GHADA KARMI: The one-state solution is the only just solution for the Palestinians, so if we want to look at solving this problem from a point of view of justice, we have no alternative except the one state. Justice means that the dispossessed shall no longer be dispossessed. That’s justice.
If what you’re saying to me is, will it will hurt the chances of the Palestinians getting something out of the present situation, that’s a different question. I would have said to you that I can understand that position, if there were any evidence that they are going to get something.
Now, I’m looking around me, and I’m imagining that our intelligent audience is also looking at things like maps and is looking at what Israel does and how Israel behaves and can only come to the conclusion that the creation of a Palestinian state is totally out of reach. And I’m sorry to be blunt, but I think we have to be quite open about this. We mustn’t go on playing this game of the emperor’s new clothes, you know, everybody pretending they’re seeing something which isn’t there. There is no territorial basis on which a Palestinian state can now be set up.
Although I fully understand that there is an international consensus that the two-state solution is the way forward, I fully understand that a lot of work has gone into this, and in proposing the one-state solution I’m not being flippant, and I am not saying that all the work and all the good will and all the effort that’s gone into the two-state solution are trivial and idiotic and we have to forget about them, the problem is we’ve given the two-state solution quite a long time to see if it will work. It hasn’t happened. In decades of talking about the two-state solution, it has not come about. On the contrary, it’s less attainable now than it was in 1967, because Israel has taken so much Palestinian land, so much Palestinian resources, there’s no possibility of it happening logistically. So why would I, as an intelligent human being, continue to back a solution which has been shown not to be working?
AMY GOODMAN: And yet, a one-state solution would mean that Palestinians would outnumber Israeli Jews, which is why the Israeli government would fight it.
GHADA KARMI: Indeed. Of course, that might—it might mean that. But, you see, the whole point of this solution is we don’t have a Jewish state and we don’t have an Islamic state, we have a democracy. If you were to look at the Western liberal democracies today, they have various communities that live together. They don’t go around saying, “Wait a minute, this has to be a white state,” or “this has to be a black state,” or “this has to be a Belgian state.” They’re saying, “We are here, we are citizens.” The moment you get rid of the idea that there has to be an exclusive something for somebody, then you can see your way to having a proper democracy. That’s the essence of democracy.
So what I’m preaching and calling for—and by the way, many others along with me—is not at all bizarre, it’s not outlandish, it is in line with the Western democratic tradition, which has tried to free itself from fascist states, from states which insist on racial exclusivity, to ideas of tolerance, of rights, of democracy, and so on. What is wrong with that? And it’s amazing to me that whenever I propose the solution, people do object immediately by saying, well, that means it’s the end of the Jewish state, or the Israelis won’t have it, or it’s a declaration of war on Israel. This is a peaceable solution. It’s actually about ending the conflict, because if you no longer are—if you don’t have parties fighting over bits of territory, then you end the fight. But if you continue to say, “I have a right, a God-given right,” or whatever it is, “to take this, this, this amount of territory, and you will not have this, this and this,” here’s a recipe for conflict, and that’s what we’ve had all along.
It seems to me that the issue of Zionism, the issue of the insistence on the part of a group to say, “We have a right to a place where only we shall live, and we will exclude others,” seems to me this notion has to be challenged head-on. We must stop accepting the idea of an exclusive state in the Arab region or indeed anywhere else. And I imagine, you know, the Western world would be the first to be up in arms if Hamas managed to establish an Islamic state from which Jews were thrown out. They’d be the first to object. They’d go mad. Well, why on earth are we tolerating a situation which we have now, in which Jews are saying, “We, as Jews, have a right to this territory.” The more so when you remember it’s not their territory. It’s somebody else’s.
AMY GOODMAN: Ghada Karmi, explain what the word “Nakba” means.
GHADA KARMI: The “nakba,” in Arabic, is—it means literally “catastrophe.” Over time, it has acquired what you might call a capital N, which of course we don’t have capital letters in Arabic. But it’s acquired a capital N in a sense that it had become, as you might say, the grand catastrophe or the great catastrophe. That’s what it actually means, because, of course, for the Palestinians, nothing more catastrophic could have been imagined than to be expelled from their home, their homeland, lose everything and never be allowed back. And all that has happened from that time to this has been due to that initial event in 1948.
Today, the Palestinians are divided. They are fragmented. They live in different places. I live in London. Many Palestinians live in other different countries. We have Palestinian refugees in camps. We have people living under occupation in what remains of Palestine. We have people who are citizens of Israel. All these were once upon a time a homogeneous, cohesive society living in a land called Palestine. Now, when I call for a one-state solution, what I’m saying is I want that situation back again, where in that Palestine, where we were one cohesive society, we had Jews, we had Druzes, we had Armenians, we had Circassians, we were Christians, we were Muslims, and we lived together. And what I’m saying is, we want that again. And it can happen again if enough people with enough good will and enough sense of morality and justice help us.
AMY GOODMAN: And your feeling about the big sixtieth anniversary celebration in Israel, everyone from President Bush to Google cofounder Sergey Brin?
GHADA KARMI: Well, I have to tell you, if I were Israel, I would be celebrating. It’s not bad in sixty years to arrive at a point where you have not only taken somebody else’s country, you’ve thrown them out, you’ve kept them out, and you’ve succeeded in it, but you’ve succeeded in becoming rich, heavily armed, powerfully armed, you have nuclear weapons, you enjoy the unstinting support of the world’s single super state of the United States. You enjoy that support in terms of funding, in terms of arms, in political and diplomatic support. There’s not a UN resolution can be passed without the big brother in the United States vetoing it. Fantastic! If I were Israel, I’d be celebrating.
What is shameful, I think, is that the rest of the world that knows what has happened, knows what Israel has done and is doing and is doing to the people of Gaza—is that really something to celebrate? Dispossessing people, tormenting them, humiliating them, occupying them, starving them, as they are in Gaza—is that really something to celebrate? I would say not.
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