Mahmood OD, a native Palestinian born in Haifa, is the author of 2048: A Manifesto for the One State Solution in Israel Palestine. In it, he considers the underlying causes of the violence and instability in the region, and proposes a simple and sensible solution, starting with: “The whole conflict can be solved with one thing: Equality. But to reach the stage of equality, one must establish basic understanding about the other side…”
How can we get from the current catastrophe—an accelerating genocide by Jewish Supremacists—to the world Mahmood envisions, in which both sides understand and acknowledge the humanity and equality of the other?
Excerpt:
So how did you come to write 2048: A Manifesto for the One State Solution in Israel Palestine?
Well, basically it took the 2021 escalation. Because for your listeners, if they're unfamiliar with me, I'm a Palestinian who was born in Haifa, which is in Israel. In 2021, I was like, okay, here we go again, another war, another escalation, then we go back to square one, no real solutions proposed. I was like, let me just write a book because from my perspective, it's very straightforward. It's a human cause. It's a matter of equality, human rights that should be by the 21st century now.
The Arab states back then and the Palestinians, even the Jewish people who used to live in historical Palestine before Zionism, in collaboration with the Nazis by the way in many cases, started bringing Jews to Europe. Many people are also not familiar with the fact that Zionism was the solution, the final solution for the Jewish problem as Hitler prescribed it at the time.
So, the Arab nations back then, and the Palestinians, they didn't want an ethno-state. They wanted a whole state for everyone, because Jews, Arabs, and Muslims, Christians lived peacefully for hundreds of years. Whether it's in Palestine, whether it's in Morocco, whether it's in the Hejaz, everywhere. They had problems in Europe. They didn't have problems with us. And obviously, we were welcoming anyone who wants to come back then.
Let me give you an example my native city of Haifa. In 1947 we had approximately 75,000 Palestinian Christians and Muslims who were then expelled by these new Zionist immigrants to take the population back to 5,000. Now my great great parents obviously were some of the few that remained there because they had to keep people to basically be slaves and build up the country, albeit they lived under martial law for a very long time.
So the notion of a one state that is for everyone isn't new. I didn't bring something new here and many people wrote about the subject too. But my intention after the 2021 escalation was to highlight how very basic and straightforward it is.
So from my perspective, I decided to put in points that are very straightforward to find a solution, including many key areas that should be highlighted. Things to do with anti-semitism, things to do with Zionism, and obviously points to reach a solution which mainly revolve around the refugees and the dismantling of the apartheid state.
Because at the end of the day, we're all human beings, and we all want the same things. We want rights, we want equality, we want basic human life. Yet Zionism was established on racial supremacy. It was established as a better race controlling a lower grade race.
You know, many people say it's utopic, it's unrealistic, but from my perspective, I don't care how utopic it seems, it shouldn't be sounding utopic because you're talking about equal human rights. And many things that human beings perceived to be utopic previously, like the end of slavery. America had civil wars because of the abolishment of slavery. Eight-hour working days were considered to be utopic. Women voting was considered to be utopic.
So, from my perspective, it's an implementable solution that is very much realistic, but we need to have our foot down constantly. This shouldn't be a case of there was an escalation, it ended, now we move on.
What happened on the 7th of October woke the whole world up. And not just the act itself, it's primarily Israel's reaction. Because if Israel stopped on the 7th of October and took a step back and recalculated what it's been doing for the past 75 years and proposed a solution, because they mainly called for a prisoner swap, we wouldn't have been here.
But Israel did Palestine a favor. And I know it might sound insane because they're committing a genocide, but in many ways they woke the whole world up to the Palestinian cause.
So from our perspective, from any decent human being's perspective, this should be a case where you're at it the whole time. There's a saying in Arabic, ما ضاع حق وراءه مطالب. You never lose a right as long as there's someone behind it asking for it. And I believe this should be the core issue that decent people like yourself constantly do and anyone who's concerned with basic human rights continue to do, because Israel is doing everyone a favor by making it untenable for it to exist as it is.
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Mahmood OD on “One-State Solution by 2048”