The Delusion of the Two-State Solution

The Two-State Delusion is an analysis by Mordechai Nisan who claims

   

there is something unreasonable in the world's continued adherence to the Oslo paradigm, tattered and battered as it is by years of a bloody fiasco. 

He makes the following points:

*   The Palestinian Arab leadership has consistently and adamantly rejected the two-state solution since its first articulation in 1937 by the British Peel commission and has, as consistently, advocated the destruction of the Jewish state.
*   Twenty years of Oslo have delivered no peace for either side of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
*   In July 2000 at the Camp David summit, Ehud Barak offered Arafat Palestinian statehood with control over approximately 92 percent of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and a political capital in the vicinity of Jerusalem. But Arafat spurned the offer, and a reign of terror and suicide-bombing ensued.
*   [N]egotiations, such as those between Olmert and PA president Mahmoud Abbas in the latter part of 2007, dragged on without results. The plethora of issues—from settlements and prisoners, to Palestinian institutions in East Jerusalem, to the Fatah/Hamas split—preoccupied and confounded the Israeli-Palestinian discussions without any satisfactory conclusion.
*   At the heart of the failed Oslo paradigm are a core group of fallacies that have been promoted as truths: that the land can sustain two opposing population groups; that the Arab goal of destroying Israel can be appeased through "painful concessions" (rather than defeated by an Israeli victory); and that this is not a conflict based on something as elemental and incendiary as religion. Not one can withstand close scrutiny.
*   [B]oth land and water are scarce, and the less than 40-mile width of the land from the Mediterranean coast to the Jordan River is insufficient to accommodate two rival states with expanding populations and vibrant national ambitions.
*   There is...a great likelihood that a Palestinian state ensconced in the West Bank and Gaza Strip would evoke a powerful zeal for further land concessions, not only from the Arabs of Ramallah or Nablus, but also among many Israeli Arabs in the Galilee...
*   ...the war against Israel is little more than a modern application of Qur'anic hostility toward Jews, expressing the ethos of jihad and the religious definition of Palestine as a sacred waqf (Islamic religious endowment)...the Oslo process brought no discernible change in the Palestinian attitude toward Israel. It remains a state that has to be eliminated.
*   One of the most intractable issues that the Oslo accord was supposed to resolve revolved around the status of Jerusalem. Despite a number of good-faith efforts to share the city proposed by Israeli negotiators, the Palestinians have spurned all offers. In fact, lines have hardened as evidenced by the confrontation seen here between Palestinians and Israeli police over the presence of Jewish visitors to the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism.
*   The unyielding Palestinian demand that the "right of return" be acknowledged and implemented is a call for Palestinian "justice" that carries within it the seed for Israel's destruction. The "right of return" has become sacred dogma for Palestinians. 
*   A Judenrein West Bank, recalling what Menachem Begin did in expelling Jews when handing over the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in 1982, and what Ariel Sharon similarly did in the Gaza Strip in 2005, was not the future that many Israelis had in mind when imagining the contours of peace.
*   A final political map delineating the outline of a Palestinian state is tied to the Arab demand that Israel withdraw to the June 4, 1967 lines. No Israeli government ever agreed to such a total retreat, which runs counter to U.N. resolution 242, which established the land for peace formula in the wake of the 1967 war
*   As such, the two-state paradigm trumpeted by Oslo has been invalidated with the growth of the magnitude of dissonance. There is just no sound political basis for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. All basic final status issues escape resolution. Yet, there has never been an admission of error...

^