I have often called for American journalists to describe what is actually going on in the Palestinian territories so that Americans can understand that one government, Israel’s, controls the fate of all 13 million or so people living between the river and the sea. Well, here are two writers honestly dealing with the collapse of the two-state paradigm following the UN vote and Israel’s further expansion.
First, William Pfaff in the Chicago Tribune asks a question that no political leader here is touching now (and few liberal Zionists are, either).
What exactly is it that Israel intends to do with the Palestinians now in the territories that it has just opened for home construction for Jewish settlers, thereby extending its policy of occupying and annexing what are legally Palestinian lands?..
What do Prime Minister Netanyahu and his colleagues intend to do with the Palestinians? For the present, the latter are penned up in walled or barricaded enclosures on what they consider to be their own land, but the whole purpose of Israel’s national policy is to take that land away from them.
Moreover, left landless in ever-deteriorating conditions — and in a Greater Israel — the Palestinians would become apartheid victims robbed of hope. That would be a terrible inconvenience and an international disgrace, as well as an ethnic contradiction, in what Israeli patriots would expect to be seen as a triumphant All-Jewish State, the Israel of the Prophets.
…Perhaps the United States, the land of immigrants, would take the Palestinians in? One must ask Obama or congressional leaders. I would think, though, that the answer would be no. Europe already has more Muslim immigrants than it finds comfortable. But perhaps the Israelis could force them onto ships to go to Germany, which started all this?
It is a very serious question — what does Netanyahu think he is going to do with the Palestinians? There is an unthinkable solution. The better one would be for Israel, right now, to accept the two-state solution.
And in the “Two State Scam,” Mitchell Plitnick writes at Souciant that the two state solution was killed by indifference, because Israel had always worked to undermine the “peace process” with the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim.
the whole two-state process has been a charade to begin with: … bisecting the West Bank has been Israel’s plan for decades, and foreign leaders who looked at a map even once had to know this. In that case, the support for a peace process has always been about supporting a process, not about supporting peace….
To begin with, there’s no doubt that Israeli settlements in E-1 moot any real possibility of a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank. Ma’ale Adumim sits far out to the east, close to the Jordan River and forces anyone trying to drive from one side of E-1 to the other to go a long way around to avoid crossing into Israeli territory, if it should become fully part of Israel. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called construction in E-1 a “red line” and you can see why…
The monkey wrench in the works of the two-state solution was in place more than a decade and a half before a two-state solution was even a serious consideration. Is this something the international community, which has been peddling the notion that a viable Palestinian state was a real possibility, wants its various citizens to know?
This is what Bibi is blowing the top off of, and it is at least as much the source of the anger being directed at him as the very real potential consequences of building in E-1. …
But it is important to recognize, once and for all, what Ma’ale Adumim is, and what the controversy over E-1 actually reveals. There has never been a realistic chance at a two-state solution and there can’t be one as long as it is based on a vision where Ma’ale Adumim is still an Israeli “neighborhood.” It is a colony, and one that was built for a specific purpose: to make sure, at first, that Israel would maintain control of all of Jerusalem and, later, that a viable Palestinian state on the West Bank was not a serious possibility.
Any two-state solution that includes Gaza (as any such solution that will be acceptable to any significant number of Palestinians must do) already has a contiguity problem that is quite challenging. The West Bank, though, must be a viable unit, and this realization has been rhetorically acknowledged by every government involved in any way in the “peace process.” Yet the presence of Ma’ale Adumim has never been acknowledged as an obstacle; on the contrary, it was virtually given to Israel on a guaranteed platter.
The E-1 controversy shines a light on what a sham the peace process has been for two decades…
upon reading Robin Wright’s “After the revolution: The Arab Spring has given way to the hard realities of running countries”, op-ed, today’s LA Times –
the same as everywhere else, the arab spring is down to the knitty-gritty over
who rules
the divvying up of the spoils
the narrative?
about seizing the present, never letting go the past & to hell with the future
what about the people?
“trust us cause we know what’s best for you”
best actually being?
where one equals one
everyone’s in on whatever gets decided
planned & brought to completion
with those magical eighteen days in tahrir square?
remembering
so as not to get lost
I recall early in the “peace process”, when US conventional opinion was that at long last, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict was on its way to solution. Liberals and conservatives fell for it.
On the Left, James Weinstein of In These Times fell for it as well, and so did many other people.
Three notable exceptions were Alexander Cockburn and Edward Said (both writing in The Nation) and Noam Chomsky.
Edward Said pointed out that the “agreement” was a rehash of previous Israeli proposals. Said thought that the agreement was so bad that it would have been better not to have an agreement at all.
Chomsky identified it as The Allon Plan (named for Yigal Allon, previous Israeli foreign minister). And I think it was Cockburn who emphasized that Israel never promised to get out of the West Bank, and never promised to obey international law, never promised to follow the UN resolutions, and never promised to return to the 1967 boundaries. The only real commitment that Israel made was to talk. Israel continued to seize more land while continuing “the peace process”.
Well,well…..maybe there is something peeking thru finally.
And I say that about William Pfaff’s ‘bluntness’ in his writing…..no pc tiptoeing around, no bs to it.
We need more bluntness, more edge, more calling a liars liars and hypocrites hypocrites—-no more weasley words…like ‘disputed territory’, etc.etc..
Plitnick should alter his ……”support for a peace process has always been about supporting a process, not about supporting peace’… to read….. “support for the peace process has always been about supporting Israel’s theft of Palestine land”.
Because the peace “processors’ have damn well known for decades that was the peace talk deal…they were f****** seeing the theft going on every day, month, year.
Zionists, on the right and “left,” have never deviated an iota from their original plan to build Greater Israel.
The Mideast peace process and the two-state solution, which have been under the control of “liberal Zionists” (that, closet Likudniks or Likud moles) under both Democratic and Republican regimes, were consciously and deliberately designed as a stalling tactic and con game from the very beginning.
As soon as Barack Obama and Joe Biden revealed early in their first term that they might be serious about pursing the two-state solution, liberal Zionists like Aaron David Miller and billionaire Ronald Lauder, in cooperation with AIPAC and Democratic big donors, pulled the rug out from under them.
No doubt Barack Obama is still trying to digest the full implications of the number that was done on him. By now he must realize that he can’t trust any liberal Zionist in the Democratic Party.
Israel has three options for dealing with Palestinians living within Greater Israel: kill them, expel them or enslave them.
From the Israeli standpoint, the best option is mass expulsion under the cover of a generalized war between the West and Islam (the Clash of Civilizations) — that is the scenario that neoconservatives have been developing for several decades now — and which received a major push forward when they were gifted with their New Pearl Harbor — 9/11 and the 9/11 anthrax attacks.