14/12/2025
Yesterday, we attended an event organised by The Rights Forum, a Dutch organisation founded by former Prime Minister Dries van Agt with the aim of defending the rights of Palestinians and working to end the Israel–Palestine conflict. The speakers at this event were American-Palestinian journalist Mariam Barghouti and British-Israeli historian Ilan Pappé. The full recording of the event is available on the website of The Rights Forum: https://rightsforum.org/livestream-13-dec/
Both speakers offered valuable insights in their talks and during the Q&A session. We would like to share one particular quote from Professor Pappé, however, because we profoundly believe that a one-state solution is the most just and realistic solution to this decades-long conflict. Despite the fact that, at this moment in time, any possible solution seems as distant as ever, these words are very hopeful:
“Before 1948, , , and coexisted peacefully in — and not only in Palestine, but in the Levant and the Eastern Mediterranean altogether. This is the right model for the future, not the model of a Palestinian bantustan next to a state — the so-called two-state solution — which should be buried deep in the ground.
We need the past, in many ways, to direct us and make sure that we are going back to the genuine coexistence between different groups, living together peacefully as they did before. Without idealising it, but we’re saying: this is a normal life, and then you can deal with other problems.
The most urgent issue we have here is that — especially now, maybe always, but especially now — Zionism became an ideology that drives to seek the annihilation and elimination of Palestinians as a people, as a nation, as a country; to expunge them out of history and their homeland.
Our role is to stop this and to defend the Palestinians from that kind of planning and that kind of ideology. The moment we succeed in doing that, I do believe that, as normal human beings, we will find a way to build the infrastructures needed for a better life between Jews and Arabs, Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Palestine — and not only in Palestine, but in the rest of the Middle East.”
