Posted on April 17, 2012, by & filed under News.


Letas say it clearly and categorically: the two-state solution is dead. If the possibility ever genuinely existed _ a subject historians are welcome to debate _ it is gone as a political option. We should even stop talking about it because constant reference to an irrelevant _solution_ only confuses the discussion.

How do we get to such an unequivocal pronouncement? Well, it only takes a little digging into the positions behind the official words and the ability to decipher the _codes_ in which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is couched to arrive at the unsurprising and straightforward conclusion that Israel has no intention of allowing a viable and truly sovereign Palestinian state to emerge even on the 22% of historic Palestine that is the Occupied Territory. But Israel does not rely solely on its political opposition to a _genuine_ two-state solution _ that is, one on which a Palestinian state arises on all the territory occupied in 1967, even if that is desired and the refugee issue can be somehow finessed _ to carry the day. It has laid over the Occupied Territory a matrix of control anchored in its all-encompassing settlement project to effectively foreclose that option. Finally, Israel relies on Europe, but even more so on the United States, to fend off any international initiatives that might result in a two-state solution.

To nail down Israelas opposition to a two-state solution and the measures it has taken _on the ground_ to eliminate it, letas use two occasions where the Israeli government was forced to spell out its positions as our points of departure……read further here on the AMEU (Americans for Middle East Understanding) website, where it was originally posted.