Sandy Tolan has some more advice for George Mitchell – "listen to people who are thinking beyond two-state options, and foster an openness and creativity
absent from American diplomacy since the beginning of this tragedy 60 years ago."
Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Tolan declares "the two-state solution is on its deathbed." He outlines some familiar statistics:
Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat famously shook hands on
the White House lawn, there were 109,000 Israelis living in settlements
across the West Bank (not including Jerusalem). Today there are
275,000, in more than 230 settlements and strategically placed
"outposts" designed to cement a permanent Jewish presence on
Palestinian land.
•The biggest Israeli settlement outside East
Jerusalem, Ariel, is now home to nearly 20,000 settlers. Their home
lies one third of the way inside the West Bank, yet the Israeli
"security barrier" veers well inside the occupied territory to wrap
Ariel in its embrace. The settlement's leaders proclaim confidently
that they are "here to stay," and embark on frequent missions to seek
new waves of American Jews to move to the settlement.
•A massive Israeli infrastructure to serve and
protect the settlements – military posts, surveillance towers, and
settlers-only "bypass roads" that allow Israelis easy access to prayer
in Jerusalem or the seaside in Tel Aviv – has cut the West Bank into
tiny pieces, fragmenting Palestinian life.
•To maintain separation between West Bank Arabs
and West Bank Jews, Israel has erected more than 625 roadblocks,
checkpoints, and other barriers – a 70 percent increase since 2005 in a
land the size of Delaware, the second-smallest state. Israelis rarely
encounter such obstacles, but Palestinians seeking to travel between
villages and towns must seek permits, and even then, a short journey
can take hours.
•Israel's "suburbs" in Arab East Jerusalem, home
now to nearly 200,000 Jews, form a concrete ring, isolating the
would-be Palestinian capital from the rest of the West Bank. It is
therefore increasingly difficult to imagine how a Palestinian president
would govern from a capital that is sealed off from the people of his
nation.
years, rendered the two-state solution all but impossible.
On the same day this article ran, we pointed out similar issues and the US role in promoting these "facts on the ground" here on Mondoweiss. These sentiments have almost become commonplace in the US media recently (its been know in Palestine for years). More and more people are realized that the Israeli occupation has become nearly permanent as demonstrated by the recent 60 Minutes story.
Like the 60 Minutes piece, Tolan offers an overview of Israel's options – "the continuation of the status quo, which is growing
inexorably into apartheid; or, expulsion of West Bank Palestinians to
Jordan, which is already being seriously discussed among Israelis" – but then puts another idea on the table, the one-state solution.
Yet it was no less a man than Albert Einstein who
believed in "sympathetic cooperation" between "the two great Semitic
peoples" and who insisted that "no problem can be solved from the same
level of consciousness that created it." A relative handful of Israelis
and Palestinians are beginning to survey the proverbial new ground,
considering what Einstein's theories would mean in practice. They might
take heart from Einstein's friend Martin Buber, the great philosopher
who advocated a binational state of "joint sovereignty," with "complete
equality of rights between the two partners," based on "the love of
their homeland that the two peoples share."
Even though Tolan uses examples from the past, its clear the discourse is moving forward.
(Adam Horowitz)
