LEILA FARSAKH This paper reexamines the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and the extent to which a viable two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was ever truly possible. Such a reexamination seems all the more pertinent today on the hundredth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. It is also seventy years since the United Nations Partition Plan to divide historic Palestine and fifty years since UN Security Council Resolution 242, which has been the basis for every peace agreement between Israel and its neighbors but makes no mention of or reference to the Palestinian people. The paper argues that the history of the past fifty years reinforces the claim that a State is central to any attempt to fight Palestinian erasure and ensure “the right to have rights,” as Hannah Arendt put it, but it argues that such an entity needs to be elevated above the nation, rather than made subservient to it if it is to protect the rights of Palestinians and all those living on the land of Palestine. IN HIS “REMARKS ON THE MIDDLE EAST” made in December 2016, then outgoing U.S. secretary of state John Kerry warned that “the status quo is leading towards one state and perpetual occupation.” The growth of settlements in the West Bank, Kerry cautioned, was putting the two-state solution “in serious jeopardy, ” making “a contiguous Palestinian state impossible.” Kerry reminded his audience that such a state had been endorsed by the international community and was in the interest not only of Israel and the region as a whole but also of the United States. 1 A careful reexamination of the past fifty years reveals, however, that a two-state paradigm was never a viable option to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and that partition could not deliver the Palestinians their basic political rights. Such a reexamination is all the more pertinent as we commemorate not only the hundredth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration but also fifty years since United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 242, which has formed the basis of every peace settlement between Israel and its neighbors after the 1967 June War. UNSC Resolution 242 makes no mention either of the Palestinians or of their internationally protected rights. It is also silent about UN General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution 181, known as the Partition Plan, whose seventieth anniversary is also commemorated in 2017. This paper argues that the two-state paradigm was never a viable option because rather than hold Israel accountable to international law, the international community accepted Zionism’s Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. XLVII, No. 1 (Autumn 2017), p. 56, ISSN: 0377-919X; electronic ISSN: 1533-8614. © 2017 by the Institute for Palestine Studies. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2017.47.1.56. 56 || Journal of Palestine Studies The “Right to Have Rights”: Partition and Palestinian Self-Determination