Gideon Rachman, a usually sensible commentator on world affairs for the Financial Times, has come out with “Israel, Palestine and the mirage of the two-state solution”. Its analysis is sober enough, but it does what one has seen for decades: it skirts the obvious, i.e., it refuses—in the name of (an illusory) objectivity—to call for Israel to give up the very thing that’s necessary for the two-state solution to become reality.
“Israel and Hamas are bitter enemies.” True enough. “Neither … has any real interest in a ‘two-state solution’.” While also true, this leads the reader to infer, mistakenly, that there are two sides with roughly equal bargaining power. And it avoids the crux, which is Israel’s occupation of land and people not belonging to it, and its subjugation of both by military force (and all the usual pleasantries that come with that).
It is the crux because, for the two-state solution—agreed as far back as 1948—to not be a mirage requires Israel, the occupying power, to give up the occupation and agree to the creation of a Palestinian state. Israel has consistently refused to do this, all while bullying the Europeans and Americans into impotently standing by while Israel has worked energetically to make the two-state solution the mirage that Rachman says it is.
Menachem Begin made it clear to Reagan in 1980 [sic]—a clarity reflected in the current Israeli government’s official policy—that Israel will never agree to an independent Palestinian state west of the Jordan River. Yet, ever since, Europeans and Americans have beaten their heads against this clarity by encouraging and pleading with all sides on the need for a negotiated settlement.
To the extent, then, that there is a mirage it’s one that the West has created and allowed to flourish. Europeans finance the Palestinians (presumably out of a guilt that acknowledges the injustice of unqualified support for Israel), while Washington occasionally scolds Israel but, substantively, behind the headlines, supports every Israeli move related to the occupation, including collective punishment and land theft (politely, “expropriation”).
Rachman says the “conditions for a two-state deal are … far worse” now than they were 30 years ago. “But that was before the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank [and] two Palestinian intifadas and terrorism inside Israel.” Once again this ignores cause and effect. Palestinians were reacting to yet another Israeli provocation, one intended to make the two-state solution impossible.
Rachman concludes that “[t]here are many reasons to doubt whether Israel would ever deliver” on “more substantive … commitments to a future Palestinian state”. True. But the only reasons that matter are (i) as it has long made clear, Israel will never agree to such a thing; and (ii) Europe and, especially, the US will continue to refuse to impose the two-state solution on parties spectacularly incapable of coming up with one on their own.
As Israel’s destruction of the economic infrastructure of nearly three million people—made possible by some 15,000 (and counting) American bombs and white phosphorus, and which, as if it mattered, qualifies as a war crime—continues, the absence of explicit calls for Israel to end the occupation makes it obvious that, rhetoric notwithstanding, even Europe and the US don’t want a two-state solution. That’s reality, not a mirage.
