Secretary Kerry, there could have never been a two-state solution

Though many rejoiced listening to Secretary Kerry’s speech at the end of December, I’ve been walking around rather disenchanted. There’s no denying that his 72-minute diatribe in response to Netanyahu’s discontent with the United Nations Resolution 2334 is a refreshing twist to the traditional Israel-has-a-right-to-defend-itself US policy. For the first time, the United States admitted that the Israeli agenda does not include living side-by-side with Palestinians. Though Kerry waited until the end (when most stopped listening), he reaffirmed the Zionist agenda for Israel that was established in the late 1800s, an agenda that has no interest in the existence of Palestinian independence.

One-hundred-and-twenty years ago, the first Zionist congress was convened in Basel by a group of Jewish visionaries.

And they declared their purpose:

Zionism aims at establishing for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine.

Those “Jewish visionaries,” founders of the Zionist movement, clearly solidified their mission: to create an “assured home in Palestine.” Not next to Palestine, not as a neighbor to Palestine but “in Palestine.” That was perhaps the last honest statement to come out of the Zionist movement… and the Obama Administration. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict started well before the state of Israel’s creation in 1948. Then, Kerry made the understatement of the century:

I don’t think most people in Israel and certainly in the world, have any idea how broad and systematic the process has become…

It’s rather remarkable how “broad and systematic.” Prior to Israel’s founding, Zionist founders would visit Palestine and study their soon-to-be adversaries. In 1891, 6 years before Theodore Herzl called for the Zionist Congress, Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg (a.k.a. Ahad Ha’am), wrote about his visit to Palestine:

The Arab, like all the Semites, is sharp minded and shrewd. All the townships of Syria [which are now Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon] and Eretz Yisrael are full of Arab merchants who know how to exploit the masses and keep track of everyone with whom they deal – the same as in Europe… For now, they do not consider our actions as presenting a future danger to them… But, if the time comes that our people’s life in Eretz Yisrael will develop to a point where we are taking their place, either slightly or significantly, the natives are not going to just step aside so easily.

The bogus notion that the state of Israel is a response to Russian persecution or the Holocaust was simply an attempt to disguise and excuse the “broad and systemic” campaign to eliminate Palestine and its people. It was intentionally orchestrated well before any of those historic atrocities and well before the creation of Israel.

Zionism was a land-grabbing agenda from its birth and was solidified in 1901 with the creation of the “Jewish National Fund,” an organization whose sole purpose was to purchase land in Ottoman Palestine for Jewish settlement. The era of settlements began more than 47 years before the creation of the state of Israel. And just as Ginsberg warned, “the natives were [are] not going to just step aside so easily.”

If the Zionists were to claim Palestine as their own they would need to use significant force to do so. And so it began. A barrage of policies, from the Balfour Declaration to the Oslo Accords, have attempted to assuage the Palestinian people with the false promise of a two-state solution while the “broad and systematic” ethnic cleansing of Palestinians continued.

Kerry used a direct quote from Ariel Sharon himself to bolster the argument for a two state solution:

The original mandate gave the Palestinians 48 percent. Now it’s down to 22 percent. I think 78 percent is enough for us.

Sharon was likely pacifying Kerry at the time of his statement. I wouldn’t trust Sharon with my pet rat, let alone a two-state solution. Let us not forget Sharon led the Israeli army in 1948, the year of the Nakba, when many Israeli-led massacres of Palestinians occurred, including at Deir Yassin. Sharon was also at the forefront of the 1956 Suez Crisis, the Six-Day War of 1967, the War of Attrition, the Yom-Kippur War of 1973 and the 1982 massacre of Sabra and Shatila. It was also Sharon who rattled the cage ending several peaceful years in 2000, and began “cementing an irreversible one state reality that most people do not actually want.”

The only thing that Kerry proved with his speech was that so long as Zionists ran Israel, the two-state solution was a mockery of foreign policy. Zionists want a state known as “the greater state of Israel,” and will sacrifice Palestinian lives and the lives of their own Israeli soldiers and citizens to do so.

Kerry did, however, make one poignant statement:

In a place where the narratives from the past powerfully inform and mold the present, it’s important to understand the history.

Indeed, Secretary Kerry. Indeed.