Photograph of Palestinian children dressed up as Na’vi from the movie, Avatar.
Palestinian Children as Na'vi. Photo: Reuters
Palestinian residents hold weekly protests along the wall dividing Israeli settlements from Palestinian land. Back in September, Israeli border guards fired live ammo at an Al Jazeera correspondent and tear gassed protesters.
Despite the Obama administration’s fairly strong language towards Israel and the Palestinians in regards to moving forward to some sort of permanent settlement, attitudes on both sides have become more, not less accomodationist.
A couple of weeks ago, former Israeli prime minister and current defense minister, Ehud Barak finally said the unsayable at a conference in Israel:
If, and as long as between the Jordan and the sea, there is only one political entity, named Israel, it will end up being either non-Jewish or non-democratic… If the Palestinians vote in elections, it is a binational state, and if they don’t, it is an apartheid state.
Israel is in a deep quandry. Per the Economist’s Democracy in America Blog:
[Palestinian intellectual and activist Sari] Nusseibeh now believes the two-state solution has become virtually impossible. There are too many Israeli settlers in the West Bank, and the Israeli political system is incapable of making the concessions that would be necessary even to halt further settlements, let alone to withdraw them and allow the creation of a Palestinian state. Mr Nusseibeh is a keen political thinker, a non-violent man who opposed the 2001 “second intifada” and has many close Israeli friends. His history of negotiations with Israeli authorities began with his secret talks with the right-wing government of Yitzhak Shamir in the 1980s. His assessment fits with the history of Israeli-Palestinian dialogue over the past 60-odd years: each side has rejected every plausible deal at every available opportunity, only to look back a decade or two later with bitter regret.
If the prospects for a two-state solution look ever less likely, the idea of annexation of the occupied territories is a complete non-starter. Non-Jews already account for 20% of the Israeli population and Arab-Israelis already deal with discrimination. Admission of the approximately 3.8 million Palestinians into Israel with 7.4 million people would call into question the entire idea of the Jewish state. Any single-state solution that does not grant full rights to non-Jews and citizens of the former occupied territories leads inevitably to some form or another of apartheid.
And you thought politics in the United States was fraught?
