Every Democrat and most Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee say they support a “two-state solution.” At the same time, “ending Israeli control over Palestinians in the territories occupied since 1967 is not on the table,” Norman Solomon wrote last week. “For politicians it has become a box to check,” while at this point “the two-state scenario is far-fetched to the point of delusion if not evasion.”
Headlined “Politicians Should Stop Hiding Behind the ‘Two-State Solution’ Fantasy,” the article says: “The boilerplate refrain for a two-state solution has great political utility in the United States. For most politicians, it’s very handy for virtue signaling.” However, “saying ‘two-state solution’ has become little more than a way of dodging key facts that exist on the ground. The Israeli military now controls 70 percent of Gaza after reducing it to rubble that has buried an unknown number of bodies. The 2.1 million Palestinians still alive in the enclave are confined to just 30 percent of its 141 square miles, under terrible living conditions.” Gaza is still under regular Israeli bombardment, drone attacks and sniping that is called a ‘ceasefire.’
Solomon’s article adds: “Meanwhile, the proliferation of settlements in the West Bank has pushed Palestinian people into smaller and smaller fragmented areas, divided by hundreds of checkpoints, while they face lawless violence from Israelis akin to the KKK’s terrorizing of blacks in the Jim Crow South. Several hundred settlements and outposts in the West Bank are now home to upward of 730,000 Israelis, with more arriving all the time.” (Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.)
The article quotes David Mandel, who lived in Israel for 11 years and graduated from Hebrew University Law School. “In light of demographic and political realities, a ‘two-state solution’ has become a mostly empty mantra, frequently mouthed by politicians who did nothing to bring it about when it might have been a viable path to end violence and build toward something better,” Mandel said. He added: “By now, the ‘two state solution’ has also become a political refuge for many Americans, including a great many Jews, who are generally progressive and want to differentiate themselves from Benjamin Netanyahu and his ilk, but only performatively, without joining efforts to end real violations of Palestinian rights like occupation, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide.”
Mandel told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “For a brief period after the Oslo accords, the prospect of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza garnered support among critical masses of Israeli Jews and Palestinians alike. But successive Israeli governments refused to advance what soon became a sterile ‘peace process,’ redefining the two states concept into something far less and helping create a bitterly divided, disempowered and discredited Palestinian leadership, enabling Israel to repress resistance of all sorts by a demoralized people.”
DAVID MANDEL, [email protected]
Mandel lived on a kibbutz in the late 1960s before working as an editor at two Israeli publications, New Outlook Monthly and the Jerusalem Post. He later spent nine years as an editor at the Sacramento Bee and went on to manage a legal aid program for California seniors. He lives in Sacramento and is currently involved with Jewish Voice for Peace, Democratic Socialists of America and the National Lawyers Guild.