24 September 2025
Amidst all the pageantry and solemnity of the September 22nd opening session of the UN General Assembly, the keynote event was the concluding session of the High-level International Conference for the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution. It was co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia and for us demonstrated that the Palestinian struggle for self-determination does not rise to the level where it is taken seriously as a political issue by the most powerful of the world’s states.
Finding a “peaceful settlement” for more than a century of Zionist colonization and genocide becomes “urgent” only when Israeli atrocities become so outrageous that they threaten to expose the cynical anti-human transactionalism of the international system. Thus the “Palestinian issue” surfaces not as a critical matter of politics or justice, but as a humanitarian problem. The High-level International Conference convened as a means of pressuring Israel to end its war in Gaza. Once that it achieved, what will continue peacefully under the auspices of the US, Israel and the Arab governments is the Israeli Judaization of Palestine.
“Everybody knows,” to quote Leonard Cohen’s paean to cynicism, that the only two-state solution will be a “Greater Israel” normalized through the Abraham Accords by the Arab world ruling over the remnants of a Palestinian people confined forever to a set of non-viable enclaves comprising a South African-type Bantustan, this time, unlike those of apartheid South Africa, recognized by the international community.
When reading over the Conference’s “action-oriented outcome document,” the New York Declaration as it is called, one is struck by the ritualized rehashing of the tired, generalized “proposals and recommendations” that neither advanced the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine nor furthered the Implementation of the Two-State Solution. It continues to manage “the conflict” in a way in which Israel’s “facts on the ground” produce the inevitable two-state solution: two-state apartheid. “Recognition of the State of Palestine as an expression of support to the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to protect and preserve the two-State solution,” for instance, or “providing the required assistance to Palestine to exercise its sovereignty over its territory [and] its borders with Egypt, Jordan and Israel,” are stated as if the presence of Israel’s massive settlements really make that possible.
If anything, the New York Declaration exposes the disconnect between recognizing a Palestinian state “based on the 1967 lines” and the minimal requirements of Palestinian sovereignty: territorial contiguity over all the Occupied Territory; control over its internationally recognized borders with Egypt, Jordan and Israel, its airspace and territorial waters; control over its natural the resources; the ability to defend its sovereignty and territory; and the capacity to reintegrate the refugees and their descendants who choose to return. And it amounts, after all, to only a declaration.
There is only one alternative to this dismal but wholly predictable outcome: the rising up of the peoples of the world, led by the Palestinians and, at their side, their anti-colonial Israeli Jewish allies, in a global movement that prevents the normalization of Israeli apartheid and forces the international community to address the real issues of Palestinian liberation. It can be done. Already millions of people the world over pour into the streets for Palestine. But they need Palestinian leadership and direction, they need a political program for which to advocate –
ICAHD has long supported the establishment of one democratic state that would replace Israel and its occupation. We, the grassroots advocates and fighters for Palestinian rights in Palestine/Israel, need to organize effectively behind Palestinian leadership and, all of us together, develop a strategy for making our voices heard in the halls of power.