Politics in Palestine

Description

Since the beginning of what came to be known as the ‘Palestinian Question’ at the beginning of the 20th century, the conflict fundamentally altered meanings, images, and identities of the self and the other of the parties involved. Framing the conflict as the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict is in itself the outcome of a profound transformation in both camps. Indeed, the conflict was dubbed the Arab-Zionist, Arab-Israeli, and Palestinian-Israeli Conflicts respectively. This has been a reflection of, and contributed to, the awakening, sharpening, and crystallization of the independent national consciousness amongst the Palestinian people, and to the framing of the current internal dynamics of Israeli politics.

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict was born at the end of the 19th century as a result of ‘incompatible national aspirations’ between the Zionist movement and the indigenous population of Palestine (the Palestinians) and over the land of Palestine. Zionism started in Europe as a reaction to mounting anti-semitism there, and aspired to the building of a Jewish State in Palestine by encouraging European Jews to migrate to Palestine and settle in a classical settler-colonial project that did not take into account the aspirations of the Palestinian people for independence and self-determination. Palestinians, who regard themselves as the “rightful indigenous inheritors of all the Arab communities that have settled in Palestine since time immemorial”, went on with their resistance against both Jewish emigration and the British authorities. This clash of nationalisms constituted a failure of the concepts of coexistence and multiculturalism, and led to a century of conflict, exclusionist policies, racism, and ultimately ethnic cleansing committed by the Zionist movement against the Palestinian people.

It took the international community almost four decades to come to the conclusion that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict should be resolved in a two-state formula, Palestine and Israel, living side by side in peace. ‘The Road Map to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’, sponsored in April 2003 by the US, EU, Russia, and the United Nations (the ‘Quartet’), designed a framework to achieve permanent resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within the context of U.N. Resolution 242’s ‘Land for Peace’ formula. This institutionalizes, with the full force of international legitimacy, the failure of multicultural coexistence which, in the form of various ‘Binational’ and ‘Single Democratic State’ proposals, have existed, in a minor key, on both the Zionist and Palestinian sides of the conflict throughout its history, and have not lost their appeal even now.