The Israeli-Palestinian 'peace process' that aimed at the establishment of two independent states, Israel and Palestine, bounded, more or less, by the 1967 borders, is totally bankrupt. What makes the two-state solution unachievable is primarily the fact that since 1967 Israel has settled close to three quarters of a million Jews in the territories it captured from Jordan in 1967. About one-third of those are in the area Israel defined as Jerusalem and annexed in 1967, declaring it to be non-negotiable. Of the remaining five hundred thousand, the lowest estimate of the number that would have to be removed in order for a viable, territorially contiguous Palestinian state to be set up in the West Bank is one hundred thousand. This is a task that no Israeli government, committed as it may be to the two-state solution, would be able to carry out, politically.

Internationally, the American-led, British supported, invasion of Iraq in 2003 that wrecked two key Arab states - Iraq and Syria - and resulted in a new configuration of alliances in the Middle East, removed whatever slight chance there was of applying outside pressure for the two-state solution. Instead of pursuing the mirage of a two-state solution, would-be peace makers should therefore recognise the fact that Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories in fact constitute one state that has been in existence for fifty years, the longest lasting political formation in these territories since the Ottoman Empire. The problem with that state, from a democratic, humanistic perspective, is that forty percent of its residents, the Paestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, are non-citizens deprived of all civil and political rights. The solution to this problem is simple, although deeply controversial: establishing one secular, non-ethnic, democratic state with equal citizenship rights to all in the entire area between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.

Yoav Peled is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Tel Aviv University. His book, co-authored with Gershon Shafir, Being Israeli: the Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship (Cambridge University Press, 2002) won the 2002 Albert Hourani Award of the Middle East Studies Association of North America for best book on the Middle East published that year. He is co-author, with Horit Herman Peled, of The Religionization of Israeli Society (Routledge, forthcoming) and co-editor, with John Ehrenberg of Israel/Palestine: Alternative Perspectives on Statehood, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016. Yoav has recently joined the University of Sussex and the Sussex Centre of Conflict and Security Research as Leverhulme Visiting Professor.

Please note registration is not required. Please arrive promptly at 18:00 at Chowen Lecture Theatre, BSMS Teaching Building, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9PX. There are no parking charges after 5pm.

By: Katy Joanna Joyce
Last updated: Monday, 12 December 2016