To guarantee a strategic peace, Hamas is indispensable in any future political paradigm. The 1967 borders mean that Gaza and the West Bank, like East Jerusalem, should be treated as one territorial unit, one Palestine for all Palestinians.
“You need to take reality as it is, not the way you imagine it to be,” says Yousef Munayyer.
Israel has effectively made the establishment of a separate Palestinian state impossible. It’s clear what’s needed now: a single, democratic state with full rights for all people.
The ideological argument over the future of Israel-Palestine disguises the fact that for the past decade we have been living in a one-state reality.
Rights groups say the new roads that are being built will set the stage for explosive settlement growth, even if President-elect Joe Biden's administration somehow convinces Israel to curb its housing construction.
Is the two-state solution for Israel-Palestine still viable? Perhaps it is time to admit, in the spirit of Voltaire, that the two-state solution was never about two states, nor was it a solution, nor could it ever be viable.
A human rights approach could lead the way to resolving the problems of partition and the problems of a two state solution. International human rights treaties offer states alternatives to partition. Instead, human rights conventions offer types of integration that protect the existence and identity of national linguistic, ethnic, and religious groups.
The people who speak now of the “one-state solution” for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are idealists. But they do a lot of harm. And not only because they remove themselves and others from the struggle for the only solution that is realistic. The two-state solution is not dead. It cannot die, because it is the only solution there is.
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