Is There Hope for a Two-State Solution?

By NASEER ARURI( Chancellor Professor (Emeritus) at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Author of Dishonest Broker, published by South End Press, Cambridge, MA.

Perhaps it is more appropriate to begin with the question of whether a two-state settlement has ever been possible and/or viable at anytime at all since 1948. This essay begins by delineating the salient factors which dealt a severe blow to the two-state solution. The long diplomatic paralysis and the impediments to a two-state solution, are embedded in the “peace process” itself, and in the ongoing Zionist consensus that pre-1948 Palestine from the River Jordan to he Mediterranean Sea should be a single state under exclusive Israeli sovereignty. In fact, the real function of the “peace process” has been to Shelter Israel from the threat of peace. The peace process is a misnomer that has enabled Israel to escape its obligations to the Palestinian people under international law. Instead, such obligations have been effectively replaced by Israeli decrees presented as American peace initiatives.

As long as the termination of the Israeli occupation is not on the active Israeli agenda, and as long as the political forces in Israel are united in their rejection of a contiguous, viable and practicable Palestinian state, Peace will not be at hand. As long as this consensus aims to destroy the political and national existence of the whole Palestinian community, and deny it the possibility of self-determination, there will be no more than one Israeli state in historic (mandatory) Palestine. This policy, known as “politicide,” may also include partial or total ethnic cleansing. The late Israeli professor, Tanya Rienhart, wrote that “the only two choices the Israeli political system has generated for the Palestinians are apartheid or ethnic cleansing (transfer). Apartheid is the 'enlightened' Labour party's program (as in the Allon or Oslo plan), while the other pole is advocating slow suffocation of the Palestinians, until the eventual ‘transfer’ (mass expulsion) can be accomplished. This is what Israel has been doing to the Palestinian people, persistently since 1948 —destroying the very fabric of the Palestinian nation. Why has peace been such a threat to Israeli leaders?
Counterpunch (via the Palestinian Pundit)