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.