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The War of Ideas in the Middle East
What Comes Next: Five Palestine futures
Richard Falk on June 26, 2014
This post is part of “What Comes Next?: A
forum on the end of the two-state paradigm.” This series was initiated
by Jewish Voice for Peace as an investigation into the current state of
thinking about one state and two state solutions, and the collection has
been further expanded by Mondoweiss to mark 20 years since the Oslo
process. The entire series can be found here. Background and Foreground
For years, perhaps going back as far as the Madrid Peace Conference of 1991, influential international debate on the future of Palestine has almost exclusively considered variations on the theme of a two-state solution. The American Secretary of State, John Kerry, stampeded the Palestinian Authority and Israel into negotiations that ‘failed’ even before they started a year ago. At least Kerry was prudent enough to warn both sides that this was their do or die moment for resolving the conflict. It was presumed without dissent in high places anywhere that this two-state outcome was the one and only solution that could bring peace. Besides the parties themselves, the EU, the Arab League, the UN all wagered that a resolution of the conflict required the establishment of a Palestinian state. Even Benjamin Netanyahu became a reluctant subscriber to this mantra in his 2009 speech at Bar-Ilan University, although always in a halfhearted spirit.
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