New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently said that the two-state solution in Israel/Palestine is, if not already dead, “in hospice.” Now it’s time for news reporters at his paper and other mainstream U.S. media, to look squarely at how and why two states is no longer possible. Instead, the two-state solution is supposedly still the ideal — for the U.S. government, among others. The headline after the U.S. Secretary of State’s arrival in Israel yesterday was, predictably: “Blinken reaffirms need for two-state solution after talks with Netanyahu.”

Once again, the U.S. mainstream media is missing — or covering up — a central reason that Israel carried out a preemptive attack on Gaza, killing 46 people, including 16 children. Yair Lapid used the attack to go ahead of Benjamin Netanyahu in polling in the election campaign.

In attacking the Harvard Crimson for endorsing BDS, Larry Summers and Alan Dershowitz deny a core reality: “If there is ever to be even a minimally just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the most important prerequisite, is the Israeli recognition that their historical narrative of the conflict is largely mythological and that they have incurred an overwhelming moral obligation… to reach a peace settlement with the Palestinian people.”

The media routinely state that Hamas wants to eradicate Israel. Some of the mystery about Hamas’s goals is surely because the organization is treated as a pariah. U.S. diplomats are prohibited from talking to it openly, the U.S. government calls it a terrorist organization, and the New York Times and other mainstream U.S. media outlets rarely if ever try to interview its leaders or listen to its supporters.

Dennis Ross gets to trash Yasser Arafat on NPR: “Defiance is very much a part of the historic Palestinian narrative.” And the popular show, “Fresh Air,” offers no Palestinian perspective when Ross blames breakdown of peace talks on Yasser Arafat.

The comments in the mainstream media after the Capitol insurrection — that political violence is somehow un-American but worthy of Arab countries or “banana republics” — show an ignorance of U.S. history. The U.S. has regularly visited violence on other societies and has a rich history of domestic violence too.

Jerome Slater’s new “Mythologies Without End” is an indispensable, compelling guide to the truths behind the myths in Israel, Palestine and the Mideast.

Liberal Zionists’ moral problem is that they are so wed to “the right of the Jewish people to a state” they seek to discredit any real program to pressure Israel for Palestinian rights. Liberal Zionists could maintain this contradiction when fighting Trump seemed more important to Americans than fighting rightwing Israel; but they have now lost this figleaf, and there is an urgent need for real action, not lip service, on Palestinian rightslessness.

“Unwilling to make territorial, symbolic, or other compromises, Israel has not merely missed but sometimes even deliberately sabotaged repeated opportunities for peace with the Arab states and the Palestinians,” writes Jerome Slater in his forthcoming book.

The following is an adapted excerpt of the Editors’ Note from The Goldstone Report: The…