THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION WAS NEVER EVER AN OPTION.

A lot of hope over the years has been placed in the idea of a ‘two-state solution’ whereby the state of Israel would exist peacefully side-by-side with an independent Palestinian sovereign state. However, as the true face of Zionist extremism emerges after the recent Israeli elections, we see now that the dream of a two-state solution has been only an illusion designed to buy time for the Israelis to find ways to marginalise the Palestinians further with the ultimate aim of clearing the Gaza Strip and the West Bank of the Palestinians and creating an area completely under Israeli control that would eventually be settled by Jews only to become part of a Greater Israel.

While the one-state bi-national solution has always been an option, it never really gained any real traction – until now – because of the unwillingness of either side to allow such an option to work. The position of both sides seemed intractable and, to a certain extent, still does. However, the geopolitical reality on the ground has deemed it necessary for the one-state solution to be seriously reconsidered if, for no other reason, than it is now the only viable option left. The alternatives are that there will either be a one-state solution, but it will not be one that Palestinians will have any role in, or things will carry on as they are for another sixty years or so.

There’s a certain irony in the fact that the reason a one-state bi-national solution is looking more attractive now than ever it was before is because the very people that are so dead-set against it, the Zionist Israelis, have already begun to create the physical foundations needed to create just such a state and that is by building their settlements, albeit as Jews-only communities, inside of Palestinian lands while, at the same time, there are already Palestinians living as Arab Israelis, in Israel.

While Kadima and other earlier Israeli governments may have talked about a two-state solution, the reality has always been that they would never accept the conditions Palestinians – Hamas or Fatah – had laid down for such a solution to be realised. It simply never was going to happen and, as we now know, now that the right-wing Zionists have the upper hand in Israel, it never will.

Slowly but surely progressives, both Israeli and Palestinian, are coming to the conclusion that the one-state bi-national solution is, indeed, the only solution but they are going to have a hard job convincing their respective fellow countrymen. It is, therefore, up to the rest of world to help the peoples of the region to see that it is the only option.
Netanyahu and his right-wing Zionist allies both in Israel and elsewhere have made it quite clear that there will never ever be the option of a two-state solution. All that Palestinians can expect now is the destruction of what little is left of the Palestinian communities that are in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. It is now up to the people of the world to demand the only viable solution left to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the one-state bi-national solution is clearly the only solution.