I write this on 6th November, a bleak day on which it has just become apparent that Trump is to be back in the White House. Trump and his crazy cronies will see that the lunatics are in charge of the madhouse.  The resurrection of the Trump- Netanyahu duo spells doom for any ceasefire or modest step towards peace in the Middle East. Continuation of the drive to wider war is more likely.

Only Trump’s reluctance to bear the cost of war with Iran may save us, but can he restrain the fanatical Israeli government?

Although Trump rarely talks anything but drivel, millions of American simpletons swallow it and Keir Starmer, for reasons of realpolitik, choose not to question Trump’s  meagre intelligence and his dubious honesty, instead leading the parade of sychophants.

Back in power, we can expect the orange man-baby to lash out in all directions, wreaking vengeance and making up for the past four years out of office.

What might he do about the Middle East?  Nothing useful, we can be sure.

Grasping at straws for a route to peace in the Middle East, there is renewed talk of a two-state solution for the 80-year Israel/Palestine conflict.

 

It has to be understood that Israel’s principal foreign policy objective has long been to render a two-state solution physically and politically impossible. In this endeavour, Israel has had the docile backing of the USA and UK, although both governments continue hypocritically bleating the two-state mantra as if it were a live possibility, which they have not helped to kill.

The closest the international community has ever come to a solution to the conflict is to partition the old Palestine mandate territory into two states, Israel taking 78 per cent of the land and Palestine having 22 per cent, roughly proportionate to the respective populations.

This would give Israel the lion’s share of the territory and the Palestinians would have only one-fifth of their original country.

Jerusalem would be divided into a western half, the Jewish capital and the eastern half, the Palestinian capital.

The Zionists, with whom we can equate   successive Israeli governments, never accepted this plan, because they have always wanted the whole of historic Israel/Palestine, deploying the idiotic myth that the Jews were given the land by God. In this crazy notion, they are backed by the biblical fundamentalists of the mighty American evangelical lobby, which few US politicians dare to challenge, as it represents about 25 per cent of the population and a high proportion of the nation’s wealth.

 

The Two-State Solution was formally rejected by the Knesset in July 2024. Netenyahu will share nothing. He wants the whole of it and more.                    

 

For their part, the Palestinians, since the 1967 war, through their representative organisation, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), recognising Israel’s superior power, when pressed, have conceded that some form of partition arrangement might be considered. But this is not the position of Hamas and Hezbollah.

In 2012, Palestine was admitted to the UN  as a non-member observer state and by 2024, 145 of the UN’s 193 members, not including the USA and UK, had recognised Palestine as a sovereign state.

In 2024, the House of Commons voted in favour of recognition of Palestine as a sovereign state, seeing this as a move towards the two-state solution. At that time David Lammy, then Opposition Shadow Foreign Secretary said a labour government would formally recognise Palestine, if elected at the next General election, due before the end of 2024. The new Labour government has yet to make such a move and would not do so without the permission of Washington and a Trumpite Washington would not wish to upset Netanyahu’s mobsters and their mates back in America..

The reality on the ground is that, in defiance of UN resolutions and international law, and with the connivance of the US and UK, Israel has ensured that a sovereign Palestine would be a nation without a territory.

The war in Gaza since October 2023 has been a genocidal war, in which Israel has  aimed at clearing the territory of all Palestinians by rendering the territory uninhabitable and by the  starvation and bombardment of the population. The world has seen nothing so horrendous since the Holocaust of WW2.

While the Holocaust was taking place, the world stood by and did nothing.

The Allies could have bombed the gas chambers. They could have destroyed the rail tracks leading to the concentration camps. They put their strategic objectives before saving the Jews of Europe.

Genocide is now taking place in the Middle East and the same allied nations, far from acting to prevent it, are conniving in it.

By supplying armaments, Britain has been complicit in Israel’s war crimes. There have been occasional mild comments from Washington on the suffering of the Palestinians, which have been ignored by Israel, as usual.

Keir Starmer has disregarded the nation-wide weekly demonstrations in support of the Palestinians. He has persistently spoken of Israel’s right of self-defence, presumably including the IDF’s policy of “pre-emptive defence” (surely the oxymoron of the century)

 

There are more than 200 illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem with a population of over 700,000 Jewish settlers, heavily armed, belligerent and protected, aided and abetted  by the IDF. This putative Palestinian territory is intersected by Jewish-only roads, with IDF checkpoints. There are closed military areas, seven national parks and five nature reserves, all under the control of the Israeli government’s Nature and Parks Authority. The whole West Bank is hemmed in by the 700 kilometre separation barrier consisting of multi-layered fencing, including razor- wire,  and  sections of concrete wall, 3 metres thick and 9 metres tall.

The UN has declared the barrier an infringement of international law.

From the pre-WW2 period to the post-war period, the idea of a national home for Jewish people went through various forms.

In 1945, Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary, told the Commons that the Labour government remained committed to a 1939 White Paper which limited at 75,000 the number of new Jewish immigrants into the British Palestine  Mandate.

At he end of WW2 there were between 7 and 11 million stateless and displaced persons (DPs) in various parts of Europe. The United States admitted many, mainly Jews and there was great pressure in the DP camps for admission to Israel. At the 1945 Labour Party conference, a resolution was passed calling for the establishment of a Jewish state in Israel and the transfer of the Arab population “to other Arabian territory”. Sympathy for the survivors of the Holocaust and arrogance bred of imperial power lay behind this astonishing contempt for the Palestinians.

On the international scene there was much misplaced optimism that, with the ending of the British Mandate, Jews and Arabs could live together, as they had done, more or less peaceably for centuries, with equal rights of citizenship and religious freedom.

Illusions that such a prospect was possible soon vanished with paramilitary Jewish groups forcing the exodus of hundreds of thousands of  Palestinians for surrounding Arab states, whilst waging war on the British in order to bring a swift end to the colonial Mandate. At the same time, Jews were being expelled from most Arab and Muslim states.

In the 1967 six-day war, Israel stole territory from Lebanon and Syria, drove out the Arab population and occupied it.

The war of 2023-4   will see further territorial gains in Lebanon, Syria,Gaza and the West Bank, further consolidating the Zionists’ vision of a Greater Israel.

Since its foundation, Israel has welcomed many thousands of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union and the USA. Less welcome were much smaller numbers of black Jews from various parts of Africa, who have experienced racial discrimination.

Given a hypothetical two-state solution, what would be the borders of Israel? We know that Netanyahu has resurrected the concept of a Greater Israel as first mooted by Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism. Netanyahu wants all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. That would entail stealing from Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, swallowing the whole of Jordan and the whole of Gaza and the West bank.

This inflated Israel would presumably retain its present constitution, with its Right of Return Law, which seeks to re-unite the Jewish diaspora, dating from the Roman Empire’s expulsion of the Jews 2,000 years ago.

The Law states that a Jew anywhere in the world has the right to become a citizen of Israel, while those Palestinians who were born there and have been forced into exile, have no right of return. The grotesque unfairness of this would pass over the heads of the demagogues who rule Israel.

Until Israel forgoes its Law of Return, there can be no two-state solution.

Israel’s inclusion in the Eurovision Song Contest and its wish to be in UEFA are symptoms of its desire to be a part of the western world, regardless of the fact that it is in Asia.  Until Israelis fully understand that they are living in the Middle East, surrounded by Arab neighbours and with a substantial Palestinian  domestic population, they will continue to live in a make-believe world, a pariah state, whose artificial existence is protected so long as it is a willing proxy for the USA in its machinations in the oil-rich Middle East.

Since its foundation, Israel has tried to  erase the Palestinian presence in its midst. The 1948 Nakba was an unsuccessful attempt to expel all of them. The 1967 war was another failed attempt.

It was hoped that he mass infiltration of armed, hate-filled settlers would drive out the Palestinians. October 2023 has been the excuse for the latest bout of exterminatory ethnic cleansing.

But the resilience of the Palestinians in the face of repeated pogroms has proved as great as that of the Jews themselves.

All that Israel has achieved is the creation of such mutual hatred that coexistence looks impossible.

Sooner or later the problem will have to be resolved.

The first essential step will have to be taken  by the UN. With the full cooperation of the USA and UK, Israel must be brought to heel, no longer able, with impunity, to ignore UN resolutions and international law.