Palestine is being shredded to pieces and the European Union is responding with platitudes.
Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s overtly fascist finance minister, is reviving the E-1 project that will ramp up the colonization in the area linking East Jerusalem with the remainder of the West Bank. Smotrich makes no secret that his plan is to bury the prospect of a Palestinian state.
He is doing so at a time when various Western countries are moving toward recognizing something known as the state of Palestine.
The suffocation of Palestinian communities which Smotrich is pushing in the West Bank shouldn’t be viewed separately from how he has boasted of extinguishing all hope for people in Gaza.
He and other government ministers have eviscerated the entire corpus of international law which came into effect following the Holocaust. UN conventions outlawing land theft and establishing the necessity of preventing and punishing genocide were introduced during the second half of the 1940s.
Rather than holding Israel accountable, Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief, has issued a bland call for Israel to “desist” from taking the E-1 decision forward. The appeal is based on “the need to consider action to protect the viability of the two-state solution.”
If Kallas really believes such claptrap, then she needs to consult a few maps. The simple reality is that Israel’s relentless gobbling of Palestinian land has meant that the two-state solution has long been unviable.
The EU’s devotion to the two-state solution may bear the hallmarks of a fantasy. But the actual policy being pursued is a fallacy.
By repeating the term “two-state solution” like it is a mantra of common sense, Brussels insiders would like to hoodwink the public into thinking they are working for peace against all the odds.
Yet the two-state solution has always been about perpetuating apartheid. It is a supposedly liberal recipe for preserving Israel as a state wedded to Jewish supremacy, while confining Palestinians to a sliver of their historic homeland. (more...)
How von der Leyen embraced Israel’s settler movement
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