This is the 60 Minutes piece on the two-state solution in Israel. It deals with the settler situation in the West Bank. Too bad they didn't do something like this years ago when it might have made a difference. Now it's too late. The settlers are there to stay. So are the Palestinians. 60 Minutes gives Israel 3 options: ethnic cleansing, apartheid, or democracy. Democracy means the end of the Jewish state, particularly since, in very few years if not already, the Palestinians will be the majority. This is a must watch.

  thanks to Mondoweiss

Adam Horowitz and Phil Weiss at Mondoweiss added some commentary on the 60 Minutes piece.

'60 Minutes' gives Israel 3 options: ethnic cleansing, apartheid, or democracy
by Adam Horowitz

What made the piece so good is that it did not equivocate. It did not excuse the Israeli occupation as an "unfortunate necessity guided by security concerns". It did not blame Hamas or Palestinian governance for a plan successive Israeli governments have been carrying out for over 40 years (if not longer). Instead, it showed a family in Nablus who can't leave their home while its taken over by Israeli soldiers. It showed a man fighting to protect his home from demolition in Jerusalem. It juxtaposed the verdant green lawns of a settler community with the parched starved landscape of the Palestinian West Bank. And while Tzipi Livni swoops in at the end to tell the world they have nothing to worry about, that the Israeli government has this under control, settler Daniella Weiss displays a supreme arrogance and confidence to end the story that tells you all you need to know - she doesn't plan on going anywhere. As I watched it I was slightly frustrated that it didn't deal with Gaza, or Jerusalem (the settler population is over 500,000 with Jerusalem, not the 280,000 in the story), or the refugees. But then I realized that that is part of what made it so powerful. Those are the "difficult" issues that are supposedly always standing in the way of peace. Here was the "easy" issue of the illegal Israeli settlers, and Simon was saying that that alone has torpedoed the two-state possibility. Israel has made the two-state solution impossible.

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A little more about '60 Minutes' stunning piece
by Phil Weiss

Tonight was such an important night in American journalism that I want to add a little to what Adam says above. Bob Simon's report was great old 60 Minutes journalism. It was good guys and bad guys. It was rage and distance. It was a strong storyline and point of view. It collapsed geographical complexity into easy understanding. It made Tzipi Livni look like a horse's ass and an Arab doctor look like the face of humanity. It was beautiful journalism. And the TRAGEDY is that 60 Minutes could have done this report 10 years ago, or 20, and it never did. It could have done it when Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush were campaigning for the settlements in '92. It could have done it when this would have made a difference. The report was really about Zionism. And the question anyone must ask is, Wasn't this clear all along? Wasn't expansionism and disrespect for Arabs part of the original political operating system, from '47 at least on? Many years ago George Antonius, a leading Arab nationalist, said, If I only tell the story of Zionism in the court of world opinion, the world will take our side. Well it didn't happen.

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On The Wrong Side
by Uri Avnery

OF ALL the beautiful phrases in Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, these are the words that stuck in my mind: “You are on the wrong side of history.” He was talking about the tyrannical regimes of the world. But we, too, should ponder these words. In the last few days I have heard a lot of declarations from Ehud Barak, Tzipi Livni, Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Olmert. And every time, these eight words came back to haunt me: “You are on the wrong side of history!” Obama was speaking as a man of the 21st century. Our leaders speak the language of the 19th century. They resemble the dinosaurs which once terrorized their neighborhood and were quite unaware of the fact that their time had already passed.

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  thanks to Aron's Israel Peace Weblog

If the two-state solution is no longer a possibility then what other possibilities are there? Here are some interesting thoughts.

What is Israel’s End-Game?

Israel has lost its political vision and military might without a clear political sense is now dominating its actions. Military power, freed from subordination to political goals, is blind and brutal. No one in the Israeli leadership has a political vision. Many who advocate a two-state solution also know that their future relations with the Palestinian state will be less like those between Italy and Austria and much more like those between Tibet and China. Suppose there was a confederation in Israel-Palestine. This confederation could become the kernel of a Middle Eastern Union of Peoples, in which Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and many other states would conjoin together much along the model of the European Union.

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  thanks to Mondoweiss