Much has been written in recent weeks about the growing “generational divide” in American public opinion on Israel and Palestine, and a majority of the writing has chosen to focus on the means by which young people receive information. The video sharing app TikTok has, understandably, been at the centre of these discussions.
As per the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s annual report released in June 2023, 20% of 18-24 year olds in the US use TikTok for news. This is also the demographic in the US with the highest sympathy for the Palestinian people. But while the spread of social media and distrust of hitherto mainstream news channels have certainly helped dismantle the well funded Israeli narrative hegemony over western minds, to focus only on the medium and not on the content is to see only a part of the story.
The last 20 years have seen a significant evolution in the discourse surrounding the idea of Palestinian liberation and three themes specifically are making their narrative more compelling globally: first, shifting the liberation discourse from territory to equality, second, the description of Israel as a settler colonial state (as opposed to the Israeli narrative of a historical homeland) and finally, the rejection of the idea of the United States as “neutral” party to this conflict.
In the first of a two part series on the changing Israel Palestine narratives, I examine the shift from territory to rights and what that means.
From the river to the sea…
As a precondition to a seat at the negotiating table at Oslo in 1993, the Yasser Arafat led PLO formally recognised the partition of historical Palestine and the state of Israel. Despite the subsequent failure of the Oslo accords to deliver on these two states, this cemented the idea of a “two state solution” to the Palestine question in global polity. In the 30 years since the Oslo accords, East Jerusalem and the West Bank remain fully occupied, and while Israeli settlements were withdrawn from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the whole strip was placed under a harsh ongoing Israeli blockade in 2007, and is currently almost certainly about to be physically reoccupied by Israel. The Palestinian Authority, established pursuant to the Oslo accords has proven to be ineffective in protecting the rights of Palestinians living in the occupied territories or halting the illegal construction of settlements in these territories and the US contribution to the creation of the two states has rarely extended beyond the very occasional reprimand to Israel on their settlement policy (also by and large given up in recent times).
And yet the framing of this conflict as some sort of a territorial dispute between two states has allowed Israeli and American voices to shift attention away from the systemic injustices deployed against Palestinians living under Israeli military rule in a seemingly never-ending occupation. As per the UN special rapporteur on the occupied territories, these deprivations include detention and trial by military tribunal for children as young as 12, administrative imprisonment without trial, apartheid style restrictions on movement within the territory, the arbitrary bulldozing of Palestinian homes and the illegal appropriation of Palestinian homes and lands by Israeli settlers. Gaza, prior to the current offensive, had been turned by the Israeli blockade into what Human Rights Watch termed an “open air prison”. Even within Israel, Palestinians, despite making up 20% of the population and holding Israeli citizenship are deprived of certain important rights reserved for Jewish citizens, including their right to freely reside in and around hundreds of earmarked Jewish majority communities, and since 2018, the right of self determination.
Palestinian scholars, responding to this reality, have shifted the paradigms of the discourse. Instead of focusing on the theoretical possibility of a future with an independent territory and what those territorial boundaries might look like, they have chosen to focus on the reality that exists today between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, namely Palestinians and Jews living under the control of a single state — Israel — but with vastly unequal rights.
The solution to this, first suggested somewhat hesitantly by British Palestinian scholar Ghada Karmi in 2003, and since with greater force by others, is the creation of a single democratic secular state with a one-man, one-vote polity without reference to ethnicity or creed. Prominent Palestinian American scholar, Rashid Khalidi articulates this less directly:
“There are now two peoples in Palestine, irrespective of how they came into being, the conflict between them cannot be resolved as long as the national existence of each is denied by the other. Their mutual acceptance can only be based on complete equality of rights, including national rights, notwithstanding the historical differences between the two. There is no other possible sustainable solution, barring the unthinkable notion of one people’s extermination by the other. Overcoming the resistance of those who benefit from the status quo, in order to ensure equal rights for all in this small country between the Jordan River and the sea – this is a test of the political ingenuity of all concerned.”
Interestingly, despite the extreme violence of October 7, and their own socially conservative Islamist origins, senior members of Hamas seem to be trying to publicly at least align with this idea of a pluralistic Palestine based on equality. The demands made this time (the return of Palestinians detained in Israeli prisons) seem designed to publicise the human rights violations faced by Palestinians in Israeli prisons. Speaking to veteran Indian journalist, Karan Thapar, Dr. Musa Abu Marzou, the head of Hamas’ international relations body, offered his personal view of a solution:
“Actually the main solution would be the one state solution as historical Palestine would be liberated for Palestinian Arabs of all religions – Muslims, Christians, Jews, a country that will contain all of those categories, without discrimination, open religion or open anything else. This Palestine will give citizenship only in the criteria of residence, not discrimination or apartheid. This is the only solution I am seeing right now…This is my personal opinion. I believe that a one state solution as Palestine with same rights for all of its citizens- Muslims, Jews and Christians. Same rights and same duties.”
While their credibility of this statement with respect to the rights of Jews within historical Palestine will naturally be subject to a high degree of skepticism in the aftermath of October 7, the statement remains interesting.
As Rashid Khalidi points out, with a total Arab population in Palestine and Israel that is roughly equal to or slightly higher than the Jewish population, the maintenance of the Zionist project necessarily requires either the continuation of the current systemic inequalities or the utterly unthinkable idea of another mass expulsion of the Palestinians along the lines of 1948 and 1967. By shifting the focus from territory to equality, Palestinian scholars have made either of these ideas increasingly difficult for young progressives in the west to stomach. Palestinian content creators have built off this.
Even prior to October 7, some of the most popular Palestinian content on social media was focused on visually documenting the inequalities faced by Palestinians in their everyday lives in the occupied territories in Jerusalem or the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. I wrote in 2021 of the young Palestinians in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheik Jarrah effectively using social media to highlight their own struggle against evictions from their homes. Viral videos, including one of a settler from New York telling a Palestinian woman in East Jerusalem that if he didn’t steal her home, someone else would have, have driven home these inequalities in young western minds.
Since October 7, these ideas have only been cemented. While there is naturally a great deal of sympathy for the Israeli civilian victims and hostages of October 7, the idea that the 2.2 million strong predominantly civilian population of Gaza can be trapped in a small strip of land, internally displaced, deprived of water, electricity and medical care and bombed incessantly for weeks on end at the will of Israel has highlighted the inherent inequality of the Palestinian condition like never before. Young Palestinians on ground in Gaza have provided an unfiltered view of the practical import of this inequality – the horrors of the bombardment and siege – which cannot be unseen, and are likely to shape progressive views in the West for years to come.
The Zionist intellectual response to this challenge has veered between wholly inadequate to wildly counterproductive. The usual strategy of equating all criticism of the state of Israel with anti-semitism has had limited efficacy this time, partly due to the substantial number of progressive Jews in America joining calls for a ceasefire, and partly due to harsh actions like doxxing students on campuses, getting people fired and job offers revoked, which have only served to reinforce rather than counter the impression of a high handed colonial state in young minds. It hasn’t helped that many of the students and young people harassed in this manner have been Black or from other ethnic minorities. Attempts to conflate Hamas with the Nazis have only resulted (rightfully) in criticism from prominent genocide scholars of Zionists minimising the horrors of the Holocaust to serve current interests. The attempts to conflate all sympathy for the Palestinian cause with support for terror have also had limited success with younger people with the western media’s incessant “do you condemn Hamas” line of questioning turning into a TikTok punchline.
The only direct counter to this reframing of liberation as equality has been the attempt to equate the Palestinian call for a single democratic state to a call for the genocidal destruction of all Jews between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. This has had mixed success. US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib was censured by her House colleagues for saying “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, and Elon Musk, the owner of the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) has classified the slogan as “genocidal speech”. And yet immediately after Musk’s slogan ban, it was trending on the platform. Similarly, a young Democrat chose to publicly refuse a US $ 20 million donation from AIPAC (the pro-Israel lobbying group) to run against Tlaib in the next primaries, which indicates that as far as young progressives are concerned, this argument has by and large not found traction.
A logical counter for the Israelis, as was the case for Yitzhak Rabin when faced with the 1987 Intifada, would be to offer minor concessions to the two state solution and shift the debate away from rights and towards territory again. But this is a step that neither Netanyahu’s far right government nor Joe Biden’s administration has left itself with the ability to engineer anymore. From the Trump administration unilaterally recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in 2018 to the Biden administration’s failure to impose any restrictions on the Israeli massacres committed in Gaza in the last 49 days, the US has for all practical purposes publicly declared itself to be a partisan in the conflict making it impossible for them to go back to their 1990s role as a serious mediator in the Middle East. It is telling that they have not been at the fore of hostage negotiations, despite US citizens being involved.
Sarayu Pani is a former lawyer and tweets @sarayupani.
This article first appeared on the author’s Substack, ‘Tattva’, and has been republished with permission. Read the original here.
