ISRAEL’S tactic in the ongoing ‘peace talks’ with the Palestine National Authority has been to carry on stalling, for the last ten years, agreeing to nothing serious, to the point where even the PNA negotiators are saying that the ‘two state solution’ is no solution.
Further, the delaying tactic has provided Israel with a decade to establish settlement facts on the ground, in the West Bank and in Jerusalem, that make a two state solution impossible.
There are now over 400,000 Zionists living on the West Bank and Jerusalem settlements, and there is the apartheid wall that splits one Palestinian area off from another.
This has created the situation where the Democratic party candidate for the US presidency, Obama, has been able to outflank the US Republicans to the right, and say that Jerusalem is the eternal capital of Israel and will remain so.
It is pretty obvious that he, as president, will seamlessly assume the other Zionist non-negotiable positions, namely that only Jews can have the right to return, Palestinian refugees cannot, and that the massive West Bank and Jerusalem settlements, must be incorporated into Israel, with the Palestinians getting as compensation chunks of the arid Negev desert!
Faced with these kind of shameless manoeuvres, PNA leader Ahmad Qurei says the Palestinians may have to seek a binational solution, that is a single state for all those who live in Palestine, Israelis and Palestinians, in the land covered by Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
However, the Zionists are just as opposed to this concept as they are to a two-state solution that wants to see two viable states side by side, with jerusalem as their joint capital and with all of the settlements emptied.
The reality is the Zionists will only accept israel as a racist Jewish state, in which the Jewish bourgeoisie rules.
They are terrified that in a unitary state, in a few years the Jewish population will be in a minority and that the jewish state will simply disappear.
Meanwhile, Qurei has told a meeting of the ruling Fatah faction in the West Bank that the Palestinian leadership had been working to establish a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders.
‘If Israel continues to reject this and prevent us from achieving our choice, we will call for the alternative solution for the Palestinian people and their leadership – that is a single binational state,’ he said.
It is now accepted that there will be no two-state deal before US President George W Bush leaves office next January, a deadline put forward by Washington and signed up to by both sides, and that both US presidential contenders Obama and McCain will give Israel everything it wants and offer the Palestinians a truncated, split up and bankrupt Bantustan.
That this is unacceptable to the Palestinian people is obvious.
If the US and the Zionists are not willing to concede a viable Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, with the settlements handed back, and with all Palestinian refugees having the right to return, then the two state solution, which has constituted a monstrous deception of the Palestinians, will have to be abandoned. the Palestinian masses will have it no other way.
There will have to be a Third Intifada of the Palestinian people, in alliance with the Lebanese Hezbollah and the masses of the Iraqi people – who are about to regain their independence from the US and UK imperialists who are now getting out of Iraq – and the Arab people as a whole.
It is revolution throughout the Arabian peninsula that will create the conditions for ejecting the imperialists and the Zionists from Palestine and establishing a secular and socialist Palestine as part of a Federation of Middle Eastern Socialist States.
