Miliband's two-state solution is dead. Actually, existing Zionism killed it
A dam has burst in British politics.
For as long as anyone can remember, this dam has held back public opinion on Palestine. It gave impunity to Israel’s most egregious attacks on Palestinians, by describing these attacks as the right to self defence.
It constructed and maintained the international siege of Gaza and the boycott of a government of national unity after Hamas won the only free election Palestine had been allowed to hold in 2006.
At its very height, it produced a prime minister in Keir Starmer who armed Israel during its genocide on Gaza and supported the withholding of water and electricity.
This dam was policed with fervour. It ended the political careers of those who dared oppose it and who had no money to defend themselves in court. It took newscasters off the air. It cast anyone who dared disagree as antisemites - at best - and terrorists at worst.
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But within a few weeks, which is a millisecond in the time line of this conflict, large cracks have appeared and the flood waters are well and truly flowing.
The dam busters are Ed Miliband, the foreign secretary and Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party, both Jews, although the comparison stops there. Miliband and Polanski have very different outcomes in mind.
One believes in a two-state solution and the other says the only way this conflict can be brought to an end is to have Arabs and Jews living together as equal citizens with equal rights in one state.
But in different ways, they are breaking a status quo that has lasted ever since Israel was created.
Breaking the status quo
For the first time, a British foreign secretary told those fighting for justice for the Palestinians that they were right.
For the first time, Britain has committed itself to a UN declaration that says the occupation is unlawful. For the first time, it has tied sanctions to an end of Israel’s occupation.
The Green Party is the first mainstream British political party to call Zionism a form of racism.
Both moves will have a profound impact on the debate about Israel in Britain.
As Chris Doyle, the director of the Council for Arab British Understanding, wrote in MEE: "For the last three years…I have attended meetings with senior political figures from both parties, alongside human rights groups and aid agencies - and we have left feeling gaslit.
"Ministers and officials dodged direct questions, or claimed that it was all very complex. Some of the people in the room, like myself, had worked on the issue of Palestine for several decades, but were apparently incapable of understanding the inner dimensions of what was going on."
Now the doors have been flung open again.
Two years ago at a Labour Party conference, front bench ministers would queue up to be seen at the Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) event. Last week, in Liverpool, not one single front bench minister attended the Labour Friends of Israel event.
The parallel in the US, although it is far from an exact one, is the loss of influence that Aipac has had over a generation of the Democratic party politicians.
"It's like night and day. Since the LBC interview (in which Starmer backed the right of Israel to withhold water and electricity to Gaza) Palestinian and Muslim groups had minimal - and in many cases - no minimal access to Downing Street. Now it's a totally different atmosphere," said one Labour party insider.
But we should not disabuse ourselves. Had Starmer persisted as prime minister for another six months the party would have rattled itself to bits, rather like the French Socialists. In fact, a delegation of Labour advisers travelled to France to learn from their experience.
Changing policy on Gaza was a matter of self preservation.
Yashad, the progressive Jewish organisation, welcomed Miliband’s sanctions move, because, it claimed, his policies "do not target Israel; they target the occupation. They draw a clear distinction between the legitimacy of the State of Israel and the settlement enterprise which is illegal under international law," according to the statement issued by the organisation in response to Miliband announcement.
"Distinguishing settlements from Israel proper is not a judgement on where a border will ultimately fall, it’s a recognition that unilateral facts on the ground should not be allowed to decide that question in advance," the statement said.
A legitimate and an illegitimate Israel
The distinction between "Israel Proper" and the settlements is not something that bears any relation to reality on the ground and it has not done for decades.
I invite anyone who disagrees to go around Jerusalem and trace out where the 1967 Green Line actually runs. It has completely disappeared.
It would be easier to find archeological evidence of the foundations of a Third Temple in the many tunnels dug under Al Aqsa mosque, evidence which of course does not exist.
But the distinction between a legitimate Israel and an illegitimate one is key to Yashad’s subsequent condemnation of the Green Party statement on Zionism.
It called the motion nothing less than an attack on Jewish identity.
"Zionism is a fiercely debated and contested word. But for most British Jews, belief in Jewish peoplehood and self-determination is core to their Jewish identity, and this is what they understand to be the basic premise of Zionism. It is why when Jews attend synagogue they pray facing Jerusalem, and why the concept of ‘Zion’ has been at the heart of Jewish communal life for two millennia.
"Telling Jews they are acceptable only if they give up that understanding of collective Jewish identity, is not, as some have sought to explain it away, an attack on a political ideology. It is an attack on Jewish identity."
Polanski himself had problems with the motion, for which he did not vote, and whose amendments were rejected, and he has since issued a statement welcoming all Jews in the party.
But on any reading, the motion was not aimed at telling British Jews they are racist. Or that they can not pray in a synagogue facing Jerusalem. Nor was it to conflate the many forms of Zionism that have appeared over the millennia.
It was to describe and target the product of their dreams and prayers, the state of Israel today. Not some imaginary state, like "an Israel for all its citizens".
That is gone for good.
The State of Israel, by basic law, is the expression of self-determination for its Jewish citizens only.
If anyone in Britain thinks that Israel’s current campaign to make life as unpleasant as possible for the Palestinians in order to force them to leave is confined to Palestinians in Gaza only, they are living in a dream world.
It applies to all Palestinians irrespective of citizenship, residency, whether they be in Israel, Gaza, East Jerusalem or the Occupied West Bank. It also applies to Shia Muslims in South Lebanon and Sunni Muslims in southern Syria.
All get the same treatment from "Israel Proper".
This is only one of the many problems in attempting to distinguish between one form of Zionism and another.
Zionism’s many colours
Turn the clock back 20 years, and the same liberals were arguing against the establishment of three major settlement blocks. Today, LFI tried in vain to persuade Miliband to exempt these settlements from sanctions.
Liberal Zionists would have you believe that if only the hateful Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right Religious Zionist friends were to be shown the door, everything would go back to 6 October, the day before the Hamas attack three years ago.
In reality, the only real difference between the many colours of Zionism is the speed at which they get the job done, not the final destination
They omit to tell you about the statements of Gabi Eisenkot, Yair Lapid, Naftali Bennet and all the opposition leaders who have consistently supported their army’s campaign in Gaza and elsewhere for the past three years.
All deny genocide. All deny ethnic cleansing, and some, like Eisenkot, while being against the E1 settlement project, are for increasing settlement expansion.
None of them want to gain power by using the support of Arab parties, although they may struggle to do so.
Bennet is a fervent supporter of starting a war with Turkey, probably over Cyprus. He says that after Iran has been dealt with,Turkey is Israel’s next Amalek.
In reality and in history, the only real difference between the many colours of Zionism is the speed at which they get the job done, not the final destination, which is to establish the modern state of Israel on what they imagine to be the biblical land of Eretz Israel.
For this reason, "Israel Proper" is incapable of substantial de-occupation. It is capable of token gestures.
The only time Israel withdrew settlers from Gaza in 2005, under the premiership of Ariel Sharon, it made sure that the total number of settlers that year was increased, by allowing more settlers into the West Bank than had been withdrawn from Gaza.
But it banks its territorial gains as it does the concessions that one generation of Palestinian leaders after another gives them.
And here lies Miliband’s problem or, to be specific, the problem of sanctioning Israel to save the two-state solution, or to save Israel from itself.
Put aside the fact that there are no negotiations or any likelihood of them for years to come. Put aside, too, the fact that the Palestinian leaders capable of uniting all factions are either in prison or have been assassinated.
Just ask yourself one practical question: which Israeli leader, born or yet to be born, is capable of forcing over one million Jewish settlers from their homes, businesses, farms and industrial estates in the West Bank and East Jerusalem?
The two-state solution could have happened once. But that train left the station almost a quarter of a century ago when Israel rejected the Arab Peace Initiative.
There is not a single member of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office who believes that Israel, under any leadership, would allow a Palestinian state to be born.
The motions in the Knesset banning a Palestinian state, with overwhelming majorities, tell the same story.
So Miliband’s two-state solution is as much a mirage as the progressive Zionist attempts to argue for the existence of an "Israel Proper".
Neither exist nor are likely to.
The shrinking of Palestine
Instead, what exists day by day, one ripped up olive tree at a time, is the steady erosion and shrinking of Palestine in any form.
This campaign involves every arm of the Israeli state. The army is a citizen’s army and has the full support of its Jewish citizens, of every political colour.
Global inaction is consent. Israel is intensely aware of global opinion, and as one window of rapid expansion is about to close, it makes hay while the sun shines. The rate of expansion in 2025 reached its highest level in 20 years.
This conflict will end only when Arabs and Jews live together as equal citizens in the same space
There are brave Israelis who put their bodies between the Palestinians and the sticks and guns of the settlers. There are braver Israelis who document all the human rights abuses. But their numbers can be counted on the fingers of several hands.
Supporters of two states argue that one state is a recipe for permanent conflict. But a state of war exists at the moment. The only thing that fluctuates is its intensity.
This conflict will end only when Arabs and Jews live together as equal citizens in the same space. There are many creative solutions as to what you call that space, and whether it will be one or two states or a confederation of them.
Whatever you call it, its citizens have to share basic things like equality before justice, equal shares of housing, land, water, security, airspace, irrespective of ethnicity or religion.
The Green Party motion may be intensely uncomfortable for the older generation of practising Jew in Britain. It may indeed challenge their identity as Jews or as liberals. It may disturb their vision of Israel. But that shock may yet prove to be salutary.
As they pray peacefully and safely in Britain’s synagogues, practising Jews can at least be comforted by the fact that they will not be shot at, spat at, bludgeoned or teargassed by paramilitary police, and their place of worship regularly stormed by religious fascist mobs.
This is the weekly experience of Muslims who attempt to pray at Al Aqsa Mosque or indeed of Christian worshippers as they pray at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
This, too, is a product of "Israel Proper", a Jewish supremacist state that regards all non-Jews as potential or real threats.
Allow this state of affairs to continue and there will not be a Palestine left to campaign for.
Which is precisely what Israel and its backers are gunning for.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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