There are few things the pro-Israel side gets right. But on one point – the Palestinians’ rejection of two states – they’ve been more-or-less correct. For me, and many others, the fundamental injustice of the establishment of the state of Israel – which occurred through massive, deliberate and purposeful ethnic cleansing designed to create a Jewish majority in historic Palestine – meant that Israel never really attained moral legitimacy among Palestinians. As Robert Malley and Hussein Agha write in their new book, Tomorrow Is Yesterday: “deep down, most Palestinians, though ready to accept Israel’s existence, have not accepted its historical legitimacy”, a statement whose veracity I can attest to.
I remember being a 15-year-old in Palestine. I remember being held up at checkpoints in the West Bank, and being unable to visit Jerusalem or Israel because of the color of my ID card, in effect, because of my race. I could see how unjust, how retrograde, the entire basis of Israel was. No amount of German or western guilt over the Holocaust would make me accept the idea that Jewish supremacy in Palestine was somehow desirable, or just. I think that continues to be true for the overwhelming majority of Palestinians. Possibly, for the overwhelming majority of humanity in the post-colonial global south.
