The Osterley Times: Last chance for two states solution

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Last chance for two states solution

By Manuel Hassassian, The Electronic Intifada, 19 April 2006

Monday's suicide bombing in Tel Aviv rightly drew international condemnation, yet criticism of Israel's relentless shelling of civilian population centres in the occupied Gaza Strip has been blocked by the US at the UN Security Council.

This month alone, Israeli forces have killed more than 30 Palestinians, including at least six children, and injured 130 others, while about 200 shells have been fired into the Gaza Strip every day.

While prominent members of the international community call on Hamas to make statements in support of a two-state solution, their own policies are rapidly foreclosing that option.

Following Hamas's accession to the Palestinian Authority, the EU and the US seem more intent on punishing the Palestinians for the results of their exemplary elections than on persuading Israel that peace and security will only materialise through negotiated political accommodation.

Ostensibly, the US-led decision to cut funding to the PA is designed to penalise Hamas for failing to renounce violence, recognise Israel's right to exist and publicly commit to previously-signed agreements. But this approach is certain to backfire.

One million of the estimated 3.8 million Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories rely on PA salaries for their livelihoods.

Impoverishing and embittering our people will not only exacerbate the existing humanitarian predicament, it will likely worsen the security crisis for Palestinians and Israelis alike. The real threat lies not in the rhetorical positions of the PA - an institution with limited powers administering a stateless people under occupation - but in Israel's deluded faith in unilateralism.

Now rebranded as Ehud Olmert's "convergence plan", unilateralism still translates as the sustained colonisation and occupation of Palestinian land.

It is true that Olmert intends to dismantle some failed settlements in the occupied West Bank, but only so as to bolster the more strategic blocs. This would entrench, not solve, the problem.

As Israel's illegal settlement and wall construction on occupied Palestinian land continues, the possibility of establishing a viable, territorially contiguous Palestinian state is being destroyed.