My Take | Why a workable Palestinian state is impossible
- The two-state solution is long dead but Western liberals keep citing it to ease a bad conscience
One for you and one for me. What can be simpler and more equitable? Unfortunately, we are not in kindergarten; we live in a world of merciless power politics. In Palestine, Israel has long enjoyed preponderant power, thanks mostly to the almost unconditional backing of the United States. It makes no sense to ask a pre-eminent power to share land equitably and settle differences once and for all with a people who have been completely marginalised as if they were an equal partner.
In real-life politics, when it comes to equity or inequity, justice or injustice, it’s decided by the distribution of power, not morality. The reality of power is completely reflected on the map today in Palestine. If you really want to understand the Palestine question, study the map in detail, how the ownership and occupation of territories have changed over the decades, but especially after 1967 – and ignore most commentaries in the news media, both social and legacy, including those from yours truly. (Sorry, man, I have to make a living!)
Any state offered to the Palestinians would be completely broken up as to be impossible to form a coherent economic and social entity, the basis on which people can conduct regular business, build essential infrastructure, develop an economy – and generally have a viable future for their children.
The breaking up of the West Bank by security roadblocks and expanding illegal “facts on the ground” Jewish settlements, which are almost always irreversible, and the complete blockade of Gaza, now being razed to the ground – these have all been, and are being, carried out with full US and Western complicity.
The alternative, which is even more likely, is that there will never be a Palestinian state. Even though such a “state” is currently recognised, de jure, by a majority of the 190-plus member states of the United Nations, the West, led by the US, does not recognise it. Some commentators have argued Taiwan has more reality as a state than Palestine, even though only about a dozen states recognise the Chinese island.
But doesn’t Israel want an enduring peace and live like a normal state? An answer to that may also explain why Benjamin Netanyahu – who is widely unpopular, even hated among the Israeli electorate – manages to become the country’s longest serving prime minister, longer than even the nation’s founder David Ben Gurion.