http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=4203Paper given at the United Nations International Conference on Civil Society in Support of the Palestinian People New York, September 5, 2003
Everyone pooh-poohs the road map. From State Department and other "quartet" officials through the office of Ariel Sharon to international activists and the average person on the streets of Palestine and Israel, one would be hard-pressed to find a single believer in the "road map." From the start it has been dismissed as another failed initiative, joining a long line from Mitchell and Tenet to Gunnar Jarring and the Roger's Plan. But is it? In my view the road map possesses a significance that has been lost even on its adherents.
If The Road Map Fails: Permanent Apartheid
Looked at from the ground up, from the perspective of Israel's completion of its three decade campaign to create irreversible "facts on the ground," the road map represents the last gasp of the two-state solution. This is the crunch. As anyone who has spent even a few hours in the Occupied Territories readily understands, Israel has entered in the last phase of fully and finally incorporating the West Bank into Israeli proper, of transforming a temporary occupation into a permanent state of apartheid.
Sharon's implementation of Jabotinsky's doctrine of the "Iron Wall" establishing such massive "facts on the ground" that the Palestinians will despair of ever having a viable state of their own has reached its critical mass. The Israeli settlement blocs are so extensive, their incorporation into Israel proper by a massive system of highways and "by-pass roads" so complete and the Separation Wall physically confining the Palestinians to tiny cantons so advanced as to render any genuine two-state solution impossible and ridiculous. Given the unwillingness of the international community to force Israel's withdrawal from the Occupied Territories and in particular the American Congress's refusal to countenance any meaningful pressure on Israel, we may say that Israel is on the brink of emerging as the world's next apartheid state. Only the road map, the last dying breath of the two-state solution, stands between the hope of Palestinian self-determination in their own viable and truly sovereign (if tiny) state and the de facto creation of one state controlled by Israel. Rather than merely another failed initiative on the way to yet others, we must view the road map as a watershed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Its final failure will alter fundamentally the entire nature of struggle for a just and sustainable solution to the Palestinian issue.
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