Seventy-six years of occupation, ethnic cleansing and settler-colonisation leading up to today’s genocide in Gaza cannot disappear overnight. In light of this, does the historical Palestinian and anti-Zionist Jewish vision for a single democratic state where Palestinians and previous Israelis coexist make any sense? How would such a state guarantee the security of its citizens—wouldn’t previous oppressors and victims be at each other’s throats?

Zionism claims that Jews have always been and will always be persecuted. Accordingly, it presents a model for a state exclusive to Jews as the only solution and promotes this apartheid throughout the world by taking advantage of the long history of European anti-Semitism to encourage Jewish immigration to Palestine to leave their societies, cleansing non-Jews from Palestine using different means of violence and even supporting similar identitarian projects in Algeria, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria and other countries. In other words, Zionism claims that violence is inherent to having different identities and that separation is the only solution. The Palestinian liberation movement, on the other hand, has historically declared that violence in the region is the outcome of an oppressive settler colonial project and that dismantling it is the solution.

Who is right? Could a democratic state guarantee peace and security for all its citizens? And what do historical cases of colonisation and decolonisation have to teach us?….more