Zack Polanski

[Lew Dolby]

Yes - it's about rights for Palestinians. There's no denial of Israelis' rights.

[I'm going quiet now. Another round of eye injections tomorrow so reading and screentime are off the agenda for a wile.]

[Tristan]

"No denial of Israelis' rights" is technically true only because the motion doesn't mention them at all. Clause 3 calls for replacing the Israeli state with a single Palestinian state and says nothing about what happens to 7 million Jewish Israelis, their security, their political representation, or their civil rights in this new state. A motion that calls for the dismantling of an entire country without saying what happens to its citizens is a denial of their rights in any meaningful sense.

[bjn]

While Isreal is doing the facts on the ground thing and shooting blind seven year old children in the face to terrorise the local population so they can steal more territory that has never been theirs, so ignoring what the populations in those places want. As it has done ever since it was founded. Isreal is actually doing to others what you are worrying about might be done to them. Which you never seem to mention.

[Tristan]

For the record, I haven't defended Israel's overall conduct in Gaza, its settlement expansion, or its treatment of Palestinian civilians in the occupied territories. I've defended its right to exist and its right to defend itself. Those aren't the same thing, and conflating them doesn't help the argument.

Israel does get held to double standards but I know that not every criticism of Israel is a double standard. I was actually planning to raise the re-introduction of the death penalty today and wasn't sure which of the multiple Israel/Gaza threads to put it in, so I'll do it here. There is no defensible case for that. It's not a double standard to say so and I won't be defending it. It's vile and discriminatory.

On "as it has done ever since it was founded" , that's nonsense. The Nakba is documented history and the displacement of Palestinians in 1948 was real and brutal but the assertion that shooting children in the face to steal territory describes Israeli conduct continuously from 1948 to now collapses 75 years of complex history into an overly simplistic narrative. It erases the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, Israeli withdrawal from Sinai, the Oslo Accords, the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, Arab citizens with voting rights and representation in the Knesset, Supreme Court rulings that have gone against the government, and the mass domestic protests against Netanyahu that filled the streets for months. None of that makes what is happening in Gaza or the West Bank now acceptable, but if your argument requires a false historical claim to hold together, it really isn't as strong as you think it is.

[IvanV]

...Clause 3 calls for replacing the Israeli state with a single Palestinian state and says nothing about what happens to 7 million Jewish Israelis, their security, their political representation, or their civil rights in this new state. A motion that calls for the dismantling of an entire country without saying what happens to its citizens is a denial of their rights in any meaningful sense.

I suppose you can read "all of historic Palestine" in Clause 3 like that. But it seems unlikely that is intended, as it is an extreme position, that I have never heard seriously proposed. It seems implausible that the Green Party, if it understood that it meant that, could accept it.

The author of the motion, in her accompanying notes, mentions a 2-state solution. So I would read it as meaning all of the West Bank and Gaza with their pre-1967 borders. That would be "all" of Palestine as understood in post-1948 history.

But even if it were clarified to ensure that is the reading, I still think this is not a helpful way to support the Palestinian cause.

I appreciate your subsequent post.

[Tristan]

That’s an extremely generous interpretation of the motion Ivan.

“All of historic Palestine” isn’t an ambiguous phrase. It has a specific and well-understood meaning in this debate and refers to the entirety of the British Mandate territory, which includes present-day Israel. It’s used by groups who explicitly reject the 1948 partition and the existence of Israel as a state. If the author meant the West Bank and Gaza with pre-1967 borders, she had plenty of less loaded language available to her.

On the single-state position never having been seriously proposed that’s just not true. It has been a mainstream position in parts of (though not all of) the Palestinian solidarity movement for decades. You may think it’s the wrong answer (I certainly do!) but dismissing it as a fringe position that nobody has ever seriously proposed isn’t a credible characterisation.
Your conclusion that this isn’t a helpful way to support the Palestinian cause is rigght but that doesn’t meant it’s not what the author and supporters of the motion are doing. If the motion is this easy to ‘misread’ (I don’t think it is a misread btw) as calling for the elimination of Israel, and a sympathetic reader still thinks it’s counterproductive, the answer is to reject it.