The two-state solution is (still) dead Mehdi Hasan is an award-winning British journalist, author, commentator and the presenter of Head to Head and UpFront on al-Jazeera. This edited piece, published last year, is republished with kind permission of al-
‘I T IS time to acknowledge that the peace process, as we know it, is dead. There is no longer a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.”
I wrote this in 2009. Yet, six years later, most of the West’s leading politicians and pundits – especially of the liberal/ left variety – continue to stick their heads in the proverbial sand, refusing to acknowledge this inconvenient truth.
At an Arab American Institute dinner I attended in Washington DC (last year), the keynote speaker was US National Security Adviser Susan Rice, who claimed a “comprehensive peace between Israelis and Palestinians” was still “possible”.
“We look to the next Israeli government,” she added, “to demonstrate a genuine commitment to a two-state solution.” Remarkably, some in the audience even applauded her.
There is no peace process. The peace process is dead. There is no peace; there is no process. And the fabled two-state solution has been buried with it.
Don’t take my word for it. Read the views of some of Israel’s leaders voted into power in March last year, who are refreshingly open, honest and blunt about their opposition to the long-standing, US-led formula. In fact, while Rice expected the-then new Israeli government to “demonstrate a genuine commitment to a two-state solution”, some of the ministers who constituted that coalition government proudly, publicly demonstrated the exact opposite.
In a press conference, US President Barack Obama said he continued to “believe a two-state solution is vital” but was aware that a new Israeli government had been formed “that contains some folks who don’t necessarily believe in that premise”.
“Some folks” was a convenient understatement. Let’s be clear: these are not fringe voices or a minority of extremists. The (under-reported) fact of the matter is that the vast majority of the ministers who make up the cabinet of Israel’s 34th government don’t believe in a two-state solution, don’t want a two-state solution, and don’t think a two-state solution is going to happen. So can the rest of us stop pretending.
Here they are in their own words…
Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister (Likud party)
As CNN reported, asked by an interviewer with the Israeli news site, NRG, if it was true that a Palestinian nation would never be formed while he’s prime minister, Netanyahu replied: “Indeed.”
Under fire from the White House, he later tried to walk back this specific remark, on US television, yet his own party released a statement on his behalf, during the campaign, that explicitly stated that “any evacuated territory would fall into the hands of Islamic extremist and terror organisations supported by Iran” and therefore, “there will be no concessions or withdrawals”.
Tzipi Hotovely, deputy foreign minister (Likud)
In 2012 she was “opposed to a Palestinian state” and, in her inaugural address to Israeli diplomats on May 21, reports AP, Hotovely said: “This land is ours. All of it is ours. We expect as a matter of principle of the international community to recognise Israel’s right to build homes for Jews in their homeland, everywhere.”
Naftali Bennett, education minister and minister of diaspora affairs (Jewish Home)
Aside from comparing Palestinians to monkeys, Bennett, former head of the Yesha Council, which represents Israel’s illegal settlements, told the New Yorker in 2013: “I will do everything in my power to make sure they never get a state.”
Yariv Levin, tourism minister (Likud)
In a speech to settlers in 2014, Levin said: “We must … leave behind the slogans of ‘land for peace’ and ‘two states for two people’” because “the two state solution is no solution”. A year earlier, he revealed: “We will try, slowly but surely, to expand the circle of settlements, and to afterwards extend the roads… At the end of this process, the facts on the ground will be that whatever remains (of the occupied West Bank) will be marginal appendage.”
Ayelet Shaked, justice minister (Jewish Home)
Aside from sharing a piece on her Facebook page during 2014’s Gaza war, which referred to Palestinian children as “little snakes”, Shaked declared at a Tel Aviv campaign event in February: “We should not give up on any centimetre of land. Yes, it’s not perfect, but it’s better than any other alternative.”
Zeev Elkin, Jerusalem affairs and immigrant absorption minister (Likud)
Elkin has said Netanyahu was “wrong” to have opened the door to the possibility of a (demilitarised) Palestinian state and told the Sovereignty Journal – a political journal published by Women in Green, the Forum for Sovereignty and Just Peace for Israel – in 2013: “Whoever objects to the two-state solution does not need to present an alternative solution because the territory belongs to us.” He was more explicit in 2011: “There is no place for a Palestinian state, not in temporary borders, not in any other configuration.”
Gilad Erdan, public security, strategic affairs and public diplomacy minister (Likud)
Speaking at an International Institute for Counter-Terrorism conference in 2014, Erdan said: “To continue talking about Palestinian statehood with the same determination and the same confidence as 15, 20 years ago is irresponsible.” – Al-Jazeera