The settlers are not leaving: decolonization, not coexistence
JVL Introduction
Two strong Palestinian voices argue for “restoring Palestinian agency to the centre of political imagination”.
In a recent essay, Lara Kilani challenged an idealised one-state solution in which everything is resolved by Palestinians and Israelis becoming co-citizens in some future state.
For her this simply fails to confront the structures of settler colonialism and risks normalizing their outcomes.
Rima Najjar takes her critique further. Palestinians, like her, who endorse a single state emphatically do not see it as integration into an existing order. But what can that mean when the settlers are not going anywhere?
“It is shorthand for a thorough decolonization: return, land restitution, dismantling of apartheid laws and institutions, and a new constitutional order detached from ethnonational privilege.”
Liberation, requires unflinching clarity and “to extend that clarity into strategy: to name the structures that confine Palestinian possibility, to reject the frameworks that domesticate Palestinian demands, and to imagine liberation not as what the world will tolerate, but as what Palestinians require to live freely on their land.”
RK
This article was originally published by Mondoweiss on Tue 16 Dec 2025. Read the original here.
The settlers are not leaving: decolonization, not coexistence
What Palestinians actually mean by “one democratic state,” and what liberation can look like when the settler society refuses to leave.
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Essential! Thanks so much for republishing this.
One just outcome of this stage of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine might be for all the illegal Zionist-only colonies in Occupied Palestine to handed-over to Palestinians. They are illegal and the colonists are committing Crimes against Humanity: apartheid; ethnic cleansing; genocide. Offer the colonists a grave plot on Gaza – around 2 x 2 Kilometres.
The most clear eyed analysis I have read for a long time. Allow me to share a (pipe?) dream. The settlements are first and foremost buildings. Who lives in them is another matter. Algeria sounds like a situation worth studying.
I would not claim to have the answer. I do recognise The sentiment if not wanting to live with the genocider. There must be many Jewish people who left Europe after WW2 when the opportunity arose for the same reason, duped by the lie of a ” A land without people for a people without a land.” Those days have long passed and the regime continues to recruit more and more immigrants to drive out the people they have always refused a acknowledge exist.