Al-Qalam 
For more than a century, Palestine has been treated not as a nation but as a negotiation. The land that once nurtured Muslims, Christians, and Jews in a tradition of coexistence has been carved, colonized, and debated as though its people were an inconvenience rather than their own homeland’s custodians.
From the Ottoman era and long before, Palestine upheld a civic pluralism that protected the dignity of all who lived there.
That legacy was shattered in 1948, when a state built through dispossession and imposed without consent was declared on Palestinian soil.
The two-state formula, celebrated by diplomats as a pragmatic compromise, asks Palestinians to legitimize this rupture.
It reduces a century of expulsion and occupation into a cartographic puzzle, two states living “side by side”, while ignoring that one state was created through force and the other is denied sovereignty. To accept this framework is to accept inequality as destiny.
The two-state solution rests on assumptions that have never reflected reality: equal partners, contiguous territories, and a fair international community. Decades of settlement expansion have fractured Palestinian land into disconnected enclaves.
Calls for Hamas to relinquish authority reveal a deeper hypocrisy: democracy is defended only when it produces leaders the West approves of. Palestinians alone have the right to choose their government, free from coercion or veto. Even Gaza’s reconstruction is being shaped by figures like Tony Blair, a man whose decisions helped devastate Iraq, now repackaged as a neutral advisor for Palestinian futures.
This is not justice; it is colonial management.
A single, democratic Palestinian state is not a rejection of Jewish life. It is a rejection of Zionist exclusivism and a return to the region’s historical norm: coexistence under a civic order that protects everyone equally.
Such a state must guarantee full rights to Muslims, Christians, Jews, and others. It must also uphold accountability: the right of return for Palestinian refugees, the removal of settlers implanted through colonial expansion, and legal consequences for those who orchestrated or carried out atrocities.
To stand for Palestine is to stand for universal principles: dignity, equality, and unambiguous justice. Any solution that legitimizes occupation or erases historical truth perpetuates the very harm it claims to solve.
The two-state framework has failed because it was never designed to confront the core injustice. A single democratic Palestine, unified, accountable, and rooted in equality, is the only moral and sustainable alternative.
Salim Mohamed Badat
Durban writer, exploring the intersections of faith, politics
