Larry Derfner writes: When you drive out on the highway to the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim from Jerusalem, you’re driving through big sky country. After passing Jerusalem’s new Jewish neighborhoods and old Arab villages, all you’ve got on either side of you are the soft hills of the Judean desert. Emptiness, except for the unseen Bedouins. But very soon, you see a long, long line of beige houses and apartment buildings on the ridge of a steep hill, stretching nearly from one end of your field of vision to the other. Welcome to Ma’aleh Adumim.

The population is 40,000 — but if someone told me it was 400,000, I’d believe it. It is huge, monumental: Long, sweeping roads lead up the hill to its entrances, and wide avenues course up and down beautifully landscaped neighborhoods built from Jerusalem stone. Ma’aleh Adumim, founded in 1975, does not look like anybody’s idea of a settlement. It is truly an Israeli city, and it looks invulnerable to U.N. resolutions.

Ma’aleh Adumim is a stick in the eye of Palestinian attempts to build a state in the West Bank. And its very presence is spurring further Israeli construction: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent threat to build a sprawling, 3,500-unit housing project linking the settlement with Jerusalem has provoked expressions of outrage and distrust from Brussels and, in much more restrained tones, from Washington. The latest diplomatic skirmish was set off after European foreign ministers, in no uncertain terms, warned of the disastrous effects of the so-called “E-1 plan” on the prospects for a two-state solution.

Western diplomats fret that E-1 construction will drive a stone wedge through the heart of the would-be Palestinian state — cutting off Palestinians’ access to East Jerusalem, their hoped-for capital. But this misses the point: The presence of Ma’aleh Adumim makes E-1, or something like it, inevitable. Israel has no intention of letting this city go in any sort of peace agreement, and it’s not going to let it remain as an isolated Jewish enclave linked to the capital by a thin, three-mile stretch of highway with nothing but Palestine on either side. The world has remained on the sidelines these last 37 years during the construction of Ma’aleh Adumim. It’s a little late in the game to go complaining about E-1.

Besides, who says this settlement, the third most populous in the West Bank, isn’t already a stake in the heart of a prospective Palestinian state, even without E-1? “Ma’aleh Adumim was established to break Palestinian contiguity,” Benny Kashriel, the town’s mayor since 1992, told the Jerusalem Report in 2004. “It is Jerusalem’s connection to the Dead Sea and the Jordan Valley [on the other side of the West Bank from Jerusalem]; if we weren’t here, Palestinians could connect their villages and close off the roads.” [Continue reading…]

Lara Friedman writes: Recently, the European Union adopted harsh new Iran sanctions, strongly supported by Israel. Shortly thereafter, Israel announced new East Jerusalem settlement construction. The EU’s top official Catherine Ashton, who was about to visit Israel, condemned the announcement in measured terms; Israel’s Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, publicly told her, in effect, to shove it. Imagine if in response, Ashton had indefinitely postponed her trip. Imagine that Israeli ambassadors in EU capitals were summoned to the local foreign ministries and read the riot act. Imagine that Israeli press had been alerted, leading to headlines about how Prime Minister Netanyahu and Lieberman were squandering the friendship of the EU and European support on Iran for the sake of settlement expansion.

None of that happened. Instead, Lieberman’s comments were politely ignored. Ashton went to Israel. And settlement construction advanced.

This episode demonstrates how things got to the point where they are today. Netanyahu and Lieberman believe they are unaccountable because they have never been called to account. They’ve seen that their defiance of Israel’s closest allies carries no price, either diplomatically or in the domestic arena. The two are, of course, linked: Israel’s allies acquiescing to Netanyahu treating them as underlings and enemies has only strengthened Netanyahu politically, and added to his aura as “King Bibi.” [Continue reading…]

Henry Siegman writes: With his decision to oppose the U.N. General Assembly’s granting Palestine non-member state observer status, U.S. President Barack Obama leaves no doubt he is not modifying his pre-election position that “There is no daylight between Israel and the United States,” and that no matter how deeply Israeli behavior violates international norms and existing agreements, U.S. support for Israel remains “rock solid.” This continuity of U.S. Middle East peace policy was promptly reinforced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when she assured Israel that despite her condemnation of its decision to proceed with new construction in the E1 corridor of the West Bank that will doom the two-state solution, this administration will continue to “have Israel’s back.”

The decision confirms America’s irrelevance not only to a possible resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict but to the emerging political architecture of the entire region, the shape and direction of which will increasingly be determined by popular Arab opinion, not autocratic regimes dependent on the United States for their survival.

The efforts promised by President Obama to renew Israeli-Palestinian peace talks will be seen universally for the empty and purposeless exercise they will be. To be taken seriously, a new U.S. peace initiative would have to begin with an insistence that Israel’s government accept the pre-1967 border as the starting point of resumed negotiations. Without such a U.S. demand, backed by effective diplomatic pressure, the United States will have no right to ask Palestinians to return to negotiations that have no terms of reference, and therefore no prospect of producing anything other than cover for Israel’s continuing predatory colonial behavior in the West Bank.

The administration’s admonitions to the Palestinians that they find the political courage to return to negotiations with a government whose intention to prevent viable Palestinian statehood has been clearly and repeatedly demonstrated are singularly inappropriate. A U.S. administration that since the third year of its first term has been pandering to the Israel lobby by withdrawing its insistence that Israel’s illegal settlements project must end, followed by a muting of its demand that resumed negotiations be framed by reasonable terms of reference, should exercise considerably greater restraint before presuming to preach to others on the subject of political courage. [Continue reading…]

Jessica Apple writes: Mr. Netanyahu has been ignoring the peace process for most of his current four-year term. For the first time since Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat shook hands in 1993, and as Israel prepares to elect a new Knesset in January, its political leaders are not talking about a two-state solution.

When I moved to Israel 15 years ago, the picture was very different. There was never a question of whether Israel and the Palestinians would make peace, only of when. The dream of peace inspired me, and even after an intifada, scores of suicide bombings and a war, I stayed in Israel. I remained hopeful.

But today, as the missiles get closer to Tel Aviv, I think of leaving. It’s not the missiles that are breaking me. It’s the lack of an alternative to them.

Mr. Netanyahu has avoided the Palestinian issue while enabling and encouraging settlement building; he has ignored the Arab initiative and focused solely on the threat of Iran. Late last month he struck a coalition deal with his ultranationalist foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, to have their two parties run one slate in the next elections in January. It signaled that Mr. Netanyahu would have no plans to make peace if he were re-elected.

Now Mr. Netanyahu has chosen to enter into a conflict that ensures that the vote in the upcoming elections will be about security — something he says he can provide. There is no great surprise in that. The surprise is that there is no opposition to Mr. Netanyahu’s policies — a signal that Israelis are resigned to living indefinitely with the threat of war. [Continue reading…]

David Wearing writes: Obituaries for the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are appearing with increasing regularity, with examples including recent pieces in the Guardian by Rachel Shabi and Ghada Karmi. Among supporters of the Palestinian national struggle, those now calling for a single bi-national state are clearly in the ascendency, but the view is not unanimous. People such as Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky continue to advocate the establishment of two states along the 1967 borders “subject to very minor and mutual adjustments”. The disagreement is over tactics and analysis, rather than politics or principle, but it is no less significant for that.

The case for a single, bi-national state is now reasonably familiar. Israel’s illegal settlements are so entrenched that uprooting them to make way for a viable Palestinian state has become impossible. We should therefore call instead for a single, democratic state in the whole of the former British Mandate for Palestine.

But the logic is incomplete. Declaring the two-state solution unrealistic does not, by itself, make self-evident the greater feasibility of one bi-national state. The latter would entail the end of Israel, and of Zionism, as we understand those terms today. Is this really a more likely scenario than the colonial infrastructure in the occupied territories being dismantled? Recent polls showing alarming levels of racism in Israeli public opinion, reflected in the new hard-right alliance between Likud and Yisrael Beitenu, suggest a polity that is not currently minded to dissolve itself under any amount of political pressure. [Continue reading…]

Joseph Dana reviews Occupation Diaries by Raja Shehadeh: Where has all the excitement gone for statehood in the West Bank? A year ago in September there were festivities and public displays of hope on the streets of Ramallah; one year later, little attention was paid to Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’s United Nations speech reiterating the need for an independent Palestinian state. Lackluster support for the PA should come as no surprise. In the past 12 months alone, the United States blocked the PA’s bid to declare statehood; Israel has intensified settlement growth while Israeli settlers have rampaged, destroying property and desecrating holy sites with impunity; the international community, focused on Iran and the threat of regional war, has stood idly by. An equitable two state solution between Israel and the Palestinians is all but dead.

Last month’s surprise economic protests are a stark reminder of the genuine discontent simmering in the West Bank, as well as the dire economic straits many Palestinians experience. Fed up with rising prices for goods and services, Palestinians rose up in sweeping protests throughout the major cities dotting the rugged landscape of the West Bank. Demonstrators stormed the municipality of Hebron while thousands threw shoes at a poster of former IMF official and current Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. Riding a wave of media hysteria that the Arab Spring might have arrived in Palestine, the Associated Press referred to these protests as the largest against the Palestinian Authority in its 18-year history.

Yet seemingly as soon as these protests began, they were gone. Some in Ramallah believed they were a show to scare the international community into providing emergency aid to the Palestinian Authority, another way of perpetuating the status quo of dependent Palestinians. From this melancholy perspective, the protests were successful. Israel released 250 million shekels in tax revenue, while the European Union authorized 100 million euros for the fledging Palestinian Authority. While this round of protests might have been carefully scripted, there can be no doubt that they tapped into a large reservoir of deep Palestinian anger. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Three decades after leaving the White House, former President Jimmy Carter still functions inside the trappings of power, cruising through fiercely contested areas of this city on Monday in a 12-car motorcade, with Secret Service agents stationed strategically as he surveyed the view from the Mount of Olives.

But at 88, Mr. Carter, trying to nudge his agenda without an official platform, no longer filters his words for politics or diplomacy. On Monday, he ramped up his years of criticism of Israeli policy by saying that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lacked the courage of his predecessors and that he had abandoned the two-state solution that has been the accepted framework for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for decades. And just two weeks before the American election, he was almost as critical of President Obama, saying his administration has shirked the historical role played by the United States in the region.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that Netanyahu has decided the one-state option is the one he’s going to pursue,” Mr. Carter said, despite Mr. Netanyahu’s professed commitment to two states, notably in a 2009 speech at Bar Ilan University.

As for Mr. Obama, a fellow Democrat, the former president said, “The U.S. government policy the last two to three years has basically been a rapid withdrawal from any kind of controversy.”

He added: “Every president has been a very powerful factor here in advocating this two-state solution. That is now not apparent.” [Continue reading…]

Max Blumenthal interviews former PLO legal advisor, Ziyad Clot, the whistleblower who handed the “Palestine Papers” to Al Jazeera last year.

MB: Explain the title of your book. What caused you to conclude that there will never be a sovereign Palestinian state?

ZC: The big question today is whether after 45 years of occupation why there has been no sovereign state. The only advice I’d give to someone interested in this is to look at a map and ignore what will be the hypothetical borders of a future Palestinian state and recognize the fact that the two populations are intermingled in Israel and West Bank. Because of the colonization and the fact that no one has been able to stop it since 1967 we now reach a situation where in the West Bank there is not a single hill without a settlement or an outpost. How do you create a viable Palestinian state in that situation, and where this is not enough land or water to create that state? You can’t. Therefore all the attributes of the state aren’t there anymore. Jerusalem has become a de facto unified capital of Israel and what really struck me when I was there was the extraordinary gap between the facts on the ground and what is still being negotiated in this parallel world which has totally lost touch with reality.

MB: The Palestine Papers provide a portrait of a Palestinian Authority that was out of touch to say the least. Not only were they willing to negotiate away most of East Jerusalem, they seemed psychologically disjointed from the entire refugee situation. How can you account for the disconnect?

ZC: They [PA officials] live and negotiate under a situation of occupation. It’s easy for us to say they’re giving up and are ready for any compromise and that all the red lines have been crossed — and this is my personal belief — but they have to cope with so many constraints and obstacles that along the years that they lost touch with the exiles, then the refugees, then Gaza, and now East Jerusalem because of the wall, so they are left in this small enclave that they try to administer without full sovereignty. So along the years they have internalized these constraints and became accustomed to the discourse that is acceptable to the West. Because of the PA’s structure and how it is financed they are more accountable to the international donors than the Palestinian people. So this explains why the bridges between Palestinians don’t exist anymore. If there is one area where Palestinians should focus it’s on the issue of representation. Because the peace process has become irrelevant the question of who represents the Palestinians and how they are represented is most important at this point. [Continue reading…]

Philip Weiss writes: Last month I wrote to Norman Finkelstein offering to debate the chapter dealing with the Israel lobby theory of Walt and Mearsheimer in his new book, Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel is Coming to an End. He wrote back to say that’s just one section, and the book has much larger aims, why not discuss them? I agreed, and our email dialogue of the last two weeks follows. Note that this dialogue preceded Finkelstein’s appearance on Democracy Now! Monday.

Norman Finkelstein: My new book is the fruit of three decades of scholarly reflection on the Israel-Palestine conflict and also of being an active participant in the solidarity movement. (I first got involved on June 6, 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon.) It is also the result of perhaps five years of intensive research, and three comprehensive rewrites of the manuscript. An honest reader would, I think, conclude that my book is the substantive version of the “Beinart thesis,” which, as it happens, I articulated in multiple venues long before Beinart came along. You might recall the conversation we had on the bus in Gaza after the 2008-9 Israeli invasion where I laid out my thesis that liberal American Jews were distancing themselves from Israel, and you expressed deep skepticism.

We are now at a crossroads in the conflict. I truly believe it is possible — not certain, not even probable, but still possible — that we can achieve a reasonable settlement within the two-state framework. But achieving this goal will require a maximum of political clarity and a vastly reduced amount of sloganeering.

Weiss: Here is where we differ. A historic compromise has been vitiated. Even David Shulman in the New York Review of Books understands this. And the crossroads we face is explaining to Americans that one regime exists between the river and the sea, and the trick is to make it a democracy. Unlike you, I believe, I would have been a bourgeois in the 1850s, and a Lincoln Republican; I would have been for a two-state solution that allowed slavery to persist in the south and vanish in time. Those historic compromises were also vitiated in the space of a few years; and lo and behold some Americans grew impatient and quoted the words, All people are created equal. As Palestinians are impatient today, and who can blame them. There is no equality under the Israeli regime. There has been none since it was founded.

The error here, on the part of American leaders and maybe you too, is the belief that somehow the failure of the peace process between 1994 and 2012 represents some form of treading water before we really swim. But 18 years is a very long time historically; it blights more than a generation; Arabs took Obama at his word when he went to Cairo and said that the settlements must end.

When the historic compromises of 1830 and 1850 were flouted in the 1850s, there were real results. People became impatient and within six years there was war. And my belief that the intractable question in Israel/Palestine is also likely to be resolved by “verry much bloodshed”—as the revolutionary egalitarian John Brown put it, a person I am sure I would have opposed at the time—is why I support BDS. It is a peaceful process.

Finkelstein: Our disagreements are three-fold: historical, political, and material.

A. There never has been a peace process, but rather an annexation process that used the “peace process” as a facade. The record is quite clear that the Israelis never envisaged a full withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territory and the emergence of a truly independent Palestinian state. Rabin explicitly said this in the Knesset just before his death in 1995. (I run through the record on pp. 232-237 of Knowing Too Much.) Interestingly, even the International Crisis Group, which is generally strong on facts, but feeble (if not awful) on analysis, and which has championed the “peace process” since its inception, comes close to conceding these facts. (See its latest report, “The Emperor Has No Clothes.”) The Palestinian leadership under Arafat signed onto the “peace process” at Oslo because it was headed towards oblivion (bankruptcy) after backing the wrong horse in the First Gulf War. In return for being rescued by Washington and Tel Aviv, the Palestinian leadership agreed to act as Israel’s subcontractors in the occupied Palestinian territory. (Former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, in Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, is very frank on this point.) It is therefore analytically incorrect to draw any inferences for the prospects of a two-state settlement from a process that, from the outset, was never intended to achieve a two-state settlement. The only possibility for creating a real peace process, and not the sham of the past 20 years, is to mobilize the Palestinians’ most potent asset—i.e., the population itself—in a nonviolent grassroots struggle along the lines of the first intifada. The succession of practical victories won by the Palestinian hunger strikers (with relatively little concrete support from the Palestinian population) again demonstrated the efficacy of this strategy. [Continue reading…]

The Daily Telegraph reports: Nick Clegg tilted Britain’s Middle East policy sharply towards the Palestinians on Monday with an attack on Israel’s settlement policies in the West Bank.

The Deputy Prime Minister drew a hostile reaction from Israel by saying the government’s continued construction on internationally recognised Palestinian land was “an act of deliberate vandalism” that undermined the basis of the Middle East peace process.

In some of the most critical language ever used by a senior European politician in government, Mr Clegg accused Israel of making the likelihood of a negotiated settlement to the conflict impossible to deliver.

“It is an act of deliberate vandalism to the basic premise on which negotiations have taken place for years and years and years,” Mr Clegg said.

AFP reports: The number of Israeli settlers living in the West Bank at the end of 2011 rose by 4.3 percent compared with the previous year to 342,414, an Israeli lawmaker said in a statement on Sunday.

Citing official data obtained from the interior ministry, Yaakov Katz of the far-right National Union party said the number of settlers in the West Bank had increased despite a 2010 partial settlement freeze, which he claimed continued to slow Jewish construction in the West Bank in 2011.

Katz said there were now more than 700,000 Israelis living in areas occupied by Israel in 1967, including east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

He said some 300,000 Jews now live in east Jerusalem, along with another 20,000 in the Golan Heights, both beyond the so-called Green Line, the armistice line agreed after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

The figures given by Katz for overall settlement population and the number of settlers in east Jerusalem far exceed those usually cited by watchdog groups.

Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now put the number of settlers in east Jerusalem in 2010 at 200,000, with another 18,000 in the Golan Heights, and 311,000 in the West Bank.

Katz said another 60,000 Jewish Israelis were studying at institutions in West Bank settlements in 2011, meaning there are “currently 720,000 Jews residing beyond the Green Line.”

Henry Siegman writes:

Is there anyone familiar with the history of the Israel-Palestine peace process who still believes that this Israeli government would defy the over half-a-million settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — by far the most influential political force in Israel — and their networks of supporters within Israel, and present Palestinians with a reasonable peace plan for a two-state solution that would be acceptable to even the most moderate and accommodating of Palestinian leaders?

Shelly Yachimovich, an Israeli Knesset Member who is a leading candidate for the Labor Party’s leadership, recently declared that Israel’s settlement project is “not a sin or a crime” since it was initiated by a Labor government, and therefore “a completely consensual move.” Leaving aside the bizarre notion that the consensus of thieves legitimizes their theft, if these are the views of candidates for Labor Party leadership in today’s Israel, what prospect can there possibly be for an acceptable peace accord to emerge from the peace process?

And is there anyone who witnessed the frenzied applause that greeted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s most recent speech before the U.S. Congress in which he left no doubt about his government’s intentions for East Jerusalem and for the West Bank, or heard President Obama’s assurances to AIPAC’s conventioneers that the ties that bind the U.S. to Israel are forever “unbreakable,” who still believes that the U.S. will ever exert the kind of pressure on Israel that will finally change its cost/benefit calculations with regard to its colonial project?

These incontestable realities give the lie to America’s absurd insistence — expressed most recently by President Obama on September 12 — that a Palestinian state can be achieved only as a result of an agreement between Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas. Surely President Obama must know that left to their own devices, Netanyahu and Abbas will never reach a two state agreement, and that the only purpose a resumed “peace process” would serve is to continue to provide a cover for further Israeli land grabs in the West Bank.