For most of my adult life I believed that a majority of Israelis could be persuaded that their own interests required recognizing Palestinian Arabs’ right to national self-determination and equality. Therefore, I believed that establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel was the most politically realistic way to achieve peace and security for both peoples.
In recent years, however, I have come to realize that promoting a two-state solution to the conflict based on the Oslo process when no such solution is likely abets Israel in perpetuating the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Fostering the fiction that the Occupation is temporary allows people of good will to entertain illusions that a substantial proportion of the settlements and settlers will be evacuated. This fiction distracts us from the core reality on which we should be focusing: the concrete and ever-worsening conditions faced by Palestinians in the current...
