Gaza, ALRAY - New York Times published a lengthy article for Ian Lustick, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the world top seven universities titled "illusions of a two-state solution".
Lustick explained the US failed to stand up to Israel's violations, and has a long history in providing a ground cover for the Israeli occupation policies; it also failed to discourage Israel from its settlement activity under the pretext that not provoking Israel would push it towards a peace agreement.
He compared the solution of establishing a Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel to Spanish dictator Francisco Franco who fell into a coma, and never stopped to be reported in the media as ‘alive’. “The news media began a long death watch, announcing each night that Generalissimo Franco was still not dead. This desperate allegiance to the departed echoes in every speech, policy brief and op-ed about the two-state solution today.”
With regard to the settlement expansions in the occupied West Bank and the doubled number of settlers under the cover of the 20-year-old Oslo Accords, Lustick believed that establishing a Muslim-ruled Palestinian state is has as potential as that of a secular Palestinian state “Strong Islamist trends make a fundamentalist Palestine more likely than a small state under a secular government.”
He indicated that “The disappearance of Israel as a Zionist project, through war, cultural exhaustion or demographic momentum, is at least as plausible as the evacuation of enough of the half-million Israelis living across the 1967 border, or Green Line, to allow a real Palestinian state to exist.”
“While the vision of thriving Israeli and Palestinian states has slipped from the plausible to the barely possible, one mixed state emerging from prolonged and violent struggles over democratic rights is no longer inconceivable. Yet the fantasy that there is a two-state solution keeps everyone from taking action toward something that might work,”
He considered that all sides have reasons to cling to two state-solution: “The Palestinian Authority needs its people to believe that progress is being made toward a two-state solution so it can continue to get the economic aid and diplomatic support that subsidize the lifestyles of its leaders, the jobs of tens of thousands of soldiers, spies, police officers and civil servants, and the authority’s prominence in a Palestinian society that views it as corrupt and incompetent.”
While for the consecutive Israeli governments, they “cling to the two-state notion because it seems to reflect the sentiments of the Jewish Israeli majority and it shields the country from international opprobrium, even as it camouflages relentless efforts to expand Israel’s territory into the West Bank,”
Conceived as early as the 1930s, the idea of two states between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea all but disappeared from public consciousness between 1948 and 1967. Between 1967 and 1973 it re-emerged, advanced by a minority of “moderates” in each community. By the 1990s it was embraced by majorities on both sides as not only possible but, during the height of the Oslo peace process, probable. But failures of leadership in the face of tremendous pressures brought Oslo crashing down. These days no one suggests that a negotiated two-state “solution” is probable. The most optimistic insist that, for some brief period, it may still be conceivable.
He added that many Israelis see the demise of their country as not just possible, but probable. “The State of Israel has been established, not its permanence. The most common phrase in Israeli political discourse is some variation of “If X happens (or doesn’t), the state will not survive!”
“Those who assume that Israel will always exist as a Zionist project should consider how quickly the Soviet, Pahlavi Iranian, apartheid South African, Baathist Iraqi and Yugoslavian states unraveled, and how little warning even sharp-eyed observers had that such transformations were imminent.” He followed.
