Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli gov’t official, suggests the imposition of the two-state solution in a piece at Politico. Myself I wonder if it is not too late for that. Pinkas makes a typical error:
The [peace] process inevitably grew into a bureaucracy. The less the process accomplished, the bigger the bureaucracy grew.
It turned into an industry, with all the recognizable attributes: executives, strategists, tacticians, analysts, designers, experts, workers, lobbyists, public relations people, industry-media and investors — the works.
It was intoxicating and consuming. Hundreds of diplomats, ex-generals and politicians in the Middle East, the United States and around the world devoted careers to it.
It drained all intellectual and political energy. It morphed into a sort of quasi-religion, with believers and adherents, as Aaron David Miller wrote in his smart, candid article for Foreign Policy.
Except for one small thing: There was no product.
Actually there was a product: More settlements, more colonization, further occupation. Americans were in on it, and this was a real product with a real effect. It seems to have ended the possibility of a viable Palestinian state in the fragment of the land left to them. This is a power struggle. I don’t see how you create equity in Israel/Palestine without some profound shift in the power balance. That is where the U.S. comes in, or could.
