The Two-State Solution Sham, And Other Reader Questions

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

I’m just going to answer questions from readers for a while.

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Lorna asks on Facebook, “Is the 2 state solution a solution …or a delusion??”

Israeli officials have been telling us themselves that it’s a delusion for a while now, and I think we should believe them. Everything about Israel is stacked against allowing the creation of a Palestinian state, and even if the Palestinians do get a meaningful state somehow, what then? Israel is constantly at war with its neighbors who refuse to obey its dictates, so a “Palestinian state” would likely either be (A) Israel continuing to bomb and massacre Palestinians just like they’re doing now, or (B) Palestinians obeying the dictates of Tel Aviv and not being meaningfully sovereign.

The truth is that Palestinians will never be free as long as Israel exists as the hypermilitaristic racist settler-colonialist state that it is. The way to have peace and freedom is to give everyone equal rights, grant right of return for displaced Palestinians, right the wrongs of the past, and for Israel and its western allies to pay so many reparations to Palestinians that the wounds of the past are no longer felt by future generations.

Israelis will never go along with this unless they are forced to, but they won’t stop any of their evils unless they are forced to anyway. The world is going to have to force them to stop, just like it had to force Nazi Germany to stop.

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Christine asks on Substack, “What do you do for self care? You spend so much time fighting the good cause, does Mr F look after you well?”

Mr F (my husband Tim Foley for those who don’t know) gives me a full-body massage for one hour every day. We go through so many massage oils I’ve been ordering big professional-sized jugs from an industrial supplier. I also take baths when I’m feeling overwhelmed.

Mostly though the key for both of us is tons of inner work. We’ve got an energetic practice we developed on our own for healing trauma and getting rid of inner fixations, and when we’re feeling overwhelmed we can just discharge the energy. Tim places more emphasis on nonduality and eastern spirituality in his practice, while my practices are more somatic in nature. Over the years we’ve gotten very good at talking each other through whatever issues we’re going through at any point in time.

I don’t understand how anyone engages with this stuff without tons of inner work. I know I personally would have drowned in the darkness of the world a long time ago if I wasn’t healing my way through this thing.

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Naterian asks on Twitter, “When did you first become aware of the injustice in palestine? What year, what age were you, what event was it that fully opened your eyes to how dire the situation was?”

My father taught me about the plight of the Palestinians back in the early eighties, which he had initially learned about from some people distributing literature in the city mall. After that it was a few different experiences over the years that opened my eyes wider bit by bit, including my troubling encounters with Israeli tourists while traveling in South America and watching Israeli snipers fire on unarmed protesters in 2018.

And actually my eyes are still being opened. Israel still finds ways to shock me with its abusiveness and depravity to this very day. Just when I think I’ve seen the full scope of its evil, I find more. I’m learning more about the kind of malice and tyranny that Palestinians have been living under every day.

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Tom asks on Substack, “What’s going to happen after recognition?”

It’s not clear at this time that much of anything will happen after governments like the UK, France, Canada and Australia go through with their planned recognition of a Palestinian state. What are they going to do, plant a Palestinian flag in the rubble of Gaza? Hand people Palestinian passports while they’re being rounded up in concentration camps in preparation for mass deportations?

The immediate problem right now isn’t that Palestinians don’t have a state, it’s that Israel has spent the last two years capitalizing on the rare window of political will which was afforded by October 7 to rapidly push through as many of its pre-existing military agendas as it possibly can. That’s not going to be stopped by giving a diplomatic thumbs-up to Palestinian statehood, it’s going to be stopped by imposing costs which outweigh the benefits of what Israel is doing.

Hard economic sanctions. The termination of military and arms agreements. Making Israel a pariah state in every possible way. Collectively threatening to terminate alliances with the United States in order to pressure the US to bring Israel to heel.

Israelis have an acute understanding of the difference between narrative and real material benefits. They’re happy to keep doing what they like and grabbing as many hard material benefits as they can while western governments make performative gestures that amount to nothing but narrative. They’ll let us have our narratives as long as they get the material land grabs and strategic gains they’re after. It’s not until the material costs outweigh the material benefits that they’ll stop acting the way they are acting.

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Barbarism Critic writes on Twitter, “As a budding writer who loves your work I would love to hear your best advice for how to stay fresh and write consistently when you start to feel like your retreading the same waters again and again.”

I think being really obsessive helps, to be honest. Making a vocation out of this thing instead of just something you do here and there means you’re always pointing at it and coming up with different angles and fresh ideas, even when the news cycle hasn’t changed much.

The daily news is an endless source of new material. Right now Antiwar.com and Drop Site News are the best resources for finding important news updates on what the empire is up to from day to day, and Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp has a great show on YouTube which he puts out every weekday breaking down the latest moves of the imperial war machine. You can pick any story that sparks your interest and just write whatever you reckon about it.

And again I have to point toward inner work as an essential component of this. Writing can’t flow freely from expansive directions if you’re in a state of inner turmoil all the time, and as you explore your psyche you’ll have all kinds of new insights which tie into what’s going on in the world in all kinds of ways.

Also please remember that there are two of me; everything you read here comes from both me and Tim, so you shouldn’t see it as a problem if your volume isn’t the same as ours. Being a team of two means we’ve got twice as much time and energy for both writing and research, and if one of us gets busy or has an off day the other can pick up the slack. We’re also constantly in conversation about this stuff inspiring each other and coming up with new ideas. I’ve seen individual writers beat themselves up about not being able to write new stuff every day like Caitlin Johnstone does, as though “Caitlin Johnstone” is just one person and not a team of two.

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Sinwa asks on Facebook, “Where do you think it will all end?”

Honestly? I reckon we win this thing. In the short term things look ugly, but in the big picture people are waking up to the reality of the empire at a rate that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. As a species we’re getting better and better at networking and sharing information with each other, while the empire is getting more ham-fisted and obvious every day. I can’t see that trajectory continuing in a way that works out well for our rulers.

It’s taboo to express optimism on the internet, but I’m honestly more optimistic about beating these bastards than I’ve ever been before. It’s scary and nasty now, but the scariest and nastiest moments in my abusive first marriage happened right before I got out. If I told you I’m pessimistic about our future, I’d be lying. I think we win, and I think we get a healthy world.

If you have a question you’d like answered, just write it in the comments section of whatever platform you’re reading this on and I’ll try to get to it.

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