Mahmud Abbas: "Is This a Pen I See Before Me?"

Once again, the great charade. The endless shuttles, the brinksmanship. A Middle East “peace process” is, well, in process.

It is all so familiar now. All the details – including the lack of details – are there, warmed over from Oslo, from Madrid, from Clinton’s Camp David.

But IS it a charade? Maybe not. Perhaps Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thinks she can finish the work her husband Bill failed to finish at Camp David in 2000.

The big question (as ever) is: can the Palestinians be made, this time, to sign the unconditional surrender document that is there on the table?

Does Hillary perhaps carry in her purse or briefcase the very pen – an elegant Montblanc fountain pen, perhaps – that poor old Yasser Arafat finally refused to take up with his palsied hand at Camp David? Does she think that Mahmud Abbas, another old man, can be made to take the pen and sign?

She seems to. The effort is serious. The Europeans have been arrayed. The ever-serviceable Tony Blair was moved into position three years ago, as the Special Envoy representing the Quartet (the U.S., the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations). Blair is thus able to tell Abbas he can expect no help to come from other quarters. Mubarak as well is in position, presumably with the same message. Meanwhile, George Mitchell, yet another old man, toggles between Ramallah and Jerusalem pretending tirelessly that this is a process of negotiation between equals.

How does Abbas feel about it all? Is it my imagination that he looks profoundly sad as he is made to walk with the real power-holders down a White House hallway?

He surely worries about that pen, ready for his hand. He must remember so well the fate of his old comrade-in-arms, Yasser Arafat. Arafat was brought to Camp David with a promise that, should the talks fail, the failure would not be hung around his neck. He was presented with a deal which, the Americans would have said, was the best deal the Palestinians could ever hope for. (Undoubtedly the Palestinians are frequently reminded that each deal they rejected in the past was better than the next one.) President Clinton seemed to believe. He apparently trusted his two managers of the Camp David process (Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk) even though both had long and deep ties to Israel’s expansionist governments. Big, bluff, charismatic Bill Clinton then held the pen and urged Arafat to sign. Surely Bill would not lend himself to a shameful and dishonest deal.

But it WAS a shameful and dishonest deal. The Israelis had not really made any solid commitments at all, either to the Americans or the Palestinians. The maps were vague. The percentages of withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories were dishonestly calculated. In fact, Palestinian territory would be broken into enclaves divided by the inexorably expansive processes of settlements, roads, nature preserves, security reserves, etc., as illustrated by the UN-OCHA map.

While words like sovereignty and independence were grandly used, the reality was that a Palestinian “state” would not have any of the essential attributes of sovereignty. It would be permanently disarmed. It would not have control of international boundaries (the Jordan valley would remain under Israeli control). It would not control its own airspace and sea space. It would not have security power over its “state” territory except over its own people, whom the “state” would be expected to keep under control. Astonishingly, the “state” would not even control Palestinian water resources, large proportions of which now go to Israel.

On top of that, as Arafat saw, all the obligations falling on Palestinians were front-loaded. Palestine would give up rights under international law immediately and for all time. (And these rights, and the refusal to surrender them, represent the only thing the Palestinians have to negotiate with.) Obligations falling on Israel, such as withdrawal of a large proportion of the smaller and more isolated settlements, not only were vague, but they were back-loaded: things that might happen in the future. Or might not. They would be dependent not only on the realities of Israeli politics (“Withdraw settlements? –are you crazy?”), but on the good behavior of Palestinians. Good behavior defined and judged by Israel, that is.

Unlike virtually every case of new statehood since 1945, Palestinian “statehood” would be probationary, not immediate. Quite possibly, for a very long time.

Arafat could not sign. He didn’t. Immediately, the “failure” of Camp David WAS hung around his neck. Subsequently, with no effective protest from the U.S., this aged nationalist leader was imprisoned in his offices, with Israeli bulldozers making the space smaller and smaller and uglier and uglier. The most humiliating circumstances of existence, including overflowing toilets, were arranged for his old age. Still he remained, an obstacle to the unconditional surrender that Israel wanted the Americans to arrange. Ariel Sharon was impatient, wanting to impose his own “final settlement” before he died. Arafat, old, palsied, maltreated, and seemingly feeble, did not cooperate by dying. Finally he did die, in France, in a way that seems to have mystified the French doctors who examined him before and after. We may never know the cause of death.

What a minefield Abbas must now traverse. If, in the face of Israel’s continued seizure of Palestinian land (humiliating for himself as also for the U.S.) he breaks off negotiations, how much different from Yasser Arafat’s will be his own fate? And how much more misery will be visited on the people of the West Bank and Gaza in Israel’s never ending (and so far never successful) effort to break their will?

But what else is possible for Abbas? He is Abu Mazen, for most of his life a representative of the anti-colonial aspirations of the Palestinian people. How can he be the one now to legitimize more than 40 years of oppression and land-theft by Israel?

Poor Mahmud Abbas. Perhaps this is a charade, soon to pass. But what it it’s not? If not, and if Hillary and Tony have their way, the pen WILL be put before him. When it is, the most powerful men and women of the world will be there, smiling and radiating good faith as they nudge him gently but oh-so-firmly in the pen’s direction. What to do? What to do?

Virginia Tilley on Two-State and One-State

The following article by Virginia Tilley -- on the multiple myths surrounding the proposed two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, and on the one-state solution which is the alternative -- was characterized by a friend as "amazing." That's what it is. If you don't read anything else on this subject, read this!
(Her article appeared originally in Global Research.)

The Two-State Solution and the Ruin in Gaza

by Virginia Tilley

Global Research, March 3, 2009

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12532

For several years, those of us warning that we already face a one-state solution in Israel-Palestine have been regularly dismissed as nay-sayers, ivory-tower intellectuals, and/or utopian crackpots. So it's noticeable when these dismissive comments begin to falter and flicker out.

True, over the same period we've heard rounds of worried agreement that if 'something' is not done, the two-state solution would be dead and one-state solution upon us within three months, or six months, or simply 'soon'. Most of those 'six-month' warnings were issued years ago but never seem to expire. The problem was that most people weren't sure what precise signal would tell them, beyond doubt, that the two-state option is truly defunct. All the diplomatic theatre-the Oslo Accords, the Road Map, Annapolis and the Paris Protocol-gave people such an impression of seriousness that they interpreted every new contradiction, like a doubling of the settlement population in the West Bank, as a mere 'impediment' or 'setback' to the supposed diplomatic process rather than evidence that it was all a sham. Bearing the burden of this increasing unreality show, the two-state project became less a real programme than a tenet of faith: however elusive it appears in reality, the two-state solution must be defended or 'saved', resuscitated as the 'only way'. Lofty rhetoric about 'sacrifice' on both sides added gravitas to this masquerade. No one knew what to do if the two-state notion finally collapsed, so no one wanted to say that it had.

The result has been dithering and delay. And Palestinian deaths. Always more deaths. But now it seems the tide has shifted, for Gaza and the Israeli elections have stripped away these last illusions. For what could failure look like, if not the rubble of Gaza? It is not just the shocking scale of the brutality, which belies any notion of a 'moderate' Israeli government or any good faith whatever on Israel's part. The whole attack was the direct result, a necessary component, and the final proof of the two-state fraud. How else could Israel have attacked Gaza so horribly, so cruelly, if security for Jewish settlements in the West Bank were not ensured through deals with Mr Abbas's Palestinian Authority? Yet how else could the Palestinian Authority enforce that security--that is, play the increasingly strained part of an 'interim governing authority'--without the two-state fig leaf? Only by ensuring that the PA was in position to suppress any mass uprising by outraged Palestinians in West Bank cities now suffocated by Jewish settlements could Israel dare to strike Gaza the way it did. So the two-state solution/illusion had to be kept alive in order to prop up the PA in order to attack Gaza.

But of course, the basic equation was also holding: Gaza had to be crushed in order to prop up the PA - for again, the last drive of settlement construction that will create Israel's new permanent borders requires security for West Bank settlements that only the PA can deliver, and Hamas threatened that filthy pact by exposing it for what it was. Now that Hamas has survived and the Abbas circle looks even more like tools and fools, we see 'unity' talks in Cairo. But we may be sure that these talks are allowed by Israel only to prop up the Abbas people up a little longer, just as the money is meant to do (e.g., of the US$900 million, not one dollar is for Gaza's reconstruction and all is channelled through PA or Fatah or other non-Hamas hands). Any deal struck in Cairo will fall apart as soon as Hamas again confronts the betrayals certain to follow-which will be quite soon, because Israel will not tolerate any mis-step by the Abbas circle, which for Israel always had only one raison d'être: to serve Israel's annexation of West Bank land.

So the two-state solution has had life only in Israeli government rhetoric and people read into that rhetoric what they wanted to believe. As one still-believing colleague protested to me last year, confronting the absence of any evidence for it, the two-state goal was "understood". After Gaza, the scales are falling away from people's eyes.

Still, it's worrisome that people are pronouncing the final death of the two-state solution partly because of the imminent ascendance in Israeli politics of Netanyahu and Lieberman. We must be clear about this, too: regarding Palestinians, no shred of difference exists between their policies and those of Livni and Barak. In any case, Netanyahu is an opportunist and says whatever will sell. When the Obama administration pressures him, and the diplomatic climate changes, he will go for whatever new version of Annapolis is cooked up and fill our media with earnest phrases about Israel's eternal innocence and laboured quest for peace. But nothing will change, whether he comes or goes, because Israel's policy goes deeper than Israeli electoral politics. The only change we can anticipate is one of style. The 'yes-but' chicanery of the Peres/Livni/Barak camp will morph into the 'no way' rhetoric of the Netanyahu/Lieberman camp, both presenting their rejectionism as Israel's tragic burden arising from Palestinian failures or betrayals. Whatever Palestinians do, neither camp has the slightest intention to do anything different in the West Bank except build settlements as fast as possible, take the land, shut the Palestinians behind the Wall, and finish the consolidation of Eretz Israel.

In fact, the idea that Livni and Barak ever meant to do anything different about the West Bank only falls for that famous old government ploy-Israel's plausible-deniability myth-that fanatical religious settlers actually drive the settlement's growth. The Israeli government has run the entire settlement operation-mapped, planned, funded, overseen, subsidised, and defended it - from the beginning. So let us not try to recreate that tinsel fiction for ourselves once again: that if only we had 'moderates' in the Israeli government we could 'keep the diplomatic process alive'. The 'moderates' brought us the carnage of Gaza and their intentions remain entirely clear, so let us have no more clinging to their lies and lip service and war crimes.

And let us have no more foolishness about Israel's security. Israel is overwhelmingly secure. It is as secure as the U.S. Army fighting Apaches on the western U.S. plains and crying foul at any white settler death. Where whites/Jews want the indigenous people's land, have overwhelming military power and capacity to take it, and see no reason to stop, what is needed to stop the government from cramming the people into Bantustans/reservations is not 'mediation' so the two sides can gain 'trust' and see each other as human beings, or indigenous collaboration to make whites 'secure', or indigenous recognition that the dominant state has a 'right to exist'. The only solution to such a power imbalance is to eradicate the state's claimed moral authority to destroy and rob and brutalise the outsider by changing the very relationship between state and outsider into something else. Native Americans did this too late, after too much was destroyed and stolen. The Palestinians can do it in time.

But this means getting serious and it means acting now.

The one-state solution is not a 'dream'. It is the only hope for real peace but it is also the grim reality we already face. The Israeli government knows this full well and also knows that the two-state façade is cracking. We see the bloody consequences of that knowledge in Gaza, where Israel deliberately created mayhem partly to derail Hamas and distract the world from the increasing transparency of the two-state lie. So there is nothing 'utopian' about this one-state reality. In South Africa, the one-state solution cost thousands of lives, particularly toward the end when the apartheid regime became desperate. As in South Africa, conditions in the one-state solution in Israel-Palestine are likely to get worse before they get better but also we have no guarantee that the struggle will come out well. It could go to ethnic cleansing and wars. It will come out well only if people shed their myths and get seriously busy.

The Myths That Must Go

Zionists myths are infamous, if increasingly tired and tattered: the Palestinians were not in Palestine when the Zionists arrived; Arab states told the Palestinians to flee in 1948; the Six-Day War was forced on Israel and so Israel has no obligation to withdraw from 'territories seized'; Israel is a nation-state like any nation-state; the occupation is not an occupation. Possibly the most dangerous myth still entertained by Zionists is that Israel can act on its own myths and somehow things will work out: that because the Palestinians have no just grievance in opposing Israel and so must be only backward fanatical (or gullible foolish) savages, Israel can bomb them into giving up their irrational anti-Jewish agendas. Zionists do not yet grasp that this tactic will never work-indeed, the myth is actually reinforced by Palestinian refusal to capitulate-because they must cling to all the other 'founding myths' to make moral sense of their ethnically cleansed state. The dogged public work of discrediting those myths in order to derail that self-deception must and will continue.

But Zionists aren't the only ones with myths. Let us lay ours out now, so that they can finally be identified for what they are and set aside like outgrown games.

The first myth is that Israel ever signed on to a two-state solution. Taking a magnifying glass to the texts of the Oslo Accords, Road Map, Annapolis and Paris Protocol, we find that Israel has not once - never, not in any deal, treaty, accord, or document of any kind - committed itself to a two-state solution. The only moment when it seemed to do so, in signing onto the Road Map, Israel put so many obviously impossible preconditions on the PA that Israel could rest easy that it would never be held to anything. So Israel isn't contradicting any formal commitment it has made by eradicating the basis for it. (Nor did Israel ever promise to abide by United Nations Resolutions 181, 194, 242, and 338, and that magnifying glass reveals that its admission to the UN was not conditioned on its allowing Palestinian refugees to return, either, but those are other issues.)

The second myth is that the US will ever make Israel withdraw from the West Bank. This is partly due to lack of political will and the Zionist lobby, but let's imagine for a moment that the Obama Administration gets serious enough, or desperate enough, to use some real leverage to force, say, a settlement freeze. It won't be enough, and not only because, at this point, a freeze is not enough. A major withdrawal is needed. But any Israeli governmental that attempted seriously to withdraw the big settlements (and mind, no Israeli government has ever agreed even to consider this) would betray whole sets of Zionist constituencies, cast the fragile Zionist pact about Jewish statehood into crisis, and split the Zionist national body down the middle. No external power can make any state willingly destroy its own national cohesion, for that is political suicide, and suicide is precisely what the Zionist dragon tail is now flailing around to avoid. In any case, there's not enough money to pull it off and Israel needs West Bank water desperately.

The third myth is that the Jewish national society that has been created in Israel will ever vanish. It will no more vanish than did Afrikaner society in South Africa (which, by the way, is flourishing today as never before). It is vital that the Palestinian national movement and solidarity movement accept this fact ideologically as well as pragmatically, for otherwise the one-state solution is ethnocidal in its premise and will never work. This might seem obvious but it strikes a deep bell of warning for Palestinian nationalist discourse: just as the 'Jewish state' cannot persist, the 'Arab state' of the Charter and Palestinian rhetoric can never form in Israel-Palestine. What forms must be something else and, as in South Africa, it must liberate all groups from the vicious grip of racism.

The fourth myth is that a one-state solution can march to secular triumph without the great Abrahamic faiths pitching in fully on the project. Religion here will not be shoved off into the private sphere. It must help lead this effort, not float in the background. But a linked myth is that people of those faiths do not have to deal seriously with the internal challenge of sorting out how to live a virtuous religious life in a multi-sectarian society. Christianity, Judaism and Islam can never 'win' in Palestine, or indeed find their greatest spiritual calling, without reaching for their noblest and most universal principles and putting them forward with all the certainty that faith enables, in this land that has suffered so bitterly from their past failures to do so.

The fifth myth is that the world will ever get behind Palestinian self-determination enough to give the Palestinians a viable separate state. This may seem counter-intuitive, especially for those recalling decolonisation in the 1960s or sensing the growth of the boycott campaign. But think: no major global movement has ever pitched in effectively behind someone else's self-determination struggle. (How much sleep have you lost over the Tamils lately?) If the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa had centred on 'Zulu self-determination' or 'Xhosa self-determination' instead of equal rights and anti-racism, apartheid would be operating here today. Apartheid was defeated by making claims on the world's conscience, and this was done by insisting on values shared by all-the fundamental equality of human beings in dignity and rights and the cruelty and illegitimacy of racist rule. We see that kind of real pressure emerging in Palestine at last, as the world views in horror the agony of Gaza. When Palestinians finally invoke those universal values directly, and demand equal rights in their homeland as citizens of a single unified non-ethnic state, they will find themselves tapping into that global force to degrees unprecedented in their political history, gaining not merely world sympathy but world passion.

Ironically, the voice that most forcefully argues this point is Ehud Olmert, who has cautioned that if Palestinians adopt a one-state anti-apartheid strategy, Israel is doomed. In April 2004, he warned that, "More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated, two-state solution, because they want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one. From a struggle against 'occupation,' in their parlance, to a struggle for one-man-one-vote. That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle - and ultimately a much more powerful one. For us, it would mean the end of the Jewish state." In November 2007, he said again: "If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished."

No wonder that Olmert and Livni and the whole machinery of Hasbara Zionist solidarity are pounding the table so hard about a two-state solution: it is their only defence against the collapse of ethnic statehood and real democracy. When one's opponent indicates the path to its certain defeat, one should pay attention.

Finally, we must set aside all those myths about the one-state solution itself: that it is easy, utopian, inevitable, impossible, will evolve naturally if we just wait, or - the most common myth -- that 'the Jews' will never accept it. The truth is that the one-state solution is difficult, dangerous, the only workable solution, the necessary solution, will take huge work to prevent it going wrong, and 'the Jews' will accept it. But for that to happen, the Palestinian nationalist vision and mission will have to embrace a new vision of a shared society and the international community must stop fiddling while Palestine burns. Either Israel or the Palestinians will seize and steer the one-state solution. What happened in Gaza tells us what Israel intends to do with that power. It must be taken back.

This new struggle will convey tremendous political strength to the liberation movement. In Palestine we see indeed a real chance to create one of those rare shining moments when humanity briefly transcends itself, such as when Nelson Mandela stood before the Union Buildings in Pretoria and took the oath as president of a new South Africa. But let us not waste more time and energy longing for some 'great man' to come act the part of Mandela in Palestine and lead everyone to national reconciliation. We all carry little Mandelas inside us - that is why we wept when watching that historic moment in South Africa, because it resonated inside us with something universal. Let us all find within ourselves those deeper resources of moral courage to pitch in and help steer Israel-Palestine to a second global triumph against apartheid and lay a foundation for real democracy and justice in the Middle East. God knows the world must to defeat this old ogre of the last century, racial nationalism, in order to confront collectively the great challenges facing us in the next one.

Virginia Tilley is head of the Middle East Project and a chief research specialist in the Democracy and Governance Programme of the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, writing in her private capacity. She is author of The One-State Solution (Michigan University Press and Manchester University Press, 2005) and many essays on Israel-Palestine, as well as another book and academic articles on racial nationalism in Latin America and elsewhere. She can be reached at vtilley@mweb.co.za.

Creating Eyelessness in Gaza:
Israel Controls the Old Media – But What About the New?

by Paul Beckett

Israel’s attack on Gaza was meticulously planned, over a six-months period. (Ilan Pappe and others have reported that a mock-up Gaza target city was constructed at a cost of millions in the Negev, and IDF soldiers practiced urban destruction for months before December 2008.)

Just as meticulous – and lasting just as long – was the planning for the media-control operation to accompany the military one.

When Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006 the spin had spun totally out of control as free-range journalists on the ground documented the killing, displacement and destruction (and the prolific use of weapons such as cluster bombs and bunker buster bombs against civilian targets). Very embarrassing for Israel (not to mention Condoleezza Rice!).

There must be a better way to suppress journalistic truth. Imbedding complaisant journalists with the IDF troops? Stricter filtering of applications for press passes (only the extremely safe need apply)? More effective censorship?

Ah! Then the wonderful idea came: how about no first-hand journalistic coverage at all! Genius!

Jon Snow’s U.K. Channel 4 show called “Unseen Gaza” (January 22, 2009) reports on his experience with the Israeli operation, first hand. With Israel’s attack (timed to begin in the American Christmas holiday week when nobody would be watching anyway), all the international media sent reporters. They were welcomed at the Press Accreditation Centre with a display of Hamas rocket debris. (That set the tone.) They were issued briefcase-loads of slick-paper reports and booklets laying out the “background story” for the journalists. Then, they were installed on a hill in southern Israel with a distant – really distant! – view of the edge of the Gaza Strip.

Visits to Sderot and the other Jewish towns that had taken Palestinian rocket fire (usually, but not always ineffectual) were furnished lavishly.

But not one journalist was permitted into the Gaza Strip.

Reporters or photographers who tried to jump the reservation were detained and sometimes had their discs erased.

The reporters watched and filmed white smoke and grey smoke and black smoke as, sporadically, it appeared over what they were told was Gaza City. They heard the dull thump of heavy bombs from time to time.

Sitting and standing there ineffectually, aware they were being used by Israel, reporters called it with sour humor, the “Hill of Shame.” Then “Hill of Same” because every day they wrote, called in, and photographed the same.

“Shame” is indeed appropriate. The reporters groused among themselves, but to my knowledge not one major Western news organization protested vigorously and left.

The media control operation was effective. On their hill, the reporters saw nothing they were not supposed to see. (Jon Snow remarks that often, as they called in their stories to London, the home office knew more than they.)

Now an interesting fact is that many of these organizations were in touch with Palestinian stringers in the Gaza Strip. They had access to the horrific reality of children blown apart, of white phosphorous wounds that burn and burn and burn in the flesh until they have burnt to the bone. They had access to shots of the hospitals where Palestinian doctors worked double and triple shifts trying to save some while others died at their feet. They had access to shots of the U.N. schools where hundreds of the homeless were pressed together to sleep on floors without water or electricity – and then (in several cases) were bombed and shelled by the Israeli forces (who had the precise coordinates of every rock and brick in Gaza, let alone the schools).

But of course, for the most part, the Western journalists on the Hill of Shame couldn’t use these, could they? After all, they had not seen these things “first-hand” with their own, highly-paid and officially-accredited, professional-journalist eyes.

Further, the gruesome pictures were much too strong (in their judgment) for their Western audiences, accustomed to infotainment. Snow permits us to listen to the self-justifications of several UK journalists or media managers (and these were not even the Americans!).

Was it a triumph for the Israeli Press Office? Well, certainly the media operation had gone exactly as planned.

Almost. What went wrong? Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera was there, and they stayed, and they were able to broadcast out. This best of the international news media ate the lunch of the Western big-name media organizations (as they’ve been doing now for years). They just told what they saw. And showed it. As much as would be humanly possible given the brutality of the attack, they even dutifully parroted Israeli official statements for balance. It was just good old-fashioned journalism in the midst of falling bombs, tank shells, and white phosphorous.

So half the world was seeing exactly what was going on. For Israel, it was not the important half. The all-important (for Israel) U.S. TV audience saw and heard only what they were supposed to.

But arguably the audience for Al Jazeera’s work was the most important part of the world. It included the entire Arab and Muslim world. And it included the younger generations everywhere, more internet-savvy, watching Al Jazeera live via Livestation, or trading clips via YouTube.

Israeli media-control failed to control the plain, good, fair, honest and old-fashioned television journalism of Al Jazeera. Meanwhile they firmly put themselves in the category (a Hall of Shame?) of regimes such as Burma or North Korea. Alas, this is not anything very new for contemporary Israel (and that’s a shame).

But there is still something else to this story, something unexpectedly heartening. There was another kind of media-control failure. This comes from the people themselves, and it is something (relatively) new in the world. This is ordinary Gazans filming blasts, wounds and killings with their cell-phones and sending out their stories. This is youthful Facebookers and bloggers who are telling the incredulous world what they’ve just been through.

This is what a new kind of media looks like, and what a new kind of democracy looks like. It’s difficult for authorities like the Israeli ones to control. Its devastating power is that people are just telling the truth, one to another. In this increasingly saddening world of ours, this is something to be excited about!

(This article was first published in The Rag Blog , February 12, 2009)

"Two-State Solution"? --Trouble is, it ain't a state

Too Late for Two-State? The Battle for the Future of Palestine and Israel

By Paul Beckett

“Two states, side by side, living in peace.” What a beautiful vision! With these and similar excellent words the Obama administration undertakes another revival of the Israeli-Palestinian “Peace Process” (already revived as often as a Red Cross training dummy).

Why should we not believe in the vision? The way to such a genuine, final two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would seem to be wide open.

Twice, at two Arab League summits (Beirut, 2002, Riyadh 2007) the Arab nations have in unanimity offered Israel an immediate and permanent peace (including diplomatic recognition) on the basis of a two-state solution. With one exception (see below) it's a very clean proposal: Israel gives up the territories it conquered in 1967, withdrawing behind the Green Line boundary, and a Palestinian state is created in the released area.

Worldwide acceptance would be immediate. The Green Line is already recognized as Israel's border by all nations except Israel. The Green Line's legality as a boundary has recently been confirmed by the World Court . The Arab proposal is essentially the solution called for by U.N. bodies any number of times, beginning with Resolution 242 in November 1967, which laid down that most important principle of post-World War II international law: “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.”

Historians meanwhile would appreciate that a Palestinian state would, in fact, complete the original promise of the U.N.'s 1947 partition of British Palestine, when provision was made for an Arab state as well as a Jewish one within the mandatory territory.

But: would the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza be willing to accept such a settlement (complete Israeli withdrawal accompanied by Palestinian statehood) and make permanent peace?

Recent polls (as well as not so recent ones) suggest they would, in large majorities. Even the "hard-line" Hamas leadership has given hint after hint of being prepared to live with Israel in peace provided Palestinians have the normal rights of statehood, and providing Israel is on the other side of the Green Line.

Would there be advantages to Israel from such a solution? Certainly. Besides the benefits of peace itself, a true resolution of the conflict could enable Israel to take up a natural role of economic engine within the Middle East, a region of huge and heretofore underdeveloped potential.

Now, above, I mentioned an exception: a kind of blemish on the “cleanness” and simplicity of the Arab League offer.

This concerns the Palestinian refugees. The Arab League peace offer requires a “just solution” to this problem. Right-to-return for some 5 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants? Well (it must be admitted) this part of two-state is not simple. But the insider consensus is that it can and will be “finessed” with only token returns by the refugees of 1948 and 1967 to Israel. There will be far more resettlement in other countries, and a whole lot of side payments. Messy certainly. And ugly. It’s made the worse by the fact that Israel maintains the most generous right-of-return – for Jews only – of any nation.

But insiders know ugly things do happen. Finessing ugliness is in their job descriptions. The messy and difficult refugee question will be handled, if the other things are.

All of the above makes a two-state solution sound feasible – a historic opportunity that should be seized.

So why are there a whole bunch of intellectuals – Palestinian, Israeli, and other – spitting in the optimism, and telling us a two-state solution has become impossible? What arguments do they make?

The arguments also are simple: Israel won't do it. And Israel can't do it.

What exactly won’t and can’t the Israeli government do?

They won't allow a Palestinian state. And they won't withdraw behind the Green Line. Either of these assertions, if true, kills the two-state idea. But let's look at both.

Take state, first. What is a state? A state (like Israel, to take one example) has sovereignty over a geographic territory. It both serves and has authority over its citizens, and represents them to other states and other peoples. It has (or would like to, anyway) a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within the territory through its armed forces, and it has the duty to defend its territory and people against attack by other states or peoples. It has authority over its international borders (land and sea), its air space, and its resources of land and minerals.

A Palestinian state would have these attributes. It would have to, to be a state.

Using this simple and quite uncontroversial definition, is Israel willing - and politically able - to agree to a Palestinian state?

Alas, no.

Israel's position can be teased out from the voluminous but deliberately murky record of "offers" (really, "offers" implied, suggested, posited, intuited, because they have never been forthrightly issued and set down) made to the Palestinian negotiators during the so-called Peace Process.

The phrase Palestinian "state" has been used by the U.S. and – seemingly grudgingly – by Israel, especially since the 2002 Road Map stage.

But the details that can be teased out are the following:

The Palestinian entity (let’s not misuse the term “state”) would not have an army to defend its territory against attack (guess who might chose to attack). Israel would retain "security responsibilities" for many roads and areas within the Palestinian entity. The major settlement blocs would be annexed to Israel, and they, together with security roads and other areas under continuing Israeli control would divide the already tiny area into several canton-like enclaves.

Further, the Palestinian entity would not have control of its international boundaries (it would be cut off from Jordan by an Israeli corridor along the river, and Israel would indirectly control the Rafah border with Egypt). It would not have sovereign control of its air space, nor of Gaza’s sea frontage. It would not have control of its external electronic communications. Amazingly, the so-called "state" would not even have sovereign jurisdiction over the water resources that lie under its soil (Israel, at present, draws much of that water for its own uses, and then sells some back to the Palestinians).

This would not be a Palestinian state. Israeli sovereign control over all the territory – from the Jordan River to the sea – would have a new disguise, but would be unchanged in essence.

Let's look now at the second simple requirement for a two-state solution: Israeli withdrawal behind the Green Line.

This has become a political impossibility. Israel has closed this door on itself – and put padlocks on it – and thrown away the keys. Israel has built the separation barrier (some 80% of it on the Palestinian side of the Green Line). Israel has made itself dependent on West Bank water resources, and has created the ideological and cultural climate of ethnic fear that entrenches Jewish support for "separation" (for which "Apartheid" really is an exact translation).

Above all, Israel under every government since 1967 has created settlements on the occupied soil of East Jerusalem and the West Bank that now have around 400,000 Jewish residents. Many of these are now second- and third-generation. Israeli leaders of the enterprise have, with a kind of sly humor, referred to the settlements project as creating "facts on the ground." Many of them, speaking candidly, have acknowledged (with satisfaction) that they are ensuring that the West Bank lands captured in 1967 can never be returned to the Palestinians. A senior Israeli political advisor is reported to have joked that even the scattered West Bank settlements would be withdrawn when “the Palestinians turn into Finns.”

There is every reason to think that the settlers and their political supporters are completely right in thinking that the settlements are there virtually forever.

Israel’s weak system of democratic government (which excludes the Palestinian fifth of its population from political influence) is heavily militarized and gives disproportionate representation to the political right. The Jewish settlers living in occupied territory (West Bank and East Jerusalem) constitute less than 10% of Israel's total Jewish population. But, especially since the withdrawal of the settlements from Gaza, the settlers, led by their youth generation, have become an almost independent force in Israeli politics. They shrewdly evoke resonance with the generation of pioneer Jewish settlers before Israeli independence. Meanwhile, in recent decades they have made themselves over-represented in the ranks of Israel's armed forces, especially the combat divisions.

The settlers' credo is to "grab more hills," not give them up. The settler community and their Israel-proper supporters mounted a convincing show of political force as they histrionically opposed the Gaza evacuation. Anyone who previously gave credence to the possibility of an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem (per the Arab states' offer, for instance) must have come to understand what a complete political impossibility such a withdrawal represents.

Where does this leave us?

With the conclusion that the nays have it: it is too late to have “two states, side by side, living in peace.” If this simple, clear solution ever glimmered as a real possibility, it was in the years immediately following the 1967 seizure, or (briefer and weaker) at the time of Oslo. No Israeli government of the present or foreseeable future would (or could) agree to a genuine Palestinian statehood. Nor could any reverse the four decades of colonization in the occupied Palestinian territories.

What are the alternatives? There are two. One is an indefinite continuation of Israeli occupation (probably with minor withdrawals and deeper disguises). The other is a single state, from the Jordan River to the sea, giving citizenship and equal rights to all within it. Each of these alternatives will be explored in subsequent articles. A great struggle for the future of Palestine, and for the soul of Israel, is ahead.

(This article was first published in The Rag Blog , February 27, 2009)