Two months ago, I discussed on this blog how the sun was setting on the two state solution in Israel. At the time it felt a bit hypothetical; while Palestinian leaders and commentators were saying that a single state was the only solution, I didn’t find many in the mainstream (neither Stephen Walt nor Philip Weiss can yet be characterized as “mainstream”) who were saying anything in favour of the idea. But suddenly, things have changed and there’s all sorts of talk about it.

In The Nation, Harry Siegman (former executive director of American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America) writes a stunning piece that concludes that an “externally imposed solution” is the only route to two states, and that without such intervention only a single state solution is possible. Here’s a taste of the piece:

Israel’s relentless drive to establish “facts on the ground” in the occupied West Bank, a drive that continues in violation of even the limited settlement freeze to which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu committed himself, seems finally to have succeeded in locking in the irreversibility of its colonial project. As a result of that “achievement,” one that successive Israeli governments have long sought in order to preclude the possibility of a two-state solution, Israel has crossed the threshold from “the only democracy in the Middle East” to the only apartheid regime in the Western world.

But what is widely believed to have been the final blow to a two-state solution may in fact turn out to be the necessary condition for its eventual achievement. That condition is abandonment of the utterly wrongheaded idea that a Palestinian state can arise without forceful outside intervention. …The last thing many in the international community want is a resumption of predictably meaningless negotiations between Netanyahu and Abbas. Instead, they are focusing on forceful third-party intervention, a concept that is no longer taboo.

Gideon Levy, a long time advocate in Haaretz of more responsible behaviour by Israel towards the Palestinians, sounds despairing in a recent article entitled “Only Psychiatrists can Explain Israel’s Behavior”.

There are numerous reasons for the observation. A long series of acts that have no rational explanation, or really any explanation whatsoever, raise the following suspicions: a loss of touch with reality; temporary or permanent insanity, paranoia, schizophrenia and megalomania; memory loss and loss of judgment. All of this must be examined, under careful observation.
The psychiatric specialists might be so kind as to try to explain how a country with leaders committed to a two-state solution continues to direct huge budgets toward building more settlements in territories it intends to vacate in the future. What explanation could there be, if not from the psychiatric realm, for a 10-month halt to residential construction in the settlements, to be immediately followed by more construction? How can a country be so tightfisted when it comes to healthcare spending on its citizens, whose poor are getting poorer – and yet when a portion of the roads in the West Bank are already deemed as dangerous, they build more and more roads there leading from nowhere to nowhere?

Mehdi Hasan is the vice chairman of the Human Rights Commission in Pakistan, and in The Guardian he says, “I’ve Changed My Mind About the Two-State Solution”

“It’s like you and I are negotiating over a piece of pizza. How much of the pizza do I get? And how much do you get? And while we are negotiating it, you are eating it.”

The truth is that the dream of “two states for two peoples”, born in the 90s, died in the noughties. The two-state solution, the popular and principled option for so long now, is neither practical nor possible. In the words of Israeli academic Jeff Halper, “Israel by its own hand has rendered a viable two-state solution impossible.” Its time has passed. So the moment has come, as we enter the teenies, to forget the idea of a Palestinian state existing side by side with a Jewish state, and to argue and agitate instead for the only remaining, viable and democratic option: a single, secular and binational state for Israelis and Palestinians. No longer “two states for two peoples”, but “one person, one vote”.

And at Mondoweiss, there’s fine coverage of a “60 Minutes” show that concludes that Israel only has three alternatives: Ethnic Cleansing, Apartheid, or Democracy.

Demographers predict that within ten years Arabs will outnumber Jews in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Without a separate Palestinian state the Israelis would have three options, none of them good. They could try ethnic cleansing, drive the Palestinians out of the West Bank, or they could give the Palestinians the vote. That would be the democratic option but it would mean the end of the Jewish state. Or they could try apartheid – have the minority Israelis rule the majority Palestinians, but apartheid regimes don’t have a very long life….

Meron Benvenisti used to be deputy mayor of Jerusalem. He told Simon the prospects of the two-state solution becoming a reality are “nil.” “The geopolitical condition that’s been created in ’67 is irreversible. Cannot be changed. You cannot unscramble that egg,” he explained.

And what’s interesting is that this whole group of people reach the conclusion that the two-state solution is impossible (or at best, very unlikely) because of the settlements. As Halper concludes in the article that Hasan cites above, “The only Palestinian “state” that could emerge from Israel’s matrix of control is a Palestinian bantustan. Assuming this is not an acceptable “solution,” only one other possibility exists: the creation of a single state in Palestine-Israel.” And so that possibility continues to move from the edges to the centre of political discourse. What does a single state look like? How can Israel protect its identity as a “Jewish State” if Jews are a minority? Yesterday’s theoretical questions are fast becoming tomorrow’s practical issues. And don’t tomorrow’s issues have a way of sidling into today’s crises faster than anyone expects?