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The map above left is part of Nobel Peace Prize nominee Jeff Halper's "Matrix of Control" showing the Israeli plan to exert absolute control and disempowerment of the occupied Palestinians. Halper is director of a courageous Israeli NGO, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (www.icahd.org), that works with Palestinians to actively block house demolitions and rebuild those destroyed. A Jewish-American Israeli professor of anthropology, Halper has done a careful analysis of Israeli objectives and tactics, and this map identifies the current (2008) situation and "facts on the ground." Halper's "2-stage solution" is described on a separate page.
The first Palestinian intifada (literally translated as "shaking off") began in 1987, led to the first "peace process" negotiations between Israel and the Arab states in Madrid in 1991, in turn leading into quiet negotiations between Israel and the PLO in Norway which produced the Oslo agreement of 1993. This agreement was immediately destroyed by continued Israeli land confiscation and settlement construction, launching a series of Palestinian suicide bombings highly publicized in the U.S. press while far greater and more frequent Israeli violence was ignored. Suicide bombings were discontinued in 2004 but are still cited by Israel as justification for its draconian "security" measures. Moreover, the U.S. press has never clarified the right of Palestinians to armed resistance under international law or the illegality of Israel's 1967 invasion and continued occupation under those laws. An occupier cannot claim "self-defense."
The "Peace Process" has lumbered on, used by Israel to create an appearance of "trying" while continuing to gobble up Palestinian land, stalling for time and never negotiating in good faith according to University of Illinois international law professor Francis Boyle who counseled the Palestinian delegation. As an official of the incoming 1996 Netanyahu administration said, "They can have whatever we decide to leave them; they can call it a state or they can call it fried chicken." A few years later, Ariel Sharon said, "Everybody has to move; run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements, because everything we take now will stay ours. Everything we don't grab will go to them." Hence the endless stalling.
Oslo was followed by the Hebron agreement in 1997, the Wye River Memorandum in 1998, the Camp David Summit in 2000, the Beirut Summit producing the Arab Peace Initiative in March 2002 (offering full recognition of Israel, guaranteed security and normalized relations in exchange for honoring UN resolutions 194 and 242 - withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders and the right of return), the Quartet's Road Map in July 2002, the Geneva Accord in 2003, and the Annapolis Conference in 2007. The most recent and most comprehensive 2-state solution proposed, the Geneva Accord, is a deeply flawed effort to circumvent international law and evade Israel's legal and moral obligations to its millions of victims.
An alternative "one-state" model proposed by Palestinian intellectuals Edward Said and Ali Abunimah, Israeli Eitan Bronstein and others, would establish a unitary, secular state with constitutionally defined equal rights for all, transforming Israel into the normal democratic state it now falsely claims to be. With returning refugees, this would soon result in loss of Israel's Jewish majority and would therefore require renunciation of the racist, 19th century ideology of Zionism. We believe that this would save Israel as well as the Palestinians.
We provide a critique of the Geneva Accord, which represents the flaws in all proposed 2-state solutions.
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