URGENT Israel-Palestine thread:

The two-state solution has been dead for at least a decade (many say much longer). While liberal Zionists sell us “two states”, Israel has carved the West Bank into bantustans that it now plans to annex. Gaza will be next or face destruction.

What’s happening to the Palestinians is Apartheid. It is not a conflict based on long-standing religious emnity. They were ethnically cleansed from their land, and warehoused in Gaza and the West Bank to create a false Jewish majority for Israeli “democracy”. It’s evil.

I’ve spent two decades getting to know Israel & Palestine from the inside out. In that time, I’ve seen the veneer of Israel’s liberal aspirations die. By 2014, people were openly discussing genocide over coffee in Tel Aviv, using terms like the “final solution” without irony.

What’s happening to Palestine is a slow-moving genocide. Every day Palestinians are brutalised in ways outsiders can’t even imagine. Shot at, spat at, their homes bulldozed or simply reallocated to Jewish-Israelis, their children kidnapped & tortured. Their businesses destroyed.

None of this is a secret. Journalists, human rights orgs, activists and politicians from all over the world have catalogued this genocide in painstaking detail.
We are doing our best to galvanise humanity against it.

But the opposition is fierce.

I’ll never forget the day @ronnie_barkan woke me from my dream of two states.

First he laid out why it’s impossible - Israel has ensured you can’t even drawn a line around Palestine anymore. It’s a bunch of cantons with no workable border.

Then he asked me a question.

“You’re Black. If someone told you the solution to Apartheid South Africa was to give the Whites control of Johannesburg and all key cities/economy/etc, and give Blacks notional sovereignty over the bantustans...Would that be justice to you?”

And I felt it.

I realised, that even while believing I was an ally, I’d been willing to accept a lower bar of justice for Palestinians than I ever would have for Black South Africans.

We have been taught to dehumanise Palestinians. To see them as less than human. They aren’t.

The only just solution in Palestine is the same as South Africa. It is the end of the Apartheid state and it’s entire machinery.

And so no anti-racist or socialist should believe in the right of Apartheid Israel to exist. No Apartheid state should exist, period.

And so beware those who will attempt to gaslight you into passively accepting the genocide of a people.

They will weaponise the Holocaust
They will accuse you of antisemitism
They will deny any and every proven piece of evidence of Apartheid
They will demonise the victims

But Marek Edelman, last surviving commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising said:

“We fought for dignity and freedom. Not for a territory, nor for a national identity”.
“To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed, never with the oppressors.”

Edelman & other anti-Zionist Holocaust survivors were vilified in Israel, even after their deaths. They held an ugly mirror up to the Apartheid state. They reminded it that to commit these acts on another people in the name of Jewishness was a betrayal of Jewishness itself.

Don’t be bullied into accepting an evil and unjust status quo. What’s right is right, whether it earns you cool points or gets you blacklisted and thrown in jail.

If you think it’s tough being an anti-Zionist in the West, just imagine a day in the life of a Palestinian.

This isn’t a sacrifice. It’s an act of solidarity. And solidarity only counts for something when it costs you something. Everything else is networking.

You can be an anti-racist, or an Apartheid apologist, but you can’t be both. So don’t play with people who tell you different.

Palestine needs us now more than ever. That’s why the heat has been turned up by Israel’s advocates.

Defy them. Educate yourself. Make human connections with Palestinians. Join hands with the small but brave anti-Zionist Israeli community, fight back.

It matters.