Yannick Giovanni Marshall
Al-Jazeera / July 25, 2024
It would be helpful to clarify what the Palestinians are really being offered as part of this much-lauded solution to the conflict in Israel-Palestine.
Evidence of genocide in Palestine has inspired several prominent onlookers in Western media and academia to offer up “solutions”. This means the resurfacing of the so-called two-state solution, i.e. providing Palestinians with their own nation-state – one that would coexist peacefully with Israel.
It is better to leave it to the Palestinians to discuss their own future. But, for my own edification, it would be helpful to know whether what is being offered in the “two-state solution” is the same old neocolonialism, especially as it seems increasingly possible that this talk of two states may become more than the ruse it is now. That is, more than a distraction created to present Israel and the West as rational, modern actors genuinely committed to the pursuit of “peace in the region” but whose efforts are frustrated by atavistic Palestinian terrorism. A “solution” emerging from the colonists’ goodwill, drawn from the humanitarian breast of those engaged in the extermination campaign.
Imperialism or “international diplomacy” might concoct a thing and call it a state. A state to run alongside the real state. A sidecar nation. A state one part dinner joke, two parts prison warden. The “State of Palestine”, albeit saddled with a more questionable “right to exist”, may indeed feature in the next stage in the evolution of settler-colonialism in Palestine.
But we have seen the births of such “post”-colonies before – colonies being renamed “independent countries” and expected to remain on good behaviour for the benefit and security of their former masters. Is this what is envisioned in the two-state solution? Is the second state to be a second-class state? A Palestine that exists at the enemy’s pleasure and obligated to ensure the security of its enemies? Its elected (or selected) leaders paid off to stem the flow of the displaced (to be renamed “migrants”) still attempting to return to their taken land? Where the settler oppression of “insurgent Arabs” is delegated to the new postcolonial state’s police so that colonial violence can be represented as “political violence”? And explained at lecterns and news desks as the “repressive instincts of a culture prone to authoritarianism”? Where the torture of resistors and beating of protesters is no longer settler-colonialism’s trade but now “yet another failure of democracy in the developing world?” Will the Israeli military leave Gaza like South African police left Soweto during apartheid – and fulfil the promise of a more ethnically representative baton strike?
Is what is being offered to the Palestinians similar to the “independence” of Africans or Latin Americans? Will a new flag be hoisted up only to be speckled with the blood of striking miners and oil-company protesting poets and the victims of civil wars prolonged to keep cobalt at flea market prices? Will this state’s new president and the “departing” colonial governor – or occupation – make a show of a friendly shaking of hands in the hand-off of power? And will the governor pull the new president close and whisper into his ear that he can be assured his family will be flown to Europe or Dubai in case of an uprising or for medical treatment in exchange for control of all ports and a reliable supply of pacified labour?
Will the planned State of Palestine be like the “former” colonies of France whose airspace can be penetrated at will and whose gold and art are held in the coffers of Paris for safekeeping? Will cheap agricultural products and minerals be invited in with one hand but migrants be shot at, turned back and directed to drown at sea or starve in deserts and detention camps with the other? Will the land given to the new independent state be controlled by the families of men who a century ago penned that the native would forever be an unsuitable candidate for self-rule? And who happen to support the “reformed” settler political party now led by their chosen conservative “native” leader smiling wide on his marionette strings? Will the natural resources be “opened up” to Canadian business who return loose change in the form of aid, inventing a national identity of the altruistic society while mourning the “sad story” of the Congo it holds by the collar?
Is this the second state of the two-state solution? Academic decolonization? Rebranding of the colonial stranglehold as a departure from it? A changing of the guard from colonial administration to deputized colonial administration? The postcolonial government nothing but a glorified tour guide for neocolonialism?
If so, it explains why liberals in the West are anxiously clamouring for it, embarrassed that the overt founding violence of settler-colonialism has not yet become the backroom violence of the troubled “postcolonial state” and that Israel, for some reason, has not yet exchanged the thrill of the sjambok and demand for white rule for the normalcy of neocolonialism and a multicultural white power where the planters are now foreign direct investment, the railway barons now development experts, NGO directors and CEOs for green startups. Perhaps the second state will be full of white women building wells in photos with smiling Palestinian children and former colonizers applauding themselves for their charity, where reparations will be said to have already been paid in the form of department stores built atop burned Indigenous cities and the new jobs created in the service industry.
Whatever the second state being proposed, what cannot be fathomed or tabled for discussion is the liberation of the colonized. It is not true that the colonists want peace in any region. If they did, they would not colonize. Any state approved and aided by a colonial power will not have encoded in its design an escape route from racist power. When the colonizer speaks of “freedom” anywhere, anytime, they mean the freedom to do what one wills with the colonized, the freedom of the slave master and the settler and the undisturbed enchaining of their victims.
An awarded emancipation, a handed-off independent state, a signed treaty tends to result in helicopters surveilling neighbourhoods and generations of the colonized made to serve out a life sentence of hard labour on stolen land. It means a forcing into the global underclass and a requirement that you behave well and show gratitude for your independence.
Yannick Giovanni Marshall is an academic and scholar of African Studies
