusiast Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s current Minister of Defence complaining about a racially exclusionary Palestinian state is breathtaking. Here he is on Israeli Arabs:
[Lieberman] has called for the bombing of Palestinian commercial centres in revenge for terror attacks inside Israel and suggested that hundreds of thousands of Israeli Arabs should forfeit their citizenship in a land swap, trading West Bank Jewish settlements for Arab areas inside the Jewish state. [emphasis added]
The apotheosis of ethnic politics. A plague on both their miserable, cramped, windowless houses. Lieberman, by the way, is presently visiting Canada as a guest of Stephen Harper.
And so what now?
Two-state solution? It was never in the cards. One-state solution? Whoops—the notion of a secular, non-racist, bi-national state is, once again, so toxic, so “anti-Semitic,” that a minister in Stephen Harper’s government tried to ban an academic conference that merely wanted to discuss it.
Welcome to the no-state solution. A banned people, forever outside looking in, living in perpetual exile in their own land.
The word Untermenschen leaps to mind. I shall no doubt be chided for it. But at this point, ask me if I care.
