two-state solution – praag.org

US turns to UN to hold off ICC case against Israel

The White House is about to turn to the UN to help force a deal between Israel and the Palestinians. The development also reflects deepening pessimism over the prospect of negotiations delivering peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

After years of blocking efforts to pressure Israelis and Palestinians into accepting a lasting two-state solution, the United States is moving toward supporting a UN Security Council resolution that would call for the resumption of political talks to conclude a final peace settlement, according to Western diplomats.

The move follows Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decisive re-election Tuesday after the incumbent publicly abandoned his commitment to negotiate a Palestinian state — the basis of more than 20 years of US diplomatic efforts — and promised to continue the construction of settlements on occupied territory.

The prospect of direct negotiations appeared to evaporate with Netanyahu’s pre-election declaration that he would never allow the creation of a Palestinian state.

The comment completely reversed the Israeli leader’s previous support for an independent Palestine as part of a permanent peace deal between the two sides.

On Wednesday, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s top diplomat in the United States told Foreign Policy the Palestinians would move forward with plans to use the ICC to try to hold Israel accountable for alleged war crimes during last summer’s war in Gaza.

“The fact that we have a government in Israel publicly opposing a two-state solution just reinforces our position that this conflict must be handled by the international community,” Maen Rashid Areikat said.

The United States would actively seek guarantees from the international community to hold off on ICC activity in exchange for a Security Council resolution outlining international standards for a final peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians.

CIA report: Israel will fall in 20 years

A study conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has cast doubt over Israel’s survival beyond the next 20 years.

The CIA report predicts “an inexorable movement away from a two-state to a one-state solution, as the most viable model based on democratic principles of full equality that sheds the looming specter of colonial Apartheid while allowing for the return of the 1947/1948 and 1967 refugees. The latter being the precondition for sustainable peace in the region.”

The study, which has been made available only to a certain number of individuals, further forecasts the return of all Palestinian refugees to the occupied territories, and the exodus of two million Israeli – who would move to the US in the next fifteen years.

“There is over 500,000 Israelis with American passports and more than 300,000 living in the area of just California,” International lawyer Franklin Lamb said in an interview with Press TV on Friday, adding that those who do not have American or western passport, have already applied for them.

“So I think the handwriting at least among the public in Israel is on the wall…[which] suggests history will reject the colonial enterprise sooner or later,” Lamb stressed.

He said CIA, in its report, alludes to the unexpectedly quick fall of the apartheid government in South Africa and recalls the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, suggesting the end to the dream of an ‘Israeli land’ would happen ‘way sooner’ than later.

The study further predicts the return of over one and a half million Israelis to Russia and other parts of Europe, and denotes a decline in Israeli births whereas a rise in the Palestinian population.

Lamb said given the Israeli conduct toward the Palestinians and the Gaza strip in particular, the American public — which has been voicing its protest against Tel Aviv’s measures in the last 25 years — may ‘not take it anymore’.

Some members of the US Senate Intelligence Committee have been informed of the report.

Source: MRS/MMN

Kerry calls for an Apartheid state in Israel

The US Secretary of State said that if Israel doesn’t make peace soon, it could become “an apartheid state”, like the old South Africa. Many are fuming over the ill-informed comparison.

Kerry is clearly confused about apartheid, since the two-state solution implies apartheid rather than a single state containing both Jews and Arabs.

Kerry warned that if there was no “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict soon, Israel risks becoming “an apartheid state”.

Secretary of State Kerry confused a room of influential world leaders in a closed-door meeting Friday about seperate development, ethnic selfrule and notions of Jewishness.

Senior American officials have rarely, if ever, used the term “apartheid” in reference to Israel, and President Obama has previously rejected the idea that the word should apply to the Jewish state.

Kerry’s use of the loaded term is already rankling Jewish leaders in America because it is bound to attract unwanted attention to Israel.

Kerry also repeated his warning that a failure of Middle East peace talks could lead to a resumption of Palestinian violence against Israeli citizens. He suggested that a change in either the Israeli or Palestinian leadership could make achieving a peace deal more feasible. He lashed out against Israeli settlement-building.

Kerry told his audience that a unitary state “winds up either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens, or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state”.

The US nevertheless imposed a unitary state solution on South Africa, strangely, to “end apartheid”. They have now changed course 180 degrees on the matter it seems.

According to the 1998 Rome Statute, the “crime of apartheid” is defined as “inhumane acts… committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” The term is most often used in reference to the system of racial segregation and oppression that governed South Africa from 1948 until 1994.

A two-state solution and claims of Jewishness imply racial segregation however.

Former president Jimmy Carter came under fire in 2007 for titling his book on Middle East peace Palestine: Peace or Apartheid.

Carter explained after publishing the book that he was referring to apartheid-type policies in the West Bank.

“Apartheid is a word that is an accurate description of what has been going on in the West Bank, and it’s based on the desire or avarice of a minority of Israelis for Palestinian land,” Carter said.

Israel’s leaders have employed the term as well. In 2010 former Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ehud Barak used language very similar to Kerry’s. “If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”

Kerry suggested in March that if peace talks fail, it would bolster the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

Time and demographics are on the Palestinian side, and Israel has to confront notions of the Jewishness of the state, Kerry implied, further strengthening the notion that the US would like to see apartheid being applied to Israel sooner rather than later.