Liberal Zionists Blamed For Death Of Two-State Solution

The two state-solution in Israel-Palestine is dead, and its erstwhile champions—liberal Zionists and foreign diplomats, mainly—are clinging to an obsolete political program, leaving the field wide open to the Israeli right and far-right to shape reality as they please, journalist Dimi Reider reported in a yearender for Foreign Policy.

Photo Insert: Separation on the West Bank in Israel

These forces have already been shaping reality for a while, entrenching the military occupation and inextricably integrating the settlement enterprise in the occupied West Bank with the economy and society of Israel proper.

There’s no way now to deconstruct the settlement project without sending cracks running throughout Israel within its pre-1967 borders. To this extent, the liberal Zionist vision of partition has been outmaneuvered and defeated by its opponents.

Worse, Israel’s largely theocratic state has justified the idea that Israel is a Jewish state and exists for the interest and benefit of Jews.

But liberal Zionism has also fallen victim to its own internal contradictions and double standards.

It’s cardinal flaw and original sin: Convincing itself that the cataclysm of 1948, when Israel’s nation-state was entrenched through widespread and systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, can be sidestepped by tidying up one of its aftershocks, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, by creating a Palestinian state on a mere 22 percent of historic Palestine’s territory.

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