Twenty-one months after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack that killed 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 240 hostages, Israel’s brutal war on the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza has killed more than 58,000 mostly civilians, women and children. Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid has caused severe shortages of food and medical supplies, leading to widespread preventable deaths and starvation. Multiple sources report that 92 percent of Gaza’s housing units and about 70 percent of all structures there have been destroyed or damaged by the war.
Amnesty International reports that since the introduction of its militarized aid distribution system under the U.S.-backed “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,” Israel has continued to use starvation of Palestinian civilians as a weapon of war. Almost daily massacres of civilians at food distribution sites have killed nearly 800 Palestinians seeking food assistance since late May.
Beyond the current bloody war and genocide in Gaza, people across the Middle East and world are asking whether or not the long-standing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians can ever be resolved. Jonathan Kuttab is a Palestinian-American human rights attorney who practices in the U.S., Palestine and Israel. Kuttab, a practitioner of nonviolent resistance, is the co-founder of both the independent Palestinian human rights association Al-Haq and Non-Violence International. He recently spoke about the prospects for peace and co-existence between Israelis and Palestinians at the Unitarian Society of New Haven, Connecticut. Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus was there and presents this excerpt of his powerful talk.
JONATHAN KUTTAB: During this past century, these two movements, the Zionist movement that calls for a Jewish state as Jewish as France is French and the Palestinian Arab Nationalist Movement, which says Palestine (unintelligible), Palestine is Arab. Who are these people coming from all over the world to take over our land? It’s like unfair. These two movements have been at each other’s throats, and they view each other as an existential threat.
Let’s be frank and honest. These two movements are mutually exclusive. Whatever lies they tell themselves, their own people and the world, you cannot have a Jewish state in Palestine without dealing with all the Arabs. You can’t pretend that it’s an empty land. It’s not empty. And you can’t have a Palestinian Arabia when, right or wrong, for whatever reasons, there’s 7 million non-Arab Jews who live there who have come there, come as conquerors, come as thieves, come as spearheads of a colonial settler movement, whatever they are there, and these two movements, these two groups view each other as an existential threat. Every additional Palestinian baby that is born or Jewish immigrant that comes in is a threat to the other side.
Every additional acre of land that’s taken away from the Arabs, put into a public domain, and then therefore serving Jews only is a loss to the Arabs and a gain to the Zionist movement. Can these two movements live together? Can they coexist or are they destined to fight each other into, I don’t know, extinction, mutual destruction?
Can these two groups live together? I believe they can. But in order for them to do so, there have to be some changes in their very basic ideology. Palestinian Arab nationalism needs to change and I believe it is changing very rapidly towards an acceptance of the fact that these 7 million Jews living here are here to stay. And Zionism needs to change also to accept that the Palestinians are a people. They’re not Jewish, but they belong to the land. It’s their land as well and they can live there as well. You only have to give up one thing: Exclusivity.
It can be a Jewish state, but at the same time an Arab state. And for my Palestinian friends, my state can be an Arab state, but not exclusively so. It can be also a Jewish state. Is that possible? Yes, it is. Can we create structures that allow Jewish Israelis as well as Palestinian Arabs to have everything they want or need, except for exclusivity?
Can we create structures for a society that is genuinely democratic and pluralistic, but which respects the individual and the ethnic minorities within its borders? Where democracy doesn’t mean tyranny of 51 percent, which allows you to trample over the rights of the minorities and everybody else? There needs to be a Constitution that safeguards the rights of the individual as well as the substantial minorities within that state, regardless of who has 51 or 55 or 60 percent, and who has the 40 percent.
Can we create structures that do away with the demon called demography so that regardless of how many Palestinians, how many Jews come in under the right of return, you can also have a Palestinian right of return where you don’t have to worry about who has the majority because the Constitution and the institutions protect the rights of everybody.
Palestinian-American human rights lawyer Jonathan Kuttab is author of “Beyond the Two-State Solution.” For more information, visit his website at jonathankuttab.org.
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