Palestine – Globalities

Zionism (& other settler colonialisms) in world-historical perspective

Helena CobbanOctober 24, 2025October 27, 2025Israel, Palestine, Settler colonialism, U.S. policy3 Comments

It’s been a long time since I read either Fayez Sayegh’s seminal Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965) or Maxime Rodinson’s Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? (1973.) In the intervening decades, a lot has happened…

Sayegh was one of the intellectual fathers of the famous “Zionism is Racism” resolution that UN General Assembly adopted in 1975, and rescinded, under super-heavy American pressure, 16 years later. He died in 1980…

Rodinson was a brilliant French Marxist and an early and vocal supporter of Palestinian rights. (His use of the question-mark in his book’s title I emulated in my 2004 book Amnesty After Atrocity?; in both cases, it was a way of indicating that we had heard and engaged with the arguments of the critics of our main thesis.) Rodinson died in 2004…

Other things that have happened since I read those two books were:

A Jewish State in Palestine: The UN’s Original Sin?

Helena CobbanSeptember 26, 2025September 27, 2025Diplomacy, Global balance, Global governance, Israel, Palestine, United Nations2 Comments

On a day when an indicted war criminal and the author and Kommandant of an ongoing genocide gets to speak from the rostrum of the world’s most august and authoritative governance body… We should ask whether this tradition of coddling and endlessly appeasing the leaders of a brutal settler-colonial project in Palestine dates back, indeed, to the founding years of the United Nations and the decision an earlier UN General Assembly took in November 1947 to partition historic Palestine and assign to that small proportion of its residents who were participants in the Zionist settler project, their own independent ethno-state state and to allocate to it, moreover, a wildly disproportionate amount of Palestine’s fertile land and other resources.

Today, at a time when Israel’s government and military continue their genocide in Gaza– and their ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank… and their continuing aggressions against Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and even a small unarmed flotilla of humanitarian activists– we should ask whether this two-year-long orgy of Israeli violence is now bringing down not just the global power of its main backer in world affairs (whose own foundation as a “nation” lay also, lest we forget, in a settler-extremist rebellion against the metropole), but also the United Nations itself.

Palestinian statehood and international legitimacy

Helena CobbanAugust 3, 2025August 3, 2025Diplomacy, Gaza, Global balance, Israel, Palestine, Settler colonialism, United Nations

The recent announcements by the governments of France and the U.K. that they have some (limited) readiness to “recognize” a Palestinian state change nothing– either regarding the genocide in Gaza or in the diplomacy over the Palestine Question more broadly. What they do do, however, is highlight once again the debate that has long simmered within the Palestinian-rights movement over whether the goal of the Palestinian movement should be a fully democratic one-state situation (‘solution’) or a two-state situation in which Palestinian and majority-Jewish Israeli states co-exist side-by-side in the land of historic (Mandate-era) Palestine.

But maybe now is a good time to re-examine another formula that’s been on the table for nearly 80 years now: that of, effectively, the three-state situation prescribed by the Partition Plan for Palestine as defined in the UN General Assembly’s Resolution 181 of November 1947?

That 1947 Partition Plan is, after all, the only authoritative and geographically delineated plan for governance in historic Palestine that carries the imprimatur of the UN and thereby its certificate of international legitimacy. And we should all care about international legitimacy, right?