GREENFIELD — While he favors a two-state solution to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a single, “bi-national” democratic state with constitutional protections for Jews and Arabs is a more realistic solution to the ongoing crisis, Israeli-American peace activist Jeff Halper told a gathering Monday.
Halper, whose fifth book “War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification,” offered his perspective on “where are we heading in Israel-Palestine” to more than 35 people at a midday forum at Greenfield Community College’s Downtown Center location as part of a three-day tour of the Pioneer Valley.
“That process has been completed. It’s over,” Halper said. “Israel is basically mopping up. Israel systematically and deliberately eliminated the two-state solution,” agreed to by Palestinians in 1988, and favored by the United States and Israeli peace activists.
Under the Likud-led government, the country has built more than 200 Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory to fragment the Arab population.
“Israel eliminated it. … It’s over. It’s done. It’s dead,” he said. “And we have to stop talking about it. Because the more you talk about a solution that’s irrelevant, the more you’re simply muddying the waters. It’s gone.”
Israel is an apartheid state, or worse, argued Halper, a Minnesota-born anthropologist who emigrated to Israel in 1973 and co-founded and now directs the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.
A supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement to rally global support against Israel’s “War Against the People” in Palestine, Halper said, “We have to look for another way out,” especially since he predicts the Palestinian Authority will collapse “sooner rather than later,” leading to an Israeli re-occupation of Palestinian areas, with more violence.
“Israel stands at the center of what I think is misguided policy in the Middle East,” he said. “There’s a lot riding on resolving this conflict … This is the main challenge to human rights in the world.”
A bi-national, democratic state would need a constitutional guarantee that both Israeli and Palestinian populations would be a way of acknowledging that Israel has favored a one-state solution all along
“You created one state, fine, we accept that reality,” he said. “But it cannot be an apartheid state. The only way out is if we transform it into a democratic state for all its citizens…. Israel will have to be transformed into something else.”
But to prevent a “tyranny of the majority,” as the Palestinian population is projected to eventually surpass that of Israeli Jews, what’s needed is constitutional recognition of both national groups.
Halper’s talk, along with other stops he made in South Hadley and Amherst earlier this week, was sponsored by Traprock Center for Peace & Justice, American Friends Service Committee of Western Massachusetts and other organizations.
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