By Sonakshi Garg 

Abstract

The Israel – Palestine conflict has been ongoing for the past 77 years, with numerous names and faces perishing into specks of dust and border lines being erased and redrawn like lines in a drawing book. Though human history has witnessed many struggles between groups of nations, this particular West Asian (from India’s standpoint) conflict is different. The bloodshed of the innocent Israelis and Palestinians is a shade darker because it is spilling in a world which claims to be orbiting towards Democracy, Humanity and Togetherness. Therefore, this article aims to unearth the reasons behind the persistence of Neo-Settler Colonialism in the 21^st century, the failure of the fruition of the One-State and Two-State Solution and the contribution of the leaders of the supposedly free world, who are actively entangled and often spin the web of violence, coercion, world politics and destruction. 

Introduction  

The demon king Ravana offered his abductee Sita two choices – marry him and reign forever as his queen or reject his proposal and suffer at the hands of death. To the distressed Sita, neither was in her favour. In both scenarios, she would suffer, in one case mentally and in the other physically. The complexity of human affairs often tangles individuals in conundrums. This leaves them at a crossroads with equal terror and unstableness attached to them. Such a dilemma is one that the Palestinians have been attempting to solve ever since the Six Day War in 1967, like the complication between the decision of a One-State or Two-State Solution with Israel.  

Power Difference  

The table of negotiations between Israel and Palestine has always been tilted towards the former faction. Israel always possessed more soft and hard power as compared to the Palestinians. According to the US News and World Report (2022), Israel is fourth only to the United States, China and Russia in military might and is tenth in ‘Strongest International Alliances’. Additionally, the state has an iron grip over all its borders, including dominating the movement of Palestinians in and out of the Gaza Strip and West Bank. However, on the other side of the spectrum, Palestine is a turf of land which fights for its sovereignty every day. Settlers in Gaza have considered prisoners in the world’s largest open prison since 2007. The territory is heavily dependent on the generosity of humanitarians, and their vital industries like medical services, educational infrastructure and military preparedness are abysmally haphazard, partly because the displacement of Palestinian refugees in states like Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, which make it difficult for nationalistic sentiments to ubiquitously breed in the minds and hearts of the ousted Arabs, making it easier of Israel to exert undue influence.  

Israel also exerts a humongous amount of negotiating and narrative power over the entire conflict because of its existence as a Jewish State, which also makes it an anomaly from other nation–states. In the international arena, the norm is that states recognise other states. However no country has a ‘Right to exist.’ The concept of such a right, surfaced with Israel first, which considers itself to possess the right to exist as a Jewish state. Therefore, the nationality of this region is peculiar because a resident of Israel is not considered to be an Israeli but rather a Jew, which is absurd because a person from India is an Indian, not a Hindu or a person from America is an American, not a Catholic, and so on. Israel has often slyly used this loophole to call Anti-Semitism, whenever someone in the international sphere criticises their policies, thus invoking the devils of the past to fight their present battle. Hence the negotiation between the Arabs and the Jews is not one between equals. Therefore, the possibility of acquiring a fair settlement is extremely low. But Israel can get away with all its tricks and manoeuvres because of the power behind its throne, its Brahmastra, the United States.  

Support of the United States  

The relationship between Israel and America goes back to the Cold War when the United States was trying to balance Soviet influence in the region, which led to the painting of the Arabs as terrorists trying to invade Israel. Since that time, the US has not only pumped funds into the Jewish state but has also had a hand in circulating a narrative in favour of its lone ally in the region. For example, the White House stated that Israeli expansion in the West Bank after the Six–Day War was merely a ‘complicating factor’ in the peace process rather than an illegal, arbitrary or colonialist expansion of Israeli sovereignty. Additionally, the United States requires the West-Asian region to remain stable in its functioning so that oil export is not disturbed. Since Israel is the largest military power in the area, a happy Israel is in the interests of the superpower, and therefore, from the very beginning of the courting period between the states, the US has always conveyed to Israel that ‘whatever you do, we are okay with it’, which has given a tremendous amount of leverage to the Jews. Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe have jointly agreed on the fact that Israel will continue with its atrocities against the Palestinians and act on its whims and fancies, risking its transformation into a pariah state as long as it has the support of America and international backlash against policies will hold no relevance to the state unless it comes from the Western Democracy. Further, the two writers have drawn a parallel between present-day Israel and South African apartheid, which lasted up to the 1990s, solely because of the capitalist aspirations of the United States in Africa, which allowed it to continue treacherous acts, even though the world had progressed past imperialism.  

Two – State Solution  

The International society has always been a strong advocate for the Two–state solution, since 1947 as part of the UN’s Partition Plan for Palestine. It has resurfaced in numerous negotiations and peace efforts. However, even though the solution seems to be the most just in the given situation and has been employed in the past, for instance, with India and Pakistan, the ground reality is more like China and India, where China is slowly starting to settle, civilian–military townships, in the disputed Arunachal Pradesh region, to strengthen its grip over its geographical aspirations. Statistics depict that, after 1967, there existed 89,800 Jewish settlers in the West Bank however, twenty years later, figures released by the Israeli Bureau of Statistics depicted that the population grew almost 40 per cent, and the rise in population cannot be linked to natural birth rate. The Israeli government has managed to increase its settlements in the disputed regions by providing incentives to the largely Ultra–orthodox Jewish community through cheap infrastructure and subsidised resources. The government targets right–wing communities more because they tend to be on the lower end of the income gamut, thus leading to easy transfers, and they have occurrences of high birth – rates and dispensation of religious ideologies within the settlements. Therefore, Ilan Pappe narrates the story, in which he tried to convince his students in England about the similarities between 19th and 20th-century settler – colonialism and the actions undertaken by the Israeli government, which make it extremely difficult for a Two–state solution to take place, because of the ethnic cleansing practised directly and indirectly by the Zionist state.  

One–State Solution  

The One–State solution is a solution which has not seen the light of international discussions, to a large extent, because of the Zionist aspirations to create a Greater Israel, with a dwindling Palestinian population. The fanatic need for this Greater Israel can be said to be the brainchild of Zionism, which shed its religious roots in 1948 and started acquiring more political and nationalistic tendencies. After the Jews got a piece of land to call their own after the Balfour Declaration, the leaders of Israel became very protective of their nationality because of the Holocaust, with many of them experiencing death secondhand. Therefore, keeping the past in mind and facing an existential threat from the surrounding states, the Jews started viewing the Arabs as a threat to their sovereignty, and to mitigate a second Holocaust, leaders started insulating themselves with weapons. This initiated the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. This hypersensitivity and traumatised nationalism led to the creation of a definition of Zionism, which views only the Israelis as having the right to occupy the land, and this has percolated into the current generation of leaders, who employ nationalistic Zionism without knowing its emotional manifestation, and therefore recklessly using its flaws.  

Hence, a true–state solution is an unwanted desire which even the Palestinians have given up on, as the Israeli government is incapable of treating the two nations’ people with equality and justice. A hypothetical scenario in which a One–state solution used to govern the disputed area would entail a strict form of apartheid, with different rules and harsher punishments used to rule the Palestinians. But, if the current conflict is not reeled in and stopped, then Greater Israel can most definitely start to take shape, which is a One–state solution with the wrong dimensions and creativity.  

Conclusion  

Therefore, the situation in the West Asian region can be a novice form of settler colonialism, and the Palestinians can only fight it by standing in solidarity and changing the narrative in their favour. A strong and unified, pro-Palestinian lobby must erupt in the United States, which should be able to show the American capitalists the loss in investing money and emotion in Israel because only then will the US’s weight slide the negotiating table to a more balanced setting. Palestine must also cease to indulge in unilateral acts of terror, as enticing as they can be, like the October 7^th (2023) attack on Israel, as it only gives the Zionist state more ammunition to speed up its geographical and political takeover of Palestinian lands and collect sympathy from the international society. However, this situation should not be viewed as a tug of war between two political entities, a blackhole for foreign exploitation, or an interesting international study rather the millions of broken hearts must be sympathised with, and the ache of the numerous wounds because only then will inhabitants acquire the motivation to patch up this hole in humanity.  

The story of Toba Tek Singh, written by Saadat Hasan Manto, holds extreme relevance to this situation, as it brings into perspective that the common-man who is most affected, does not care for political fighting and egoistic policies, as all they care for is their rightful home, which shelters their spirit. If the West Asian situation does not improve with a human touch, then it will not be long before newspapers carry, millions of Tob Tek Singhs dying of madness on disputed borders.  

Author’s Bio

Sonakshi Garg is a first-year law student at O.P Jindal Global University. She is deeply passionate about History, Sociology, Psychology and Political Science and enjoys inter-dimensional research and writing.  

Image Source: https://www.manchesterhive.com/view/9781526129871/figures/img2.6.jpg