The language of this morning’s recognition of the State of Palestine by Canada’s Carney government is somewhat refreshing in its directness—though the bar was exceptionally low.
[Israel’s] sustained assault in Gaza has killed tens of thousands of civilians, displaced well over one million people, and caused a devastating and preventable famine in violation of international law. It is now the avowed policy of the current Israeli government that ‘there will be no Palestinian state’.
This last line I think perhaps feels the most significant as a break from the past. It’s certainly long been true. But it was permitted to be a plausibly-deniable implicit policy for decades, as long as Israel and other nations played along with certain rules of the great game. A _dis_avowed (wink, wink) policy, if you will.
But over the past two years, the Israeli polity has increasingly doubled-down on saying the implicit things very loudly, while also declining to uphold their traditional obligations in the maintenance of the game. This removal of the international cover for the yawning chasm between what is supposedly happening in Israel and Palestine (i.e. a peace process, with two states as a nominal goal, to which Israel is upheld as a party engaged in good faith, but perennially and tragically lacking a viable partner) and the actual reality (i.e. salting the earth for anything other than the realization of a Greater Israel and expulsion of the Palestinians) really feels like a genuine rupture. Not a veiled caution. Not just a mealy-mouthed bloviation of supposedly shared, supposedly liberal, “Western values,” capped with an affirmation of one party’s “right to defend themselves.”
In the hope of a future where children can grow up without fear of famine, suicide vests, or sniper bullets, may this rift open up a path to somewhere better.