Last Straw

Outgoing Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, recently quoted as saying:

(I am saying) what no previous Israeli leader has ever said: we should withdraw from almost all of the territories, including in East Jerusalem and in the Golan Heights.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki, in response:

We wish we had heard this personal opinion … (before) he resigned.

No shit. But this all pre-supposes the dead end that is the two-state solution. As Ghada Karmi wrote last week in The Guardian:

A unitary state is inevitable. Establishing an exclusive state defined along ethnic-religious lines and excluding its previous inhabitants was unjust and ultimately unsustainable. No political acrobatics will alter this. The sooner the UN, which unwisely created Israel in the first place, takes charge of the consequences, the better it will be for Palestinians, for Israelis and for the region as a whole.