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1947. In hindsight, we know partition was also an ill-conceived idea from a realpolitik point of view. This may not have been known at the time. But to offer partition now as a solution on the same premise that informed the 1947 resolution—which was that Zionism was a benevolent movement wishing Israelis to coexist as equals with the Palestinian native majority—is an absurdity and a travesty.
    The continued adherence to the interpretation Zionism gave to partition, and liberal Zionism very recently gave to the Oslo process, corrupts every human and humane value cherished in the West. Partition, in both 1947 and 1993, means a license to have a racist Jewish state in more than 56 percent of Palestine in 1947 and more than 80 percent, if not more, in 1993.
    This is where the senior Israeli and pro-Israel Western political and social scientists are exposed in their utter immorality and indecency. They claim, and teach, that a Jewish state reigning over much of Palestine, provided there is a Palestinian entity next to it, is a democratic reality. It is a democracy that is maintained by all means possible to ensure an everlasting Jewish majority in the land. These means could and have included genocidal policies and other brutal strategies to safeguard that the state embodies the ethnic identity of one group alone.
    Israelis do not find it therefore at all bizarre or unacceptable that determining the results of a democratic process by first determining by force who makes up the electorate gets the desired result: a purely Jewish state in a binational country. This charade is still marketed successfully in the West: Israel is a democracy because the majority decides what it wants, even if the majority is determined by means of colonization, ethnic cleansing, and, recently, by ghettoizing the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, enclaving them in Areas A and B in the West Bank and in isolated villages in the Greater Jerusalem area, the Jordan Valley, and the Bedouin reservations in the Naqab.
    Israeli Jews need to safeguard the existence of the Palestinians, threatened daily by their government and army, before nourishing the project of coexistence. If they want to help, they can join the international solidarity movement and those within the land who wish to transform Israel and Palestine into a geopolitical entity in which everyone can live as equal persons and citizens.

    Conclusions: Palestine and Israel, 2014–2020
    In order to move out of the paradoxes mentioned above, the ideas of the old peace camp have to be abandoned. The international community interested in helping Palestine needs to stand behind the attempt to turn Israel into a pariah state as long as Israel continues to pursue its policies of apartheid, dispossession, and occupation.
    The peace process between Israel and the Palestinians is a medical miracle: it died several times, was resuscitated for a while, then collapsed again. It holds on not because there is the slight chance it will succeed but because of the dividends its very existence brings to many involved. The Israeli government understands that without this “peace process” Israel would become a pariah state and would be exposed to international boycott and even sanctions. As long as the process is alive, Israel can continue to expand its settlement project in the West Bank and the dispossession of the Palestinians there (including in the Greater Jerusalem area) and establish facts on the ground that would render any future settlement unfeasible and impossible. Because of the dishonest brokering of the United States and Europe’s impotence in international affairs, Israel continues to enjoy immunity in this process.
    The Palestinian leadership is divided on the question of how desirable the continuation of the process is. Senior members in the Palestinian Authority assert that the establishment of the PA was a very important national achievement and therefore should be maintained.