Their mutual acceptance can only be based on complete equality of rights, including national rights, notwithstanding the crucial historical differences between the two. There is no other possible sustainable solution, barring the unthinkable notion of one people’s extermination or expulsion by the other.

Finally, uprooting the systemic inequality inherent in Zionism is crucial to creating a better future for both peoples, Palestinians and Israelis.

It is the issue of inequality that is most promising for expanding the understanding of the reality in Palestine. It is also the most important, since inequality was essential to the creation of a Jewish state in an overwhelmingly Arab land, and is vital to maintaining that state’s dominance. Inequality is so crucial not only because it is anathema

This connection between an exclusive right to land and peoplehood is central to a specific type of “blood and soil” Central European nationalism, which is the ground from which Zionism sprang.

That eight-to-one casualty ratio was typical, something one would not have known from much of the American media coverage.

In terms of what Ari Folman called the outer circles of responsibility, American culpability for Israel’s invasion extends even further than Haig’s green light: the United States supplied the lethal weapons-systems that killed thousands of civilians and that were manifestly not used in keeping with the exclusively defensive purposes mandated by

of the Reagan administration, which, under pressure from Israel, stubbornly refused to accept the need for any formal safeguards for civilians, rejected the provision of international guarantees, and blocked the long-term deployment of international forces that might have protected noncombatants.

This marked the beginning of a long, slow process of shifting away from the maximalist objective of the democratic state, with its revolutionary implications, to an ostensibly more pragmatic aim of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, to be achieved via negotiations on the basis of SC 242.

Only two years later, in 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously proclaimed that “there were no such thing as Palestinians … they did not exist,” and that they never had existed.24 She thereby took the negation characteristic of a settler-colonial project to the highest possible level: the indigenous people were nothing but a lie.