By Saree Makdisi
May 11, 2008

There is no longer a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Forget the endless arguments about who offered what and who spurned whom and whether the Oslo peace process died when Yasser Arafat walked away from the bargaining table or whether it was Ariel Sharon's stroll through the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem that did it in.

All that matters are the facts on the ground, of which the most important is that -- after four decades of intensive Jewish settlement in the Palestinian territories it occupied during the 1967 war -- Israel has irreversibly cemented its grip on the land on which a Palestinian state might have been created.

Sixty years after Israel was created and Palestine was destroyed, then, we are back to where we started: Two populations inhabiting one piece of land. And if the land cannot be divided, it must be shared. Equally.

This is a position, I realize, which may take many Americans by surprise. After years of pursuing a two-state solution, and feeling perhaps that the conflict had nearly been solved, it's hard to give up the idea as unworkable.

But unworkable it is. A report published last summer by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs found that almost 40% of the West Bank is now taken up by Israeli infrastructure -- roads, settlements, military bases and so on -- largely off-limits to Palestinians. Israel has methodically broken the remainder of the territory into dozens of enclaves separated from each other and the outside world by zones that it alone controls (including, at last count, 612 checkpoints and roadblocks).

Moreover, according to the report, the Jewish settler population in the occupied territories, already approaching half a million, not only continues to grow but is growing at a rate three times greater than the rate of Israel's population increase. If the current rate continues, the settler population will double to almost 1 million people in just 12 years. Many are heavily armed and ideologically driven, unlikely to walk away voluntarily from the land they have declared to be their God-given home.

These facts alone render the status of the peace process academic.

At no time since the negotiations began in the early 1990s has Israel significantly suspended the settlement process in the occupied Palestinian territories, in stark violation of international law. It preceded last November's Annapolis summit by announcing the fresh expropriation of Palestinian property in the West Bank ; it followed the summit by announcing the expansion of its Har Homa settlement by an additional 307 housing units; and it has announced plans for hundreds more in other settlements since then.

The Israelis are not settling the occupied territories because they lack space in Israel itself. They are settling the land because of a long-standing belief that Jews are entitled to it simply by virtue of being Jewish. "The land of Israel belongs to the nation of Israel and only to the nation of Israel ," declares Moledet, one of the parties in the National Union bloc, which has a significant presence in the Israeli parliament.

Moledet's position is not as far removed from that of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as some Israelis claim. Although Olmert says he believes in theory that Israel should give up those parts of the West Bank and Gaza densely inhabited by Palestinians, he also said in 2006 that "every hill in Samaria and every valley in Judea is part of our historic homeland" and that "we firmly stand by the historic right of the people of Israel to the entire land of Israel."

Judea and Samaria : These ancient biblical terms are still used by Israeli officials to refer to the West Bank . More than 10 years after the initiation of the Oslo peace process, which was supposed to lead to a two-state solution, maps in Israeli textbooks continued to show not the West Bank but Judea and Samaria -- and not as occupied territories but as integral parts of Israel .

What room is there for the Palestinians in this vision of Jewish entitlement to the land? None. They are regarded, at best, as a demographic "problem."

The idea of Palestinians as a "problem" is hardly new. Israel was created as a Jewish state in 1948 only by the premeditated and forcible removal of as much of the indigenous Palestinian population as possible, in what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe, which they commemorate this week.

A Jewish state, says Israeli historian Benny Morris, "would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. ... There was no choice but to expel that population." For Morris, this was one of those "circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing."

Thinking of Palestinians as a "problem" to be removed predates 1948. It was there from the moment the Zionist movement set into motion the project to make a Jewish state in a land that, in 1917 -- when the British empire officially endorsed Zionism -- had an overwhelmingly non-Jewish population. The only Jewish member of the British government at the time, Edwin Montagu, vehemently opposed the Zionist project as unjust. Henry King and Charles Crane, dispatched on a fact-finding mission to Palestine by President Wilson, concurred: Such a project would require enormous violence, they warned: "Decisions, requiring armies to carry out, are sometimes necessary, but they are surely not gratuitously to be taken in the interests of a serious injustice."

But they were. This is a conflict driven from its origins by Zionism's exclusive sense of entitlement to the land. Has there been Palestinian violence as well? Yes. Is it always justified? No. But what would you do if someone told you that there was no room for you on your own land, that your very existence is a "problem"? No people in history has ever gone away just because another people wanted them to, and the sentiments of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull live on among Palestinians to this day.

The violence will end, and a just peace will come, only when each side realizes that the other is there to stay. Many Palestinians have accepted this premise, and an increasing number are willing to give up on the idea of an independent Palestinian state and embrace instead the concept of a single democratic, secular and multicultural state, which they would share equally with Israeli Jews.

Most Israelis are not yet reconciled this position. Some, no doubt, are reluctant to give up on the idea of a "Jewish state," to acknowledge the reality that Israel has never been exclusively Jewish, and that, from the start, the idea of privileging members of one group over all other citizens has been fundamentally undemocratic and unfair.

Yet that is exactly what Israel does. Even among its citizens, Israeli law grants rights to Jews that it denies to non-Jews. By no stretch of the imagination is Israel a genuine democracy: It is an ethno-religiously exclusive state that has tried to defy the multicultural history of the land on which it was founded.

To resolve the conflict with the Palestinians, Israeli Jews will have to relinquish their exclusive privileges and acknowledge the right of return of Palestinians expelled from their homes. What they would get in return is the ability to live securely and to prosper with -- rather than continuing to battle against -- the Palestinians.

They may not have a choice. As Olmert himself warned recently, more Palestinians are shifting their struggle from one for an independent state to a South African-style struggle that demands equal rights for all citizens, irrespective of religion, in a single state. "That is, of course," he noted, "a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle -- and ultimately a much more powerful one."

I couldn't agree more.

Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA and the author of "Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation," out this month from W.W. Norton.

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By Benny Morris
May 11, 2008

Israel at 60 is a sad place. It is sad despite the prosperity that is apparent at every turn.

By most Western political and economic standards, the country is a phenomenal success story. It is one of the few states created after World War II to have emerged and remained a functioning, indeed vibrant, democracy; its citizens, including its Arab citizens (1.3 million out of a total population of almost 7 million), enjoy civil rights and the benefits of a legal system that is as free and honest as any in the West, and a social welfare basket that assures the survival of the poorest. It is a powerhouse in terms of economic, scientific and cultural creativity, with substantial high-tech accomplishments, a handful of Nobel Prize winners and a host of internationally successful writers to prove it.

Like most developed countries, Israel is not without poverty (mostly among Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Jews), just as it has its share of clogged highways and traffic jams. But economically, it's hard to argue that Israel is anything other than a miracle -- a minuscule backwater (8,000 square miles) without natural resources, yet its annual budget today stands at about $60 billion. It exports high-tech products worth billions of dollars to the United States and Europe as well as to Asia, Latin America and Africa . The rush of foreign investors appears unstoppable.

Yet Israel is a sad place, and sometimes, after the most vibrant nightspots close, one can sense it in the air. In the mornings, one feels it in the coffee shops on Tel Aviv's Dizengoff Street and Jerusalem 's Gaza Road , where the young and middle-aged and old linger over their cups and consider their collective and personal present and future.

Israel is a sad place because its Jews have begun to lose hope, hope that the 100-year-old conflict with the surrounding Muslim Arab world will ever end, hope of ever being accepted as a legitimate presence in the Middle East, hope of ever achieving peace. Indeed, most Israeli Jews are at least dimly aware that the state founded by the Zionist movement as a safe haven for a people oppressed and murdered through the centuries in the Christian and Muslim lands of their dispersion is probably today the most unsafe place in the world for the Jews. Without doubt, the crucial, defining moment, when despair overtook at least hesitant hope, was in 2000. Before then, between Israel 's founding in May 1948 and the Camp David summit of July 2000 attended by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, President Clinton and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, most Israeli Jews, and their leaders, believed in the prospect of eventual peace.

They may have lived and fought with their backs to the wall, under awful circumstances of political isolation and numerical inferiority. They may have felt mortal, existential peril as Arab armies assaulted or attempted to strangle their tiny state in 1948, 1967 and 1973. But they continued through all that time to believe that eventually the Arab world would tire of the struggle, that it would change and liberalize and Westernize, and that it would acquiesce in the existence of a Jewish state in its midst. All the Israelis needed to do was to hold fast, weather the next storm, and possibly also the next, and bright, sunny uplands awaited them over the hill and down the road.

The year 2000 changed all that. That July, Arafat, speaking for the Palestinian people and with barely a squeak of internal dissent, said "no" to the generous terms that had been offered -- and thereby said "no" to the principle of a two-state compromise with Israel and "no" to a future with a Palestinian Arab state coexisting in peace alongside the Jewish state of Israel. (Arafat's nominal successor, President Mahmoud Abbas, continues to refuse to recognize Israel as a "Jewish state.")

In December 2000, when Clinton published his "parameters" for a two-state settlement, Arafat responded with a second, even blunter "no": Clinton had proposed a Palestinian state in virtually all of the West Bank, including half of Jerusalem and all of the Gaza Strip, as well as Palestinian rule over the surface area of the Temple Mount and massive international aid in resolving the Palestinian refugee problem, mainly by resettlement in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, or in the West, or in the future Palestinian state.

Instead, the Palestinians unleashed an open-ended terroristic assault on Israel , its restaurants and buses and marketplaces. For Israelis, each suicide bomber was a microcosm of what the Palestinians intended for the Jewish state as a whole. And the Palestinian masses cheered, in the streets of Gaza and Ramallah, as each bomber successfully detonated himself. Indeed, the killers' mothers often publicly proclaimed their wish that they had more sons to sacrifice for the cause.

At which point the Israelis understood that their desire and struggle for acceptance and legitimacy in the Middle East was a lost cause; that the Arab world would never accept their sovereign presence in the region, just as it had never accepted the Crusader kingdoms in the Middle Ages.

The Arabs might accept some Jews as a minority within a Muslim Arab Palestine, but the bulk of the Jews, like the Crusaders, would, in time, be swept into the sea or, at least, back to Europe . Weak Arab rulers and states, such as Anwar Sadat's Egypt in 1979 and King Hussein's Jordan in 1994, might sign formal peace treaties with Israel, but the Arabs, the masses and their intellectual and religious guides, would never bow to its existence. The Palestinians' election to power in 2006 of Hamas -- which openly avows that its aim is Israel 's destruction -- only drove the nail into the coffin of Jewish hope.

Which left many Israelis wondering where had they gone wrong. Could they have behaved better toward their own Arab minority and toward the 3.5 million Palestinians in the semi-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, in a manner that would have led to acceptance and integration in the region? Would a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza after 1967 have led to peace with the Palestinians? Was the problem the (continuing) expansion of the settlements in the West Bank ?

Many left-wing Israelis, with a penchant for self-flagellation, certainly thought so; Israel should have been more conciliatory and "softer." But most Israelis concluded that the fault lay in the historical circumstances and with the other side. The problem was not what Israel did but what Israel was -- a Jewish state, a democracy, an outpost of Westernism and modernity in a world that abhorred the West. Most Israelis looked about and saw an Islamic Arab world that was hardening and radicalizing regionwide, brutal and closed to compromise and change, and resistant to the West and its messages of democracy and liberalization and secularism and individualism.

The mini-war between the Israeli Defense Forces and Hezbollah in the summer of 2006 only deepened the sense of despair for most Israelis. The IDF, unwilling to inflict large-scale casualties on Lebanese civilians (Hezbollah forces hid among them and operated from their villages) and unwilling to risk greater Israeli casualties, fought with both hands tied behind its back, sending in the air force to do a job that only a massive sweep by ground forces could have done: rooting out and killing Hezbollah's fighters and destroying the organization's Katyusha rocket launchers, strongholds and arms stores as far north as Beirut.

The Israeli army has traditionally functioned well against conventional Arab armies. And Israel , over the decades, has managed to ward off the successive conventional challenges by the Arab world (including economic boycotts and the threat of international political isolation).

But the threats that have emerged since then, coupled with growing Muslim rejectionism and radicalization, have posed and continue to pose far more difficult challenges: Hezbollah and Palestinian fundamentalist terrorism, with their rockets and suicide bombers; Palestinian demography (Palestinian Arab birthrates are twice those of Jewish Israelis) and the looming black cloud of a nuclear-armed Iran, whose leaders almost daily proclaim, in Allah's name, the need to destroy Israel. All these constitute challenges that are extremely difficult if not impossible to counter at a cost that is morally acceptable.

How do you silence the rocketeers of Hamas and their fellow jihadi groups (which are firing on an almost daily basis into the Israeli town of Sderot ) without killing masses of civilians in Gaza ? How can you reduce Palestinian Arab birthrates (and this includes the birthrate among Israel's own Arab minority, whose members increasingly identify themselves as "Palestinians" and will, if present demographic trends continue, constitute more than a third of Israel's population within 15 to 20 years)? How do you stop Iran 's nuclear armament (after the world has failed to do so) without initiating an open-ended war and without yourself using nuclear weapons?

And these long-term threats are compounded by the short-term prospect that Israel's staunch friend in the White House may well be replaced next year by Barack Obama, whose views on the Middle East I find to be unclear, at best, and who many Israelis fear may sell them down the river.

All this presents Israel 's Jews with the prospect of a bleak short- and medium-term future, and perhaps no future at all. A small minority is making tracks, or may make tracks, for the West. But the overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews, for whom Israel is and always has been home, is staying put.

But it doesn't look good. It is no wonder that there has been little enthusiasm for the government's 60th anniversary festivities.

Benny Morris is the author of many books about the Israeli-Arab conflict, including, most recently, "1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War."