THREAD: Time for the #GlobalMajority to break Washington's lockhold on managing all Arab-Israeli "diplomacy" >
Yesterday's #FlourMassacre in Gaza should touch the hearts of decisionmakers everywhere. (Those that have hearts, that is.) Clearly this diplomatic quagmire in which the U.S. has staved off calls for a #ceasefire throughout the past 20-plus weeks has gone on far. too. long. >
Biden & his acolytes keep saying "We can't have a ceasefire because that might interrupt this delicate diplomacy we're leading." What diplomacy? It has had no results except to buy time for more #IsraeliGenocide in Gaza >
while Washington has continued to deliver arms, targeting info, massive economic help, & regular UN vetoes to support the Israeli genocidaires. However >
Back in November I did a lot of writing about how the UN Security Council could & should end the massacre of #Palestinians in Gaza. >
On Nov. 10 I published this essay: >globalities.org/2023/11/the-un…
At that point I outlined 6 sequential steps the UNSC should take to end the crisis (and also the Israeli occupation of Gaza.) > 
Step 4 there was key: At that point the UN-led humanitarian mission arrives in Gaza (by sea) and starts its work; a UN-based (UNTSO) Disengagement Force starts to oversee the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza-- it need not take much time; and the UNSC issues a declaration that Israel's 57-year military occupation is thereby *ended* >
Of course, getting from Step 1 through all the other five steps I outlined would take ab-initio agreement on the nature of those steps. Other notable later steps there are #5, the final release of all Israeli and Palestinian captives; and #6 the activation of an UNTSO-like (UN-led) monitoring force in the occupied West Bank.>
None of these actions are impossible to achieve, provided the UN Security Council has the will. The crisis in #Gaza today is also a very deep crisis for the Security Council itself & for the whole system of global governance that the United States set in place in 1945. >
I wrote about that some (but not enough) in the piece I recently had in @BostonReview: bostonreview.net/articles/shock…
So in this thread I want to look at two aspects of what needs to unfold. #1 is how can the #GlobalMajority wrest control of the Arab-Israeli diplomacy from veto-wielding Washington. #2 is the formal structure of the outcome in historic Palestine that might be possible: 2 states or 1? >
@BostonReview First, how can the #GlobalMajority break the US veto? One key example I looked at in my @bostonreview piece was the 1956 Suez Crisis and how Eisenhower broke the power of the vetoes that both Britain & France had (& amazingly still have) in the UNSC. >
@BostonReview Eisenhower achieved that through purely economic means: He very credibly threatened to withhold the support the US had until then given to the £ sterling. London immediately caved and so, very speedily, did Paris & their cats-paw, Israel. >
@BostonReview Of course, that was a key turning point for the British Empire (for which Suez was a vital artery; less so for the French Empire.) A key turning-point too in the emergence of increasing US interest in (& power over) Arab-Israeli diplomacy. But today-- >
@BostonReview What powers are there in world economic affairs that might mount an analogous challenge to US economic power & specifically to the power of $? >
De-dollarization has become an increasing trend worldwide in recent years, and especially after Washington thrust Russia into (and into the leading ranks of) "Team Sanctioned." But are the BRICS-plus powers prepared to get together NOW, in March of 2024, and use their combined power to issue a démarche to Washington over Gaza? >
@BostonReview I think that should be a key global demand right now! We who are citizens of the USA have our own big tasks, too, of course, & I'm sure the coming days will see huge actions here. ("It's not just Michigan!") And so... >
@BostonReview Back to the other thing I want to write about quickly here: should we look for 1 state or 2 in Palestine? I'll admit my views on this have shifted a lot over the years & continue to shift. I'll also admit >
@BostonReview that I recognize this question is not one for me or any non-Palestinian "outsiders" to decide. But I have very closely followed the trajectory of the Palestinian liberation movement for over 50 years, including in my 1984 book on the PLO's history I traced >
the big & hotly contended discussions inside PLO circles in the mid-1970s over whether, in the post-1973 diplomacy, they might move toward some open-ness to accepting a 2-state situation (the Palestinian "duwayla", mini-state in just the lands occupied in 1967), possibly, as they argued >
as a *step toward* the secular democratic state in all of Palestine that had been the PLO's stated goal since 1968. Of course, any acceptance of such a mini-state also needs to be accompanied by arrangements to address the rights of the Palestinian refugees to (a) return to their homes and properties inside 1948 Israel or (b) to receive due compensation for the same. >
@BostonReview & in the present circumstances in which there are >700,000-- quite illegal-- Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank (inc. E. Jerusalem), even getting to a robust Palestinian mini-state in the whole of the West Bank *might* seem like many to be a stretch >
@BostonReview I say "might", because of course what we've seen in Gaza in recent weeks is the Israelis themselves peremptorily uprooting and relocating nearly 2 million people from their homes there, many of them several times. Hence >
@BostonReview the idea of relocating 700,000 people from homes in the West Bank that they have built and occupied in complete violation of international law no longer seems like such a stretch. Let the Israelis put them into tent cities someplace, or whatever. I would say, >
the idea of persuading 7-plus million Palestinian refugees to accept compensation (from Israel, of course, not from anyone else) for the homes, properties, rights, and dreams they had within their ancestral towns and villages inside 1948 Israel might be a much harder task. As for the outside world >
@BostonReview there is a fairly strong consensus among the world's governments that a 2-state solution is what is needed. (Heck, even Washington pays lip-service to this goal, despite having given such outrageously strong support to Israel's settler-implantation project for so many years.) >
But of all the world's governments only Iran and Israel are currently on record as opposing a 2-s-s. (I think the Iranians may have recently introduced some nuance into their opposition to it. Need to check that.) But this Israeli government and any conceivable successors are all strongly opposed.>
@BostonReview So a 2-state solution is the one that is currently on the scope for the whole of the #GlobalMajority, hence *probably* a whole lot easier to aim toward than the dismantling of the Zionists' entire little colonial settler-state at this point. But >
@BostonReview we are now at a key inflection point in world affairs, so who knows which outcomes in historic Palestine may or may not be achievable?? >
@BostonReview One thing we have been seeing in Gaza is living, livestreamed-to-the-whole-world proof, in Gaza, of how it was the Zionists came to have their ghastly settler-state in Palestine in the first place, back in 1948. >
@BostonReview We see them gleefully occupying the homes, kitchen, and bedrooms of Palestinians in Gaza whom the Zionist militias had earlier, very violently forced to flee. We see them >
@BostonReview deliberately destroying key Palestinian community institutions like mosques, churches, universities, schools, hospitals-- and of course tens of thousands of homes. And agriculture. >
@BostonReview So now the whole world sees this and can start to understand, more visibly & more viscerally, how it was that those Zionist forebears had established their State of Israel on the ruins of Palestinian homes back in 1948. >
@BostonReview As I say: this is now an inflection point. When will we see the #GlobalMajority and its allies within the US body politic start to take effective action?
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