Seminar, Middle East Centre, St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, 20th February 2004

Palestine/Israel: The End of the Road for the Two-State Solution?

Ali Abunimah

The question I would like to consider tonight, I think has become, in a sense, the fundamental question for those concerned about Palestine and Israel. Is peace in Palestine through territorial partition a doomed fantasy? And has the time come to discard it? A growing number of people believe that while it may once have worked on paper, in practice the Israeli state has succeeded, through the relentless colonization of the Occupied Territories and lately its grotesque separation barrier, in its long-standing goal of rendering any workable partition impossible. Each passing day renders this more evident. Since the Oslo Accords were signed in September 1993, Israel has more than doubled the number of settlers in the Occupied Territories, establishing facts on the ground that make any sort of reasonable partition more and more unlikely.

While Israel was conceived as a state for Jews, Edward Said explained in 1999, the “effort to separate (Israelis and Palestinians) has occurred simultaneously and paradoxically with the effort to take more and more land, which has in turn meant that Israel has acquired more and more Palestinians.â€