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| Hamas’s election and the Implications on the Israeli State’s legitimacy |
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This is unlike the situation of Israel, which finds itself in the heart of the Muslim world surrounded by Arab and Muslim societies. No amount of Jewish emigration to Israel will ever be able to change this situation. Nor will Israel be able to separate its own Jewish citizens from the Palestinians or Arabs who live in close proximity to its Jewish citizens. Israel’s ability to maintain its current position in such a region despite the open hostility from all its neighbours is due to the strength of the Israeli army and the patronage of the United States. Fear of the Israel army keeps much of the hostility that exists against Israel in the region from manifesting into open warfare.
Israel was established after the Second World War as a homeland for the Jews, a place of peace and security where it would be inconceivable for another holocaust to take place. Without addressing the narrative and perception of the Arabs, there can never be a stable peace between Arabs and the Jews. And yet, to date, the international community and Israel has invested all its effort in a two state solution between Israel and the Palestinians. There is little evidence to indicate that such a solution will work. The Israeli version of a Palestinian state - one that consists of non-contiguous areas joined together by roads, whose borders only Israelis will guarantee and secure, whose capital cannot be Jerusalem, whose water resources Israel will control - is not one that Palestinians or the wider Muslim world can accept. It will be not be independent, viable or sovereign in any real sense. It will, instead, be the world’s biggest prison camp.
Such a two state solution will perpetuate the conflict indefinitely and guarantee that future Jewish generations will see wars instead of the security that the founders of Israel sought. Although today no Muslim country would dare to attack Israel militarily on its own, the precariousness of the situation means it would be naïve to assume that this will always hold true in the future.
Israel faces many costs for the occupation and control of Palestinians in the occupied territories and for the hatred that Israel has earned from its neighbours. The need for a strong military to carry out this occupation and to defend Israel’s borders means that Israel has to commit vast resources – wealth and people – to this task. Most Israeli Jews go through military training following completion of secondary school and remain ready to be called-up by the army when needed. And even this is not enough for the task given Israel is the biggest recipient of military aid from the US. Moreover, the insecurity that has resulted from this occupation has also negatively affected the psychology of Israel society. To legitimise and rationalise the forcible occupation of other peoples, Israel has ended up dehumanising the Arabs. Such a culture is like a cancer that eats away at the moral fabric of Israeli society.
The international community must start to develop a policy for peace that addresses the narrative that Israel is neo-colonialist state. Ultimately, peace for Israel’s Jewish citizens will not depend on the pseudo-legitimacy conferred by Europeans or Americans living thousands of miles away but by the acceptance tens of millions of Muslims who reside in neighbouring states. Getting countries and parties to accept the right of Israel to exist may superficially increase Israeli legitimacy in the international community but has little impact on the people whose Israel’s security really depends upon i.e. those that live in the occupied territories and societies that surround Israel.
Both the Jews of Israel and the Arabs of Palestine are deserving of peace and security. Like many others before me, I propose that the only real option to avoid perpetual conflict is to change the nature of the Israeli state such that it becomes a single state where both Jews and Muslims are considered equal citizens of the state and where both feel secure and safe from persecution. This is the only case in which the narrative that describes Palestinians and Arabs as occupied peoples will naturally disappear and in which both groups are able to share the religious sites in Jerusalem. Whether this can be achieved under secular rule, a philosophy that in Europe gave us the gas chambers and Srebrenica is debatable. What isn’t, however, is that Zionist policies practised by Israel for more than five decade has failed to give Jews, Christians, or the Muslims the security or tranquillity they deserve.
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