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12. One State The Realistic Solution Saree Makdisi avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister, declared in april 2009 that Israel is not bound by the commitments it entered into at the annapolis summit in november 2007.1 He was followed by Benjamin netanyahu, the then freshly minted prime minister, in a policy speech in june of the same year, which categorically ruled out the possibility of the creation of a genuinely independent Palestinian state.2 These declarations came as close as we are likely to get to an official announcement of the end of the two-state solution to the Zionist conflict with the Palestinians. and in essentially renouncing the two-state solution, the Israeli government effectively committed itself to the only other realistic alternative—a one-state solution. Of course, the one state that Lieberman and netanyahu have in mind is not a state of equal citizens, but rather a state in which the jewish inhabitants of historic Palestine would continue to enjoy rights and privileges denied to—and founded at the expense of—the land’s non-jewish (that is, Palestinian) inhabitants. Far from being something radically new, this represents the continuation of a status quo already in place for several decades, in which jewish inhabitants of the land (and new jewish immigrants, like Lieberman himself) have been coming and going freely, while Palestinians in the Occupied territories and in Israel itself—not to mention those who have lived in involuntary exile for six decades—have been subjected to draconian forms of control, blockade, confinement, and worse, for no other reason than that they are not jewish.3 There were many expressions of dismay in response to Lieberman’s declaration : the New York Times called it “blunt and belligerent”;4 the former foreign minister tzipi Livni said that in twenty minutes Lieberman undid 252 saree makdisi fifteen years of patient diplomacy;5 and the U.s. state department said that despite his remarks it still hoped for a two-state solution.6 Only the official Palestinian negotiator saeb erekat seemed (almost comically) out of sync with the world reaction, when he asked after Lieberman’s speech, “I’d really like to know, are we going to see a settlement freeze?”7 If the answer to that question was not already obvious in what Lieberman said, it would be driven home once and for all in netanyahu’s first major policy speech, in june 2009. That speech also outlined more clearly than ever the profoundly racialized contours of the Zionist conflict with the Palestinians—with which any approach to the conflict must contend.8 although the reception of netanyahu’s speech in most of the U.s. and UK media made it seem as though he had accepted the creation of an independent Palestinian state, he actually did no such thing. For an amorphous and permanently disarmed entity lacking a definite territory, not allowed to control its own borders or airspace, not allowed to enter into treaties with other states, and shorn of any vestige of sovereignty (other than symbolic trappings such as a flag and a national anthem)—which is all that netanyahu said the Palestinians might, possibly, be allowed to have—meets no conventional , customary, or dictionary definition of the term “state.” It was in fact merely by juxtaposing the word “Palestinian” with the word “state” that netanyahu earned the praise of much of the Western media as well as the state department and White House, which called the speech “an important step forward.”9 Only by using the term “state” did netanyahu’s proposal differ from what had been on the negotiating table from the time of the Oslo accords of 1993–1995. It ought to be clear by now that the official peace process, as it was launched in secret negotiations at Oslo in 1993 and carried on ever since by ehud Olmert, Livni, and others, has itself been the greatest obstacle to a lasting and genuine peace between Israelis and Palestinians . although the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has never seemed further from a just and lasting peace than it is at the moment, what I want to suggest is that a genuine resolution to the conflict is closer at hand than it has ever been, and that, as counterintuitive as this may seem, the terminal breakdown in the official so-called peace process, Israel’s post-Christmas 2008 bombardment of Gaza, and the sweeping victory of the right wing in Israel’s 2009 elections actually...

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