Israel Matzav: History is against a 'two-state solution'

History is against a 'two-state solution'

I've jiggered the title of this Guardian "Comment is Free" piece by historian Benny Morris, because I think my title is more honest. Perhaps Benny Morris would agree, but the editors of the Guardian would likely never let it through that way.

Morris argues that what he refers to as President Obama's ambition - 'two states for two people' - is impossible. Here's why:

President Obama's efforts to revive the Middle East peace process are bound to fail because of the unbridgeable divide separating Israel's and Palestine's political goals. The minor problems are Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu's unwillingness to partition Jerusalem and enable the Palestinians to constitute the eastern half of the city as their capital, and his reluctance to freeze the settlement enterprise in the West Bank. The major problem is that the two-headed Palestinian national movement is averse to sharing Palestine with the Jews and endorsing a solution based on two states for two peoples.

Read the whole thing. The only part I disagree with him on is his demographic projections.

One other point that bears making: In his New York Times op-ed over the weekend, former Saudi ambassador Turki al-Faisal referred to Hamas' 1988 charter as "the outdated 1988 Hamas charter" as if it was something in the past. Sadly, that is not the case. Here's Benny Morris again:

Hamas, which won the Palestinian national elections in 2006, says so bluntly. Its charter of 1988 explicitly calls for Israel's destruction and assures the believers that "Islam will destroy Israel". It repeatedly compares Israel to the medieval crusader kingdoms and states that its end will be identical. (This comparison, incidentally, has been a constant in Arab discourse on Zionism. In September 1947, the Arab League's secretary general, Abdul Rahman Azzam, told Zionist emissaries: "Centuries ago, the crusaders established themselves in our midst against our will, and in 200 years we ejected them.")

Fatah too has a constitution, never revised since the 1960s, which advocates Israel's destruction. During the 1990s, Fatah – then the leading component of the Palestinian national movement – agreed in negotiations with Israel to produce a revised Palestinian National Charter that deleted the clauses calling for Israel's destruction. No such revised charter was ever produced, though these clauses were ostensibly revoked by a gathering of Palestinian notables in Gaza in 1998.

That's just one of the elephants in the room with Obama's negotiators, but it's probably the biggest one.

Israel Matzav: History is against a 'two-state solution'