MIDDLE EAST CRISIS : Palestinian ambassador to SA believes two-state solution is dead but still the only option backed by global community

The Palestinian ambassador to South Africa, Hanan Jarrar, says that after the failure of the Oslo Accord, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) “is not a big fan of the two-state solution”. However, it has no choice but to pursue it because it is the only option that the international community supports.

She largely blamed Israel for killing the two-state solution because it failed to implement the 1993 Oslo Accord in which Israel and the PLO agreed to establish a separate Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

“For example, Israel has been grabbing the Palestinian land on a daily basis for the sake of expanding and constructing new settlements on the Palestinian land allocated for the Palestinian state,” she told Daily Maverick.

“This makes it difficult to establish a viable Palestinian state, geographically connected.”

She added that daily raids against Palestinian homes and cities and ongoing killings were destroying the notion of a two-state solution.

This coupled with Israel’s building of “the apartheid segregation wall” separating Palestine settlements on the West Bank had aggravated the matter even further.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Israel-Palestine War

“That’s why the two-state solution, in reality, is dead, but it is the only window that is backed by the international community.

“We don’t have any other choice that is internationally backed up by the international community … [other] than the two-state solution. That’s why the two-state solution is still the one and only window for the Palestinian people … to establish the Palestinian state. Because without the support of the international community, nothing will take place.”

Jarrar said since the assassination in 1995 of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who had negotiated the Oslo Accord, Israel had not been committed to realising the two-state solution and a Palestinian state.

She said Palestinians had no choice but to support it until the international community forced Israel to sit down to negotiate the issues that would create a viable Palestinian state along the pre-1967 borders.

She said current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during more than 16 years in government, “has systematically ruined every opportunity to materialise a viable Palestinian state”.

ANC meets Palestinian groups

The ANC and SA Communist Party met last week with the PLO, Fatah, Hamas and other Palestinian groups at the ANC’s Luthuli House headquarters in Johannesburg.

The ANC has been widely criticised for meeting with Hamas, including by some in the US Congress. The US and the European Union have designated Hamas as a terrorist organisation.

Jarrar stressed that Fatah and Hamas had met with the ANC under the umbrella of the Palestinian embassy and the PLO, meeting the ANC as political parties and not as governmental organisations or official representatives of the Palestinian people.

She said the purpose of the meeting had been to discuss the mutual interest of political parties and to discuss ways of supporting the cause of Palestine and the Palestinian people.

Jarrar said the Palestinian Solidarity Forum, held in Johannesburg just before the meeting with the ANC, had drawn together Palestinians and political factions from other parts of the region, including Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

They had shared ideas about how to use mass mobilisation to increase solidarity and to increase support for the Palestinian people, “especially in these difficult times where Gaza is facing a genocidal war by the Israelis”.

According to reports, by Monday Israel had killed more than 18,000 people in Gaza since it launched its retaliatory campaign following Hamas’s 7 October attacks on Israel in which 1,200 people were killed and around 240 taken captive.

ANC National Executive Committee International Relations Subcommittee deputy chair Obed Bapela told Daily Maverick that the ANC remained in favour of the two-state solution.

He said the ANC intended to campaign and push for the implementation of a two-state solution along the pre-1967 boundaries between Israel and Palestine

Bapela said Hamas had explained at the meeting why it did not support a two-state solution.

“Hamas said they had been disappointed by the lack of the implementation of the agreement. So as a result, their view is that the entire Palestine be liberated, from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea. They can then look at modalities on how to accommodate who is there, Muslims, Jews, Christians and Palestinians.

“There is that view that Israel has put itself into a corner and should they have implemented the 1967 resolution we would not be where we are now.

“We did tell them about our recent decision as [the] ANC and government that we have approached the ICC [International Criminal Court] on the issuing of an indictment of Prime Minister Netanyahu to be charged for those three elements: genocide, violation of human rights and war crimes,” Bapela said.

The US reacts

US Republican Senator Jim Risch has sharply rebuked the ANC for meeting Hamas and criticised the Biden administration for its “appeasement” of the South African government despite its ties with Hamas.

Risch, the top Republican on the Senate foreign relations committee, who has also been sharply critical of the ANC and the SA government for their warm ties with Russia, posted on the social media platform X questioning why the Biden administration “embraces” the ANC, which “stands in ‘solidarity’” with Hamas.

#SouthAfrica‘s ruling party stands in ‘solidarity’ w/ #Hamas – an Iranian-backed, U.S.-designated terror group.The Biden Admin, meanwhile, persists with its embrace of this same South African gov’t. What is the U.S. gaining from this policy of appeasement? https://t.co/ETPdpoCHf0

— Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member (@SenateForeign) December 6, 2023

JT Tomaszewski, a senior member of the Senate foreign relations committee staff, posted on X: “Ranking Member Risch criticizes #SouthAfrica’s ruling party for openly supporting Hamas, an Iranian-backed terror group, and questions the effectiveness of the Biden Administration’s ‘policy of appeasement’ toward the political leadership of the current govt.” DM