Nouvelle solution finale ?
IO HERMES
http://www.nytimes. com/2008/ 09/04/world/ middleeast/ 04state.html?
_r=2&em&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Support for 2-State Plan Erodes
Negotiations for a two-state solution in the Middle East tend to
stall on issues like security and settlements.
By ISABEL KERSHNER
Published: September 3, 2008
JERUSALEM — Even among the most moderate Palestinians, the credo of a
negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is
beginning to erode.
Hamas, the Islamic group that refuses to recognize Israel, has
already taken over Gaza, one of the two territories earmarked for a
Palestinian state.
Now, with hopes fading for an agreement on statehood by the end of
the year, leading pragmatists in the West Bank and East Jerusalem,
last bastions of Palestinian secular nationalism, are calling for a
fundamental reassessment of their leaders' strategies and goals.
A growing number propose dismantling the internationally financed
Palestinian Authority as a first step, in order to expose the reach
of Israel's continued occupation of territories it conquered in the
1967 war and to make Israel bear the direct responsibility and cost
until a political solution is found.
Prominent mainstream Palestinians are increasingly warning that if
they fail soon to achieve the kind of state they want — sovereign and
independent, with East Jerusalem as its capital — they will opt
instead for a one-state solution based on a long-term fight for equal
rights within the state of Israel, a struggle they compare with what
took place in South Africa.
At one level the one-state ultimatums are intended as a pressure
tactic to wring concessions out of Israel — granting equal voting
rights to millions of Palestinians in the territories would
ultimately spell the end of the Zionist project of Jewish self-
determination and a Jewish state.
But now they also reflect an urge for a genuine reappraisal in the
dwindling Palestinian nationalist camp as it despairs of achieving
the kind of state it had envisaged and questions its own ability to
survive.
"It is less of a scare tactic and more of trying to shake the
traditional Palestinian leadership into strategic forward thinking,"
said Sam Bahour, an American-born Palestinian businessman who moved
to the West Bank and invested heavily there after Israel and the
Palestine Liberation Organization signed their first accord in 1993.
One of the first to articulate the shift was Sari Nusseibeh, the
president of Al-Quds University and one of the most cogent proponents
of the two-state solution for the past 20 years.
"I know that people assume the sun will rise tomorrow, that it will
always be possible to arrive at two states," he told reporters here
in July. "But I don't think so." If Israeli and Palestinian leaders
fail to sign an agreement on Palestinian statehood in the coming
weeks or months, he said, "We will have to prepare ourselves for the
next stage."
That, he said, meant "trying to cover the next few decades with the
least pain" by fashioning "some kind of coexistence" in a single
state.
In August, Ahmed Qurei, a veteran leader of the secular and
nationalist Fatah movement and the chief of the Palestinian
negotiating team, said at a meeting of his party in the West Bank
city of Ramallah that if Israel continued to oppose the Palestinians'
terms for an independent state, then the team would demand a
binational state.
The past few days have seen a flurry of statements, articles and
reports. One, by the Palestine Strategy Study Group, a collection of
personalities from the region and beyond, financed by a European
Union grant, laid out possible situations, including the one-state
option, concluding: "Palestinian alternatives to a negotiated
agreement are difficult but possible. They are preferable to a
continuation of the status quo."
The Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, a well-
established organization long dedicated to promoting the two-state
solution, issued a paper on Monday examining possible policy options
for the Palestinian Authority — including the one-state solution —
should the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations end without a deal.
Mr. Bahour, a participant in the Palestine Strategy Study Group, said
it was essential to put a deadline on what he called the "never-
ending peace process," which has sputtered along for the past 15
years.
That effort has been hampered by bouts of violence that culminated in
the Palestinian suicide-bombing campaign in the years after 2000 and
Israel's subsequent military reinvasion of all the Palestinian
Authority-controlle d cities of the West Bank.
Then there is the complexity of the issues on both sides.
Israel has concerns about security, deepened by the rocket onslaught
from Gaza that followed Israel's unilateral withdrawal from the area
in 2005.
There are also considerable gaps between the sides on the most
delicate issues, like sovereignty over Jerusalem, with its sacred
Jewish, Muslim and Christian sites, and the Palestinian demand for
the right of return for the refugees of the 1948 war and their
descendants, now numbering millions, to their former homes in what is
now Israel.
But what Palestinians view as the main obstacle to the realization of
the two-state solution is Israel's continued settlement construction
in parts of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, strengthening a 40-year-
old enterprise that was intended to guarantee a permanent Israeli
presence and control.
"Where will the Palestinian state rise up?" asked Qaddurah Fares, a
grass-roots Fatah leader in Ramallah, in an interview early this
summer. "The Israeli nation is inside us already."
In 2003 Mr. Fares signed on to the Geneva Accord, an unofficial
blueprint for a two-state deal. "I am still for a two-state
solution," he said. "You don't change visions every day. But it is
not realistic."
Palestinian public opinion polls show a clear majority still favors a
two-state solution and the Fatah establishment remains committed to
it, according to Khalil Shikaki, a well-respected political analyst
in Ramallah.
But the warning from the chief negotiator, Mr. Qurei, "gave an
indication of where Fatah might go," he said.
Parts of Fatah are already coming over to binationalism, particularly
among the frustrated Fatah young guard, now in their mid- to late
40s, who are using the reassessment as a way of asserting themselves.
Still, says Mahdi Abdul Hadi, who directs a research institute in
East Jerusalem: "Nobody is spelling it out. They are not endorsing it
publicly because of the absence of leadership and consensus."
So far nobody is willing to put a date on ending the current peace
effort, and nothing much has actually changed.
"No one will decide," said Ghassan Khatib, a lecturer in cultural
studies at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank. "There is lots of
debate, but few new ideas or conclusions."
The details of the one-state option remain sketchy. Few believe it to
be feasible in the foreseeable future, not least because it is
something that Israel would vehemently oppose. Yet the Palestine
Strategy Group states that in the long run, it is a "logical
scenario" given "basic Western ideas" of individual freedom,
democracy and rule of law.
In the meantime, encapsulating the Palestinian predicament, Mr.
Fares, the Fatah leader in Ramallah, said that if Israel gave him the
choice of a state in the 1967 territories or of living together in
peace, "I'd choose the latter. But we don't have the choice, not of
this and not of that."
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