During a panel discussion at the Doha Forum 2024, the Foreign Minister of Norway, Espen Barth Eide, asserted that the solution to the Palestine question does not lie “in the continuation of the occupation” or “in the process of annexing lands”. The only way to ensure peace and coexistence in the Middle East, he said, was the establishment of an “integrated Palestinian State” that includes “the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and relevant parts from Jerusalem as enshrined in Oslo Accord”.

However, there is good reason to believe that Israel has other ideas on the matter. In January, just as Israel’s campaign of shock and awe was reaching apocalyptic proportions, Israel’s Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir had asked Jewish settlers to return to Gaza after the war. He told them: “If we don’t want another October 7, we need to return home and control the land.”

Less than 10 months later, in October a two-day conference titled “Preparing to Resettle Gaza” was organised on the border of Gaza by members of Netanyahu’s Likud party and Nahala, a group whose members see themselves as the redeemers of the Biblical “Promised Land”.

At the event, Ben-Gvir warned Palestinians: “The land of Israel is ours...leave to other countries” because it is “the best and most moral solution”.

The next month, at a press conference on November 5, the commander of the Israel Defense Force’s 162nd Division, Brigadier Gen Itzik Cohen, announced that his troops were getting closer to “the complete evacuation” of northern Gaza and that residents would not be allowed to return home.

The Israeli Defense Forces tried to downplay the commander’s comments, claiming they did not “reflect the IDF’s objectives and values”. However, Cohen’s statement is borne out by facts on the ground that Israel has been creating since October 7, 2023.

In addition, another Israeli officer is reported to have said that he had spent more than two months demolishing houses to clear the ground for a series of big military bases in Gaza’s Netzarim corridor, a military zone between the Mediterranean coast and Gaza’s eastern perimeter fence.

As if this was not enough, the Zionist state is about to pump in $11 million to double the population in the Golan Heights, a region it conquered from Syria in 1967 and annexed in 1981. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said, “Strengthening the Golan Heights is strengthening the State of Israel....We will continue to hold on to it, make it flourish and settle it.”

Play

A brief history

Those not conversant with the history of Zionism could perhaps believe that the angry talk of driving the Palestinians out of Gaza is a reaction to the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, that killed 1,250 Israelis and foreign nationals. But Israel’s decision to depopulate the occupied territories did not begin after October 7.

In December 2022, 10 months before the Hamas attack, Netanyahu had dismissed the right of the Palestinians to establish their independent state by declaring that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel”, and therefore, his government “will promote and develop settlements in ... the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea, and Samaria”.

Then, at the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, 2023, shortly before the Hamas attack, Netanyahu mocked UN resolutions that support an independent Palestine by showing a map of Israel, which included all Palestinian territories, including Gaza and the West Bank. No wonder, Israeli historian Adam Raz believes that “Netanyahu is the number one opponent of a two-state solution”.

In pursuance of Netanyahu’s ambitions, Israel’s parliament on July 17 had overwhelmingly passed a resolution stating that it “firmly opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state west of Jordan” because it would “pose an existential danger to the State of Israel” and “destabilise the region”.

In October, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich described repeated attempts to reach a two-state solution as wrongheaded. He said there should be an “unequivocal Israeli statement to the Arabs and the entire world that a Palestinian state will not be established”.

Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, agreed with Smotrich. He said that Israel must abandon any policy based on concessions and “put up a political iron wall” against international efforts for a two-state solution.

Indeed the aim of political Zionism, as announced in 1897 by the First Zionist Congress held in Basle, has always been the establishment “for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine”. By this, the convener of the First Zionist Congress and founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, meant “the restoration of the Jewish State” in Palestine.

As the First Congress was held 50 years before the UN partitioned the region into Jewish and Arab states, the Palestine it refers to is the historic undivided country that was part of the Ottoman Empire. However, it would appear from Herzl’s 1902 novel, Altneuland (the Old New Land of Palestine), that he sought to establish Zionist sovereignty over the entire territory of Palestine not through violence but by fooling the Arabs into believing that Zionists were not land-robbers but saintly benefactors who would create a veritable Shangri-La in Palestine.

When the Palestinians refused to be taken in by Herzl’s paradisiacal inveiglement, the Zionists who came after him first influenced the British into issuing the Balfour Declaration in 1917 supporting the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.

Pro-Zionist historian Benny Morris writes in his book Righteous Victims that representatives of the Zionists at their first formal post-Balfour gathering in December 1918 resolved by a vote of 55 to 1 that the Zionist movement intended to establish not a “national home” but a “medina ivrif” or a Jewish state.

To achieve this, the World Zionist Organisation manipulated the British into acquiring a Mandate over Palestine from the League of Nations in 1922.

The Mandate, which lasted till the creation of Israel in 1948, in blatant violation of the letter and spirit of Article 22 of the League of Nations, authorised the British government “to place the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as would secure the establishment of the Jewish national home”.

This facilitated the immigration of Jews into Palestine at the expense of the original inhabitants, Palestinian Arabs, who at the time of the Mandate constituted 92% of the population. In 1922, when the Mandate came into effect, the Jewish population stood at 83,794. In 1946 – a year before the UN partitioned Palestine – the Jewish population had increased to 608,230 out of a total population of 1,972,560.

By the end of 1949, Israel had captured more than half the territory reserved for the Arab state. In exact terms, the Jewish state increased its UN-given territory from 14,500 sq km to 20,850 sq km – almost 80% of the territory of Palestine.

Guileful pragmatism

These undeniable facts prove that the Zionists’ acceptance of the UN Partition resolution in 1947 was in reality an act of guileful pragmatism. Confirming this, Benny Morris writes in Righteous Victims that Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann and its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, pressed for a solution based on partition because both saw it as “a stepping stone to further expansion and the eventual takeover of the whole of Palestine”.

Weizmann had argued: “The Jews would be fools not to accept it, even if [the land they were allocated] were the size of a table cloth.”

Ben-Gurion was more explicit. A “Jewish state in part [of Palestine] is not an end, but a beginning,” he wrote. “Our possession is important not only for itself... through this we increase our power, and every increase in power facilitates getting hold of the country in its entirety. Establishing a [small] state . . . will serve as a very potent lever in our historical efforts to redeem the whole country.”

US-Israel symbiosis

Thanks to its incremental occupation over the past 75 years, the Zionist state is now on the verge of realising its original aim of annexing the whole of Palestine. Sensing this, 46 UN experts had warned on July 26, 2023, two months before the October 7 attack, that “a concrete effort may be under way to annex the entire occupied Palestinian territory in violation of international law”.

In June 2020, another group of 47 UN experts had stated: “We express great regret about the role of the United States of America in supporting and encouraging Israel’s unlawful plans for the further annexation of occupied territory.”

This makes it obvious that the United States is the only country that could stop the impending capture of all the land allocated by the UN for an independent Palestinian state. But in a display of complete apathy towards the Palestinians’ right to life and sovereignty over their own land, the Biden administration has been doing very little besides watching Israel commit one of the worst massacres in modern history in the name of “the right to self-defence”.

Indeed, when the International Criminal Court on November 21 issued warrants of arrest for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant “for crimes against humanity and war crimes”, President Joe Biden lost no time in describing the warrants as “outrageous” and vowed to “always stand with Israel against threats to its security”.

No wonder over the last year the US has vetoed several UN resolutions demanding a ceasefire in Gaza forcing at least 12 Biden administration officials to resign and issue a statement accusing the US government of clinging to a “failed policy” that has not only been devastating for the Palestinians but has “deeply undermined” US credibility worldwide “at a time we need it most”.

If the nominations of Mike Huckabee as the next US ambassador to Israel and Pete Hegseth as the new secretary of defense are any indication, President-elect Donald Trump’s West Asia policy is likely to be more pro-Israel than Biden’s. Huckabee is of the view that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian”, and “no such thing as an occupation”. Hegseth is known for his dictum: “If you love America, you should love Israel.”

To make matters worse, Israel’s next ambassador to Washington, Yechiel Leiter, is also a hardliner who believes in his country’s ultimate sovereignty over the West Bank.

This seemingly baffling symbiosis between the world's oldest democracy and an identitarian state pretending to be a democracy is based on two dogmatic presuppositions. One, Israel is an indispensable US ally in West Asia; two, the Jewish state is entitled to its ideological aspirations that are rooted in biblical misinterpretations.

It was the first assumption that in 2013 made Biden when he was vice president assure the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that Washington’s deep commitment to the security of Israel is also “a strategic commitment” because it is “in our naked self-interest, beyond the moral imperative”.

Ten years later, Biden offered a glimpse of the second assumption when he identified himself as a non-Jewish Zionist, and invoked Ben-Gurion’s expansionist fantasy to state that Israel and the US have been working together “so that the dream of generations will be fulfilled”.

Not surprisingly, Israeli leaders have made the most of such pro-Zionist expressions by American politicians. During his address to the US Congress on July 24, Netanyahu sought to convince Americans that “our enemies are your enemies, our fight is your fight, and our victory will be your victory”.

The standing ovation he received during his speech indicates the extent to which American politicians and lawmakers have bought into the Israeli narrative.

The way forward

The US must understand that its unconditional support for Israeli irredentism – in “naked self-interest” – despite its atrocious acts of commission and omission against civilians in Gaza and Lebanon is a violation of American and human values.

As noted above, the founders of the Zionist state openly admitted that “the Land of Israel” did not belong to them. Yet the Palestinians, to whom the land belonged, had long ago accepted Israel’s right to exist in the territory given to them by the UN even though they considered the Partition resolution illegal. Despite this, they are not being allowed to establish their independent state on the remaining land.

This gross injustice defies a remedy because the US is unwilling to question and stop the Zionist state’s invocation of mythic theology to subjugate, dispossess, starve and now obliterate Palestinians.

We know from history that violent hatred does not bring peace or security. Israel must realise that just as it has the right to exist an independent Palestinian state too has the right to exist.

A perpetual war against the Palestinians would only sustain violent movements such as Hamas. The only way, therefore, of ensuring the dissolution of Palestinian resistance is to give them the independent state they deserve. Trump is in a unique position in history to emphatically deliver this message to Israel for permanent peace in West Asia.

A Faizur Rahman is Secretary-General of the Islamic Forum for the Promotion of Moderate Thought. He can be reached at themoderates2020@gmail.com and on X at @FaizEngineer.