Forget the two-state solution. Israelis and Palestinians must share the land. Equally.

There is no longer a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Forget the endless arguments about who offered what and who spurned whom and
whether the Oslo peace process died when Yasser Arafat walked away from the
bargaining table or whether it was Ariel Sharon's stroll through the Al Aqsa
Mosque in Jerusalem that did it in.

By Saree Makdisi.
All that matters are the facts on the ground, of which the most important is
that -- after four decades of intensive Jewish settlement in the Palestinian
territories it occupied during the 1967 war -- Israel has irreversibly cemented
its grip on the land on which a Palestinian state might have been created.

Sixty years after Israel was created and Palestine was destroyed, then, we are
back to where we started: Two populations inhabiting one piece of land. And if
the land cannot be divided, it must be shared. Equally.

This is a position, I realize, which may take many Americans by surprise. After
years of pursuing a two-state solution, and feeling perhaps that the conflict
had nearly been solved, it's hard to give up the idea as unworkable.

But unworkable it is. A report published last summer by the United Nations
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs found that almost 40% of the
West Bank is now taken up by Israeli infrastructure -- roads, settlements,
military bases and so on -- largely off-limits to Palestinians. Israel has
methodically broken the remainder of the territory into dozens of enclaves
separated from each other and the outside world by zones that it alone controls
(including, at last count, 612 checkpoints and roadblocks).

Moreover, according to the report, the Jewish settler population in the occupied
territories, already approaching half a million, not only continues to grow but
is growing at a rate three times greater than the rate of Israel's population
increase. If the current rate continues, the settler population will double to
almost 1 million people in just 12 years. Many are heavily armed and
ideologically driven, unlikely to walk away voluntarily from the land they have
declared to be their God-given home.

These facts alone render the status of the peace process academic.

At no time since the negotiations began in the early 1990s has Israel
significantly suspended the settlement process in the occupied Palestinian
territories, in stark violation of international law. It preceded last
November's Annapolis summit by announcing the fresh expropriation of Palestinian
property in the West Bank; it followed the summit by announcing the expansion of
its Har Homa settlement by an additional 307 housing units; and it has announced
plans for hundreds more in other settlements since then.

The Israelis are not settling the occupied territories because they lack space
in Israel itself. They are settling the land because of a long-standing belief
that Jews are entitled to it simply by virtue of being Jewish. "The land of
Israel belongs to the nation of Israel and only to the nation of Israel,"
declares Moledet, one of the parties in the National Union bloc, which has a
significant presence in the Israeli parliament.

Moledet's position is not as far removed from that of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
as some Israelis claim. Although Olmert says he believes in theory that Israel
should give up those parts of the West Bank and Gaza densely inhabited by
Palestinians, he also said in 2006 that "every hill in Samaria and every valley
in Judea is part of our historic homeland" and that "we firmly stand by the
historic right of the people of Israel to the entire land of Israel."

Judea and Samaria: These ancient biblical terms are still used by Israeli
officials to refer to the West Bank. More than 10 years after the initiation of
the Oslo peace process, which was supposed to lead to a two-state solution, maps
in Israeli textbooks continued to show not the West Bank but Judea and Samaria
-- and not as occupied territories but as integral parts of Israel.

What room is there for the Palestinians in this vision of Jewish entitlement to
the land? None. They are regarded, at best, as a demographic "problem."

The idea of Palestinians as a "problem" is hardly new. Israel was created as a
Jewish state in 1948 only by the premeditated and forcible removal of as much of
the indigenous Palestinian population as possible, in what Palestinians call the
Nakba, or catastrophe, which they commemorate this week.

A Jewish state, says Israeli historian Benny Morris, "would not have come into
being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. ... There was no choice but
to expel that population." For Morris, this was one of those "circumstances in
history that justify ethnic cleansing."

Thinking of Palestinians as a "problem" to be removed predates 1948. It was
there from the moment the Zionist movement set into motion the project to make a
Jewish state in a land that, in 1917 -- when the British empire officially
endorsed Zionism -- had an overwhelmingly non-Jewish population. The only Jewish
member of the British government at the time, Edwin Montagu, vehemently opposed
the Zionist project as unjust. Henry King and Charles Crane, dispatched on a
fact-finding mission to Palestine by President Wilson, concurred: Such a project
would require enormous violence, they warned: "Decisions, requiring armies to
carry out, are sometimes necessary, but they are surely not gratuitously to be
taken in the interests of a serious injustice."

But they were. This is a conflict driven from its origins by Zionism's exclusive
sense of entitlement to the land. Has there been Palestinian violence as well?
Yes. Is it always justified? No. But what would you do if someone told you that
there was no room for you on your own land, that your very existence is a
"problem"? No people in history has ever gone away just because another people
wanted them to, and the sentiments of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull live on among
Palestinians to this day.

The violence will end, and a just peace will come, only when each side realizes
that the other is there to stay. Many Palestinians have accepted this premise,
and an increasing number are willing to give up on the idea of an independent
Palestinian state and embrace instead the concept of a single democratic,
secular and multicultural state, which they would share equally with Israeli
Jews.

Most Israelis are not yet reconciled this position. Some, no doubt, are
reluctant to give up on the idea of a "Jewish state," to acknowledge the reality
that Israel has never been exclusively Jewish, and that, from the start, the
idea of privileging members of one group over all other citizens has been
fundamentally undemocratic and unfair.

Yet that is exactly what Israel does. Even among its citizens, Israeli law
grants rights to Jews that it denies to non-Jews. By no stretch of the
imagination is Israel a genuine democracy: It is an ethno-religiously exclusive
state that has tried to defy the multicultural history of the land on which it
was founded.

To resolve the conflict with the Palestinians, Israeli Jews will have to
relinquish their exclusive privileges and acknowledge the right of return of
Palestinians expelled from their homes. What they would get in return is the
ability to live securely and to prosper with -- rather than continuing to battle
against -- the Palestinians.

They may not have a choice. As Olmert himself warned recently, more Palestinians
are shifting their struggle from one for an independent state to a South
African-style struggle that demands equal rights for all citizens, irrespective
of religion, in a single state. "That is, of course," he noted, "a much cleaner
struggle, a much more popular struggle -- and ultimately a much more powerful
one."

I couldn't agree more.

Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA and
the author of "Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation," out this month
from W.W. Norton.

  Los Angeles Times May 11, 2008

source:

http://iraqwar.mirror-world.ru/article/164303