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| I've changed my mind about a two-state solution | Mehdi Hasan Israel's Palestinian settlements are now too extensive to make division of the land practical. Instead, it must be sharedOK, I admit it. I was wrong. How could I have bought into all that idealistic nonsense at the start of the decade, about the prospects for Middle East peace? Why did I foolishly assume that Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat had shattered taboos at Camp David in the summer of 2000? And why did I want so desperately to believe the two sides when they claimed, at Taba, in January 2001, that "significant progress had been made" and they had "never been closer to agreement"?Perhaps the heady optimism of the 90s had seduced me. That was the decade of hope; of the Madrid conference, the Oslo accords and the historic handshake on the White House lawn. During his first stint as Israeli prime minister in the late 90s, even uber-hawk Binyamin Netanyahu agreed to territorial withdrawals at the Wye River summit.That was then, this is now. Palestinians and Israelis remain locked in conflict. Netanyahu has returned to office, 10 years on, speaking only of a demilitarised Palestinian state and refusing even to consider allowing East Jerusalem as its capital. His far-right foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who lives in an illegal West Bank settlement, has long been opposed to meaningful peace talks with the Palestinians. A decade that began with Bill Clinton bringing together Arafat and Barak to attempt to conclude the Oslo process, at Camp David, has ended with Barack Obama unable to persuade the government of Netanyahu and Lieberman to agree to a partial settlement freeze. On Monday, the Israeli housing ministry announced plans to build nearly 700 new apartments in occupied East Jerusalem.It is time to acknowledge that the peace process, as we know it, is dead. There is no longer a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Why? Because, as Virginia Tulley wrote in the London Review of Books, "the conditions for an independent Palestinian state have been killed off by the inexorable and irreversible advance of the settlements". Or, to borrow an analogy from Palestinian lawyer Michael Tarazi: "It's like you and I are negotiating over a piece of pizza. How much of the pizza do I get? And how much do you get? And while we are negotiating it, you are eating it."Consider the facts. According to Peace Now, there are 120 illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, with a settler population estimated at around 300,000. Some 200,000 Israelis live beyond the Green Line in occupied East Jerusalem – almost the same number as Palestinians allowed to reside within the city. The UN's office for the co-ordination of humanitarian affairs (OCHA) has calculated that settler numbers continue to grow at a rate of 5.5% a year – which is the equivalent of adding one a half bus-loads of new settlers each day to the 500,000 already living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. On current trends, says the UN, the settler population is likely to double to nearly a million in the next decade.Throw in Israel's infamous "facts on the ground" – the roads, barriers, checkpoints, buffer zones and military bases – and the settlement project takes up almost 40% of West Bank land. The past 10 years have seen the territory further fragmented, by Israeli soldiers and settlers, into a series of isolated enclaves, with Palestinian communities scattered around the West Bank, disconnected from one another and from the outside world. So, one has to wonder, what will emerge from any future negotiations? A Palestinian state or a bantustan? It is difficult to disagree with the verdict of the former UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, that settlement expansion is "the single biggest impediment to realising a viable Palestinian state with territorial contiguity".Confronted by half a million settlers living on the territory of a future Palestinian state – one of whom includes Israel's own foreign minister – and another half a million on the way, I can no longer support an illusory two-state solution: on pragmatic, if not principled, grounds. The two peoples are so enmeshed and intermingled that I now believe the land can no longer be divided, it must be shared. The egg cannot be unscrambled.In November, the chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat – a veteran of Madrid and Oslo – startled reporters in Ramallah when he too confessed it may be time for President Mahmoud Abbas to "tell his people the truth, that with the continuation of settlement activities, the two-state solution is no longer an option". The alternative left for Palestinians was to "refocus their attention on the one-state solution where Muslims, Christians and Jews can live as equals." Erekat added: "This is the moment of truth for us."The truth is that the dream of "two states for two peoples", born in the 90s, died in the noughties. The two-state solution, the popular and principled option for so long now, is neither practical nor possible. In the words of Israeli academic Jeff Halper, "Israel by its own hand has rendered a viable two-state solution impossible." Its time has passed. So the moment has come, as we enter the teenies, to forget the idea of a Palestinian state existing side by side with a Jewish state, and to argue and agitate instead for the only remaining, viable and democratic option: a single, secular and binational state for Israelis and Palestinians. No longer "two states for two peoples", but "one person, one vote".• Comments on this article will remain open for 24 hours from the time of publication but may be closed overnightIsraelPalestinian territoriesMiddle EastMehdi Hasanguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
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Memories of the Holocaust: Sabina Miller 'We ran because we heard the ghettos were being liquidated and that lorries were coming for the Jews'Sabina Miller never did find out what happened to the young woman she only knew as Ruszka. They both spent the winter of 1942-43 Âsheltering in a hole in the forests of northern Poland. It had been dug earlier by partisans and was the best Âaccommodation the two women could find. "We couldn't go home because we had no home and we felt safer there in the woods than risk being betrayed to the Germans."Sabina fled the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto in her teens; later she ended up working on a farm run by a Lithuanian man. He used to horsewhip the Jewish women labourers if they didn't work hard enough. There she met Ruszka, and together they finally ran away, to shelter in the forest. "We ran not Âbecause of him but because we heard that the ghettoes were being liquidated, and we heard that lorries were coming for [the Jews]."We're sitting over tea and cakes in Sabina's warm kitchen in the flat in west Hampstead, London, where she has lived for nearly 50 years. What was it like in that freezing hole? "You couldn't walk into it. You slid inside and then tried to keep as warm as you could. I think we had pinched a blanket from somewhere that kept us warm. But we were frozen and lousy. We looked like animals. My feet were so swollen I couldn't wear boots." Sabina nods towards her feet. "Later I had to have an operation on my foot. They amputated part of my toe."The only thing that Sabina had to Âremind her of her past life with her family in Warsaw was a little washbag containing a few photographs and a postcard from her sister. The postcard, Sabina believes, had been thrown by her sister from a train heading towards a death camp and was picked up by someone who posted it to the farm. "I don't know that for certain. Maybe she jumped from that train. Maybe she's alive." All that seems unlikely, Sabina admits. But, nearly 70 years after the card was, perhaps, thrown from the train, she holds on to that hope.During the night Sabina and Ruszka would go from farm to farm begging for food, but eventually farmers told them not to beg together – they looked too obvious – so she and Ruszka started Âgoing out alone. One day Ruszka didn't come back. "Who can say what happened to her?"Sabina visited local farms asking Âafter her friend. Nobody had any news, but one farmer's wife made a proposal. Could Sabina, this 20-year-old Jewish woman from Warsaw, stand in for her own non-Jewish daughter who had been called to do forced labour in ÂGermany? Sabina Najfeld (her maiden name) thus became, for a while, a Polish farmer's daughter called ÂKazimira Kuc. Because she was in such bad shape, the Germans didn't want to transport her to ÂGermany for forced labour, but later, under another name, she did end up in Germany. She spent the rest of the war on the run Âunder Âassumed names.The years of subterfuge took their toll. "When the war ended, I thought I was the last Jew in Europe." After Âliberation, she was taken to a camp for displaced persons. "One day, a soldier came up to me and said: 'Are you ÂJewish?' I said, 'No.'" It was force of habit: Sabina had spent so much of the war denying who she was. "When I came to England, for the first two or three years I was still apprehensive to tell people I was Jewish. I fell in love with this country because what I got was kindness and acceptance." Sabina flourished: she married, raised a family, learned English, made friends, worked in retailing, and became what she hadn't been in years – herself.These days she can still recall her childhood in Warsaw, but only patchily. Her father and mother probably died of typhus in the ghetto. "I can't be sure of what happened to my mother Âbecause I had typhus too and I blacked out for several weeks. When I came round, my mother was not there. I don't even know who looked after me then. On the farm, I would tell Âeveryone my mother is not dead. But I didn't know." She recalls being smuggled out of the ghetto by her brother to go and stay with an aunt who lived in the countryside. "I Âremember we didn't take off our Âarmbands during our escape because we were afraid, but we wore raincoats over the top to hide them."Three years ago, Sabina decided to go back to her homeland for the first time in more than 60 years to visit Auschwitz. "I had to bend my head from respect and pray for the dead." She, her son and daughter recited the Kaddish, the Jewish mourning prayer. On the same trip, she also went to ÂWarsaw to try to find out about her family. As with Ruszka, the fates of her siblings and her mother remained Âuncertain, though their murder by the Nazis is overwhelmingly likely. She tells me she regularly phones the ÂJewish cemetery in Warsaw to find out if, during their restoration work on the graves, they have found her mother, her father or her grandparents.Eleven weeks ago, Sabina, now 87, became a great-grandmother when Jack was born. She shows me a 2010 calendar featuring photographs of her son Stuart and daughter Sandra, her six grandchildren and baby Jack. "I'm happy I survived and I have achieved a lot," she says. "I have beautiful children and lovely people around me."HolocaustSocial historySecond world warStuart Jeffriesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |