CHOPPING PALESTINE INTO two tiny, unequal nations, despite US President’s Barack Obama’s avid support and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s predictable rhetorical bullying, is a medieval leap backward for a Mediterranean world disorder that will never lead to peace.

In Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine, published in 2007, Ghada Karmi advances the bold humanist agenda of one democratic, secular state in the whole of former British Mandated Palestine.

Karmi, a Palestinian by birth who today works as a physician, academic, and media commentator in Britain, has synopsised a hundred years of Middle Eastern history in taut, muscular prose.

The work has been published by Africanist-turned-publisher, Roger van Zwanenberg, a former History Department Chair at the University of Nairobi and anti-Zionist Jew.

Yet despite international outrage at the continued suffering endured by Palestinians — the latest massacre in Gaza in 2008-9 left over 1,400 dead — conventional wisdom continues to trump justice. Why?

To the victor belong the spoils of history. Since 1948, Israel has lived within the comfort zone of Western moral authority while since the 1960s Palestine has ceased to exist — four million people written out of history.

After the demise of European Jewry in the Second World War, that lost Jewish world “rose from the ashes” in Palestine.

From Western nations steeped in Holocaust guilt to Christian Evangelicals giving a geopolitical face to Biblical prophecy, the circle of Western players infected with the Zionist fallacy was complete.

For decades, tendentious screeds and polemical rants poured from the world’s presses dismissing and misrepresenting occupied Palestine’s anti-colonial struggle.

By 1968, Uri Avnery, “Israel’s conscience,” had produced Israel Without Zionism, calling for two-states while the late Edward Said, Palestine’s scholarly face also was resigned to “equal sovereignty in Palestine.”

Karmi’s examination of the colonisation of Palestine has special resonance for East Africa. During the 19th century, “little Europes” as socialist collectives were created around the world that stretched from New York to the Tana River Delta; in 1847 the Oneida Community established near Syracuse and the Freelanders at a short-lived colony outside Lamu.

BEGINNING IN THE 1880S, THE Jewish population in Palestine increased through the influx of Jews fleeing anti-Semitic pogroms in Eastern Europe. Initially the left-leaning Jewish collectives called kibbutzim seemed attractive even to progressives.

Karmi recalls the witty response of two rabbis sent out in 1897 to explore Palestine for possible colonisation. Cabling back to Europe, they reported: “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.” Karmi mentions the Zionist in l902.

THE PROPOSAL OF A ZIONIST colony in British East Africa is the subject of A farm called Kishinev (2005) by Kenyan author Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye; a fictionalised account of a Jewish family who took up farming near Eldoret after escaping a Russian pogrom in Kishinev near Odessa.

Reviewing the Biblical themes that have been cleverly woven into Zionist ideology, Karmi examines European Jewry’s alleged ancestral land in Palestine — the Zion of 2500 BC, whose provenance as a geographical entity is hard to establish.

Writes Karmi, “[t]he way that Zionism connected the Old Testament stories of an ancient Israelite tribe that once lived in Palestine with a modern community of Jews in Europe — such that the latter’s ‘return’ to ‘their ancient homeland’ seemed natural and just — was nothing short of genius.”

In the interim period (2500BC-1919AD) the principal cities of Jerusalem, Nablus, Acre, Jaffa, Nazareth, Jericho and Haifa all had been built by Palestinians first as Arabs and then as part of the Ottoman Empire until 1919, when the area entered the British sphere of influence.

In 1948, the year of the creation of Israel, the Palestinian Arab majority of two million was radically “downsized” as 780,000 Palestinians were dispossessed of land and houses — swelling to two million refugees in camps today around the Arab world. Some 400 Arab villages were razed and 23,766 Arab homes demolished.

Reviewing the Balfour Declaration of 1917 calling for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, Karmi sees Britain’s Victorian attitudes toward Jews in microcosm.

Since the 1840s, the Christian Zionist movement had advanced a literal reading of the Bible — on the restoration of an Israel to Britain’s Jews — as an essential condition for the Second Coming of Christ and the redemption of all Christians.

A second veiled purpose was the removal of Jews from Britain. Few know of Balfour’s previous Aliens Act of 1905 that barred the entry of Jewish immigrants to Britain. Hence, paradoxically, “It was possible for anti-Semitism in English society to co-exist with Christian Zionism.”

During the same period Christian Zionism had also spread to the US, with American evangelicals promoting the “restoration” of Jews to Palestine.

Far more important than either notions of ancestral land or Christian Zionism were the “feelings of guilt [the Holocaust] engendered.”

Having gassed six million Jews in concentration camps in the space of five years (1940-1945) the Western powers now gave carte blanche to Israel to do anything “to survive.” Why, Karmi asks, do Palestinians have to suffer for European anti-Semitism?

KARMI COMPREHENSIVELY chronicles the “mean-spirited” international and regional efforts to resolve the conflict with their minimal offers to the Palestinians in return for their land from the first UN Security Council Resolution 242 in 1967 when “Israel was being awarded an almost instant conversion from regional pariah status to regional legitimacy” down to the day.

That alone makes this book compulsive reading.