The formal death of the two-state solution makes a bi-national state inevitable - the best way forward for both peoples.
In the immediate aftermath of Mahmoud Abbas' symbolic victory
at the UN of official recognition for the state of Palestine, Israeli
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu took concrete steps to ensure that
such a separate and independent state would never come into existence.
With the announcement of the construction of 3,000 new settlement units in E1,
the last unsettled land connecting the theoretical future Palestinian
capital of East Jerusalem with the West Bank, the Israeli government has
severed these territories and formally put an end to the possibility of
a two-state solution to the conflict.
In the words of Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayad, the
construction in E1 is "the last nail in the coffin" of the peace
process, while Daniel Seidemann of the Jerusalem-based Israeli NGO
described it as "a doomsday scenario" and "the fatal heart-attack of the two-state solution".
With this announcement, it can be said that the plan for peace agreed
to by both sides in the Oslo Accords; the vision of two peoples living
side-by-side in two wholly separate states, has finally been
extinguished by an increasingly right-wing Israeli polity in which the
settler movement has gone from fringe to mainstream in a few short decades.
The question to be asked now is, "What comes next?" What is the way
forward now that the status quo roadmap for the future has been
overturned?
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