By Henry Siegman
Published: February 24 2010 02:00 | Last updated: February 24 2010 02:00
The Middle East peace process and its quest for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict that got underway nearly 20 years ago with the Oslo accords has undergone two fundamental transformations. It is now on the brink of a third.
The first was the crossing of a threshold by Israel's settlement project in the West Bank; there is no longer any prospect of its removal by this or any future Israeli government, which was the precise goal of the settlements' relentless expansion all along. The previous prime minister, Ehud Olmert, who declared that a peace accord requires Israel to withdraw "from most, if not all" of the occupied territories, "including East Jerusalem," was unable even to remove any of the 20 hilltop outposts Israel had solemnly promised to dismantle.
A two-state solution could therefore come about only if Israel were compelled to withdraw to the pre-1967 border by an outside power whose wishes an Israeli government could not defy - the US. The assumption has always been that at the point where Israel's colonial ambitions collide with critical US national interests, an American president would draw on the massive credit the US has accumulated with Israel to insist it dismantle its illegal settlements, which successive US administrations held to be the main obstacle to a peace accord.
The second transformation resulted from the shattering of that assumption when President Barack Obama - who took a more forceful stand against Israel's settlements than any of his predecessors, and did so at a time when the damage this unending conflict was causing American interests could not have been more obvious - backed off ignominiously in the face of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's rejection of his demand. This left prospects for a two-state accord dead in the water.
The disappearance of the two-state solution is triggering a third transformation, which is turning Israel from a democracy into an apartheid state. The democracy Israel provides for its (mostly) Jewish citizens cannot hide its changed character. A democracy reserved for privileged citizens while all others are denied individual and national rights and kept behind checkpoints, barbed wire fences and separation walls manned by Israel's military, is not democracy.At first, the collapse of the assumptions on which hopes for a fair and just resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict rested triggered much despair. But that despair has begun to turn to anger, and options for resolving the conflict, previously dismissed by the international community as unrealistic, are being looked at anew. That anger is also spawning a new global challenge to Israel's legitimacy.
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