WHILE Benjamin Netanyahu is the architect of the genocide in Gaza and continues to sow chaos across the Middle East, we must ‘appreciate’ his ‘honesty’ regarding one issue: consistent opposition to a Palestinian state.

Recently, he reiterated his resolve to prevent the implementation of the two-state solution when he said that he intended to “fulfil our promise that there will be no Palestinian state”. He was speaking at an event to sign off on the so-called E1 settlement near occupied Jerusalem. Yet the vast majority of the international community rightly believes that there should indeed be a Palestinian state. A resolution at the UN General Assembly on Friday calling for the ‘revival’ of the two-state solution was endorsed by 142 countries.

Despite the global majority’s support for a Palestinian state, Israeli extremists are doing all they can to prevent this goal. For example, Israel’s finance minister has said that “there is nothing to recognise and no one to recognise”. This is a regurgitation of the genocidal Zionist myth that Palestine, at the time of the Nakba, was a “land without a people”.

The fact is that the Palestinians are a historical reality, and have lived on this land for centuries, much before Zionist settlers started colonising their land. It is the very existence of the Palestinians that Israel is trying to erase through the genocide in Gaza, and the colonial land grabs in the occupied West Bank.

While the UNGA vote is a moral victory for the Palestinians, Israel has said in unambiguous terms that it will oppose a Palestinian state. And with staunch US support, Israel’s sinister designs to forever block a contiguous and viable Palestinian state are succeeding. It is Israel’s xenophobic attitude that has sparked two intifadas in the past, as well the ongoing genocide and it is the major obstruction to peace in the Middle East.

What the extremists in Israel intend to do is clear: create ‘Greater Israel’ — a Zionist empire fuelled by racist ideology, and extremist religious thought, that intends to devour several Arab states. The Israeli aggression against Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran and now Qatar — the list is expanding — is proof of Tel Aviv’s terrifying intentions.

If the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, and further aggression against regional states are to be halted, Arab and Muslim countries need to put up a united front. Moreover, as the UNGA resolution demands, the international community needs to give an outline of “tangible, time-bound, and irreversible steps” for a Palestinian state.

Where the resolution calls for the end of Hamas rule in Gaza, once Israel ends the genocide and the conditions for such an exercise are created, the Palestinian people must decide through elections who is to rule them.

Published in Dawn, September 14th, 2025