For all the talk of peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis and a two-State solution, the facts on the ground must, perforce, make a two-State solution well-nigh impossible.
Gershom Gorenberg is the author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (New York: Times Books, 2006). Writing "The Other Housing Crisis" in FP [Foreign Policy] he says:
"The message written on the landscape is simple: Every day, the settlements expand. Every day, Israel grows more entangled in the West Bank. To a large degree, the Israeli and Palestinian publics have accepted the need for a two-state solution. But time, and the construction crews, are working against it. No one knows exactly where the point of no return is—when so many Israelis will have moved into so many homes beyond the pre-1967 border that there is no going back. But each passing day brings that tipping point nearer. If a solution is not achieved quickly, it might soon be out of reach.
The failure of slow-motion diplomacy can be told in numbers. In 1993, when the Oslo process began, 116,000 Israelis lived in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (excluding Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem). Seven years later, when negotiations collapsed, the settler population had risen to 198,000.
Watching this steady march, Ehud Olmert, then Ariel Sharon’s deputy prime minister, stunned Israelis in late 2003 by renouncing his lifelong commitment to keeping Gaza and the West Bank under Israeli rule. “We are approaching a point where more and more Palestinians will say: ‘There is no place for two states between the Jordan and the sea,’” he warned. Instead, he said, they would demand equal rights in a single, shared political entity—one person, one vote. The only way to preserve a Jewish state was to withdraw, he argued. By then, according to the Israeli Interior Ministry, there were 236,000 settlers.
Olmert’s declaration presaged Sharon’s decision to withdraw from Gaza. In 2006, Olmert was elected prime minister. Despite the Gaza evacuation, the settler population was then more than 253,000.
Last year, when Olmert resigned and elections were announced, the number of settlers in the West Bank had passed 290,000, living alongside 2.2 million Palestinians. (Another 187,000 Israelis lived in annexed East Jerusalem, next to 247,000 Palestinians.) By the time the next prime minister takes office, more than 300,000 Israelis are likely to be living in the West Bank, with the number continuing to climb."
Gershom Gorenberg is the author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (New York: Times Books, 2006). Writing "The Other Housing Crisis" in FP [Foreign Policy] he says:
"The message written on the landscape is simple: Every day, the settlements expand. Every day, Israel grows more entangled in the West Bank. To a large degree, the Israeli and Palestinian publics have accepted the need for a two-state solution. But time, and the construction crews, are working against it. No one knows exactly where the point of no return is—when so many Israelis will have moved into so many homes beyond the pre-1967 border that there is no going back. But each passing day brings that tipping point nearer. If a solution is not achieved quickly, it might soon be out of reach.
The failure of slow-motion diplomacy can be told in numbers. In 1993, when the Oslo process began, 116,000 Israelis lived in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (excluding Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem). Seven years later, when negotiations collapsed, the settler population had risen to 198,000.
Watching this steady march, Ehud Olmert, then Ariel Sharon’s deputy prime minister, stunned Israelis in late 2003 by renouncing his lifelong commitment to keeping Gaza and the West Bank under Israeli rule. “We are approaching a point where more and more Palestinians will say: ‘There is no place for two states between the Jordan and the sea,’” he warned. Instead, he said, they would demand equal rights in a single, shared political entity—one person, one vote. The only way to preserve a Jewish state was to withdraw, he argued. By then, according to the Israeli Interior Ministry, there were 236,000 settlers.
Olmert’s declaration presaged Sharon’s decision to withdraw from Gaza. In 2006, Olmert was elected prime minister. Despite the Gaza evacuation, the settler population was then more than 253,000.
Last year, when Olmert resigned and elections were announced, the number of settlers in the West Bank had passed 290,000, living alongside 2.2 million Palestinians. (Another 187,000 Israelis lived in annexed East Jerusalem, next to 247,000 Palestinians.) By the time the next prime minister takes office, more than 300,000 Israelis are likely to be living in the West Bank, with the number continuing to climb."
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