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Does anyone over there really wants the 2SS?

What news on the Rialto? I’m afraid it’s all bleak. Elliott Abrams’s neoconservative rejection of the two-state solution is echoed on the left by Matt Berkman’s analysis: Nobody really wants it (though he’s not against its imposition by force). So some day the realist position in the Middle East may also be the idealist-democratic position: one man, one vote, one state. Give it five years or ten? And I say this as someone who entered this issue as a realist, who wants the whole dern mess off the U.S. plate and was willing to support Partition on that basis.

Berkman takes on the darling of the West, PA prime minister Salaam Fayyad:

Having come to power through a suspension of the democratic process, Fayyad’s popular support leaves much to be desired. According to a poll released last month, only 26 percent of Palestinians consider his government the PA’s legitimate successor (slightly less than the Gaza-based Hamas regime of Ismail Haniyeh). Fayyad himself lacks any real constituency outside the international donor community. His political party attracted only 2.5 percent of the vote in the most recent parliamentary election (which brought Hamas to power), and he’s been known to outrage other Palestinian factions with what they perceive as overly conciliatory gestures to Israel, including his apparent renunciation of the Palestinian “right of return” during an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz last Friday.

While, for the West, Fayyad’s crowning achievement has been the creation of a durable Palestinian security force capable of waging war on Hamas (something I described here), his Palestinian detractors understand these developments in radically different terms.

“Fayyad aims to project an image of a competent Palestinian administration,” writes Ali Abunimah. “But what is really taking shape in the West Bank today is a police state, where all sources of opposition or resistance real or suspected to either the PA regime, or the Israeli occupation are being systematically repressed by US-funded and trained Palestinian ‘security forces’ in full coordination with Israel.”

Khaled Amayreh, a noted Palestinian journalist, observed this week that "Human rights and civil liberties are virtually non-existent [in the West Bank] as the PA security agencies exercise absolute control over all aspects of life. People are unceremoniously fired from their jobs at the slightest suspicion regarding their political or ideological orientations. And the justice system is in a state of chronic paralysis due to the often wanton interference by the security apparatus."

All of this speaks to a fact little acknowledged by pundits and analysts but tacitly recognized by the United States government — at least when it comes to the Palestinians — as early as 2006, when the Bush administration began orchestrating the overthrow of the elected Hamas government: namely, that the two-state solution as envisioned by the U.S. and the international community will never be implemented voluntarily, and can only be imposed by force on a resisting population (a fact that applies in equal measure to Israelis and Palestinians).

Which is not to say that the two-state solution is undesirable. It may in fact be the only alternative to perpetual warfare and apartheid-like conditions given Israel/Palestine’s zero-sum reality. But despite ideologically-motivated attempts to portray it otherwise, it’s not a popular solution, and it won’t come about democratically. Polls have long purported to show broad, mutual support for a two-state solution among Israelis and Palestinians. But this is a deception. Cheery journalistic framing almost always conceals irreconcilable differences that emerge upon closer examination.

when respondents were asked to evaluate a range of potential solutions to the problem of Jerusalem, majorities on both sides rejected every known compromise.

On the equally insoluble issue of refugees, a 2008 poll from the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion found that nearly 90 percent of Palestinian respondents rejected a solution that would require them to “waive” the Palestinian right of return, “even if the price would be the non-conclusion of an agreement” with Israel. Israelis, for their part, refuse to entertain even a symbolic recognition of Palestinian suffering as proposed by the Clinton Parameters, no less the limited repatriation of refugees that a pragmatic accommodation demands (see the OneVoice survey).

For proponents of the two-state solution, then, the problem is democracy itself. And with Palestinian democracy now extinguished and replaced — at least in the West Bank — with an increasingly efficient “two-statist” hegemony under Salam Fayyad, the international community has turned its attention to Israel, where the reactionary political forces that subverted Ehud Barak’s peace agenda in 2000 are rattling their sabers once more.

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