The Zero-State Solution

‘Do you know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember ‘Nothing?’

Joseph Conrad imagined the heart of darkness lurking deep in the Congo, or in the fictional Latin American country of Constaguana. To find this heart of darkness, his stories follow a river winding its way as a black serpent into the thick of those jungles and foreign shores, where lay concealed the unspeakable horror and truth of existence. His was a “savage,” an “exotic” heart of darkness.

But what if that Stygian river led here, to these cities, and its waters ran under our very feet? What if the heart of darkness were the beating drum of our day to day modernity, so close we could touch it, hold it even on the palms of our hands? What if we bought, invested, and profited from it? What if the heart of darkness lay not somewhere remote, but stared at us from the logos of household brands, the ivory towers of global capital where it was actively constructed with merciless, value-based logic?

This is what the UN Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, exposes in what is nothing less than an epoch-defining report, From the economy of occupation to the economy of genocide, published last June. With extraordinary analysis, a masterclass of jurisprudence, and moral lucidity, she exposes those who have profited obscenely from the extermination, dispossession, and displacement of the Palestinian people.

Albanese demonstrates that colonialism is at its ugly core a corporate enterprise. What are touted as the pillars of modern civilization, enlightenment and progress such as universities (MIT), asset managers (Blackrock), or truly “cutting-edge” tech companies (Microsoft) are nothing more than euphemisms for the most abject barbarism, a concerted, lucrative form of organized violence. Why doesn’t the genocide stop? Because it pays, she says, and pays well.

In this context we still hear talk of the so-called two-state solution, that mirage ever-conjured as a cruel and illusory hope for Palestinians, and a disguise for the colonial war machine as it appropriates the whole of Palestine. Canada, for instance, has acknowledged Palestine as a state. Palestinians need the bombs to stop dropping, they need food, water, shelter, a lifting of the siege, they need sanctions, justice, dignity. They need respect of basic human rights. Little use they have for land acknowledgments.

The two-state solution is an insult to intelligence. One glance at a map, and one wonders how exactly are the two states supposed to exist, with Israel slicing Palestine in half. The two-state solution is in reality what is known as “Greater Israel,” as illegal settlements further erode and burn the West Bank, until it is annexed, as Gaza is slowly starved and killed. Perhaps it does not end with Palestine, perhaps Greater Israel shall encompass parts of Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia even. Netanyahu is “on a spiritual mission,” a spiritual mission that certainly has its material compensations.

There were those of us who pleaded for a one-state solution as a path to peace: Israel/Palestine, Palestine/Israel, call the land what you will. A state where Israelis and Palestinians could live with equal human rights. A secular state, secularism the basic foundation of any rational society. Secularism — an idea under relentless fire.

The reality is not a two-state solution, a one-station solution, or even the Greater Israel solution. The world — and I say the world because it is not just the West who has facilitated what has happened, who has refused to sever diplomatic, cultural, and economic ties with the Israeli government — now reaps the spoils of its policies: the zero-state solution.

For after two years of live-streamed genocide, does the West expect the Arab world and the Global South to just forget? Does the president of the USA really think that the Abraham Accords are still viable? Do they expect these kinds of wounds, deep as abysses, to magically heal and be forgotten?

Cruelty does not necessarily beget power. Power stems from moral authority. Without it, Power is deemed illegitimate.

While pro-Palestinian human rights activists were slandered with accusations of antisemitism (even if they were Jews themselves, and even if they were lectured on their Jewishness by none other than Germany), while the memory of the Holocaust was so crudely weaponized by those in power, even while allying themselves with real antisemites — what Israel has done is succeeding in making itself hated to an extreme degree, its image and reputation shattered beyond repair.

This is a very dangerous situation, the flames of which are further fanned by the fanatics of its government, who openly talk of the demolition of Al-Aqsa, one of the holiest sites of the Muslim world. On top of this, they are really intending to build the Gaza Riviera, complete with giant, Oscar-like statues of Donald Trump. One imagines this project built with the Instagram architecture of Dubai or the revolting taste of Trump’s resorts. Perhaps the artists who broke with BDS, like Radiohead and Nick Cave, so arrogant as to lecture Palestinians on how to conduct their politics, may headline a music fest to inaugurate the Gaza Riviera.

How do they think West Asia will react?

Debating between an apartheid society and the Final Solution, the Israeli government chose the latter. Why? Because there is a global economic benefit to war and occupation. In order for there to be such benefit, Israel must always remain in a state of ceaseless war.

Thus, we reach a zero-state solution. As Israeli historian Ilan Pappé eloquently explains, Zionism is collapsing. The final nail in the coffin comes from Israel’s own predictions of the climate cataclysm, the tide of flames that will render the land uninhabitable by the end of the century.

These are the politics of wasteland, wasteland in T.S. Eliot’s sense: both as an environmental desolation, a hell incarnate, but also as waste land, land full of waste, cultural waste, ethical waste, wasted lives, wasted hours, wasted lives, wasted dreams. The politics of wasteland all across the globe set in practice by the The Hollow Men.

Francesca Albanese shows us an alternative path for our species. This is the path of justice. But for there to be justice, there needs to be shame. Our leaders are not shameless: they are incapable of shame. Those are two different things. Without shame, without this first step to meaningful peace and coexistence, there is only historical force: what goes up comes down.

A heap of broken images

Gaza did not only ruin its occupier. The West currently lives through an institutional crisis unlike any in its history. Its institutions have been exposed as frauds and masks of capital, its media liars, its military butchers. Gaza brought down American Exceptionalism. It showcased the lengths intellectual, political, and business elites will go to protect their petty status and their privilege. It exposed the moral rot putrefying the absurdity, the incoherent brutality that goes for policy in 2025.

Gaza has endured the unspeakable. It cannot hold forever, but how dearly has it sold its life. Gaza leveled empires to ruins. The victory of the West — a degrading, vile, cruel, barbaric, racist, hollow victory over murdered children, pregnant women, starving elderly, over the sick, the hungry, the wounded, the poisoned, the amputated, the unborn, the neonate, the destitute — is the greatest defeat humanity has earned for itself since the perpetration of the Holocaust.

What does this say of us? All our history, all those supposed lessons, all our science, our philosophy, our poetry, our revolutions, our Marxism, our love thy neighbor, our thou shalt not kill, our religions, our poetry, our technology, our wokeism, that miserable, useless, pathetic, liberal-pleasing Newspeak word — all this failed to stop a mass extermination of human beings based on a racial premise. A genocide in plain sight.

The most harrowing images produced over twenty-two months did not stop it. The image of a father holding his decapitated baby in his hands; a boy covered in flames amid the bombed ruins of a hospital, still tethered to an IV; the images of Gaza City, a cruel echo of Hiroshima — all these images, recorded by journalists murdered, whose memory is slandered even after their assassinations, failed to halt the merciless killing. I really thought they would. I knew humanity could be cruel and terrible, but not this. Not this again.

This heap of broken images is all that is left of the West.

This week they murdered Anas al-Sharif (and those who believe the ludicrous claims that he was a member of Hamas, let them know that even if he was, being a member of any political organization, such as Democrats, Republicans, Likud, is not grounds for the targeted killing of a journalist in cold blood). While reading his last words, I was struck especially by this sentence, “I entrust you with Palestine – the jewel in the crown of the Muslim world, the heartbeat of every free person in this world.”

A heartbeat, in a time when humanity resembles ever more a corporate conglomerate, an automated killing machine incapable of feeling, uninterested in thinking, the mechanization of the human soul, the plastification of the human heart — amid all this death, and death in life, a heartbeat.

Palestine is a heartbeat within a paradigm. It is where all the cruelty, ignorance, and avarice of our time converge. Having disposed of a bankrupt liberalism beyond repair, Palestine has shown the main fight across the world is between an ultranationalism wedded to religious fanaticism, against an internationalist, progressive global movement for human rights. It is showcased in the struggle between Zionism and the incredible bravery of Jewish Voice For Peace and Independent Jewish Voices, movements whose religion, as Octavio Paz would say, humanizes their politics. I am awed by such secularist, pacifist movements. I can say I’ve proudly stood alongside them.

With her attempt to break the siege on Gaza, Greta Thunberg exposed how the climate crisis is inextricable from the genocide of Palestinians, from imperialism in general. For the same people who have burned the habitable conditions of the Earth (even as they so shamelessly pander the term Anthropocene, as though the whole of humanity perpetrated this cataclysm of the planet’s habitable systems, and not the imperialism associated with the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, the pathological levels of consumerism, as well as the military-industrial complex), are also the ones who perpetrate the massacres, directly or indirectly. Chevron, for instance, a company whose environmental crimes include an oil spill in the Amazon that led to stillbirths and deformities in the indigenous population, is also a direct profiteer of the genocide. Microsoft provides military software for the killers, while it builds AI infrastructure to be disgustingly powered by coal and fossil fuels. Genocide and climate crisis have a common denominator: they are good for business. The destruction of nature is the destruction of human beings.

Through the tears, the pain, the rage, the nausea I have felt daily for two years straight, the wreckage of humanity and hope, the ruins of everything I ever believed — there is the heartbeat that is Palestine. There is only ever the choice between the politics of wasteland, the blood-stained desolation of ash and howling pain, and a vision of utopia, utopia as nothing more than what the painter Nabil Anani reveals to be endless groves of olive trees, silver-haired, shimmering.