Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Until recently, Zionists liked to say the Israeli/Palestinian fiasco was “insoluble,” and they were saying this well before October 7. “Insoluble.” Some may still say it. This is convenient, because it shunts aside the obvious solution, namely a single, binational state with equal rights for all. So when someone says to you that this particular situation is insoluble, you should know what you’re hearing. What you’re hearing is an excuse. An excuse for an intolerable status quo.

What’s alarming, however, is the moment when this excuse gets dropped – because a “solution” has been found. And when those people, who previously liked to say nothing could be done, finally start doing something because the FOUND a solution, you know it’s nothing good.

Currently Israeli settlers and soldiers are storming cities and towns in the West Bank and, as the whole world witnessed, the IDF reduced Gaza to rubble, its two million inhabitants to utter destitution and murdered at a minimum 70,000 people, at least 20,000 of them children in a slaughter of what can only be described as incomprehensible wickedness. So while this old excuse that the Israeli/Palestinian dispute was “insoluble” long served, and for some still serves, to deny basic justice to millions of Palestinians, more recently Israeli bigwigs have found a solution, and it involves mass displacement of Palestinians and denial not merely of justice but of survival to tens potentially hundreds of thousands of people.

But let’s go back to this old excuse, because ironically, in the long run, it also endangered part of the Jewish Israeli population, namely secular Jews, a group that has so far shown itself to be singularly inept at saving itself from the rapidly accelerating violence of the theocratic fascism practiced by the Likud government. This group, politically completely on the outs, let the “insoluble” excuse deprive them of an ally – Arabs living in greater Israel – which was a big mistake. Because in the long term – and history may surprise us by making that actually not so long – secular Jews living in Israel are an endangered species. Their sparse sympathy for Palestinians, which they exhibit from time to time, is greeted with gunfire and rock-throwing by settlers, who do not distinguish them from what they regard as the........

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