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Even Thomas Friedman declares the two-State solution dead

You know things are dire when even Thomas Friedman - New York Times columnist and Israel-booster - declares, what the well-informed have been saying for a long time now, that the two-State solution between the Israelis and Palestinians is dead.      Juan Cole, on his informed COMMENT does an analysis in "Israel: Friedman of the NY Times surrenders to One-State Solution, sees ME Apocalypse".

"Tom Friedman of the New York Times has completely given up on a two-state solution, forthrightly abandoning the polite fiction that there will ever be a Palestinian state alongside Israel, and ridiculing American presidential candidates for speaking as though it were still a possibility. In fact, he proclaims, with an eye for the glaringly obvious, the peace process is dead: 

“The next U.S. president will have to deal with an Israel determined to permanently occupy all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, including where 2.5 million West Bank Palestinians live.”

Friedman proposes a long list of those responsible for the failure of the peace process. It isn’t remarkable that he blames, among many others, Palestine president Mahmoud Abbas and the Gaza party-militia, Hamas, though it would have been refreshing if he had admitted their powerlessness truly to affect the equation. It is sort of like blaming the Inca for Francisco Pizarro’s brutal conquest of Peru.

What is remarkable is that he puts Israeli and/or pro-Israeli actors first in his rogues gallery and pulls no punches. The villains of this piece include:

1. Fanatical Jewish settlers on Palestinian land.

2. Right-wing Jewish billionaires, such as Sheldon Adelson, who shielded expansionist Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu from criticism by influencing the US Congress. (Friedman has long since implicitly acknowledged the argument of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their The Israel Lobby, but this statement of it took even me aback; I think focusing only on the rightwing billionaires is a little unfair, since there are lots of Israel lobbies and many supporters of the Israeli squatters are neither rich nor right wing.)

3. Netanyahu himself, characterized as power-hungry and unimaginative: “Bibi won: He’s now a historic figure — the founding father of the one-state solution.”

Continue reading here.

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