Mitchell's Challenge; After Gaza, Five Questions about Palestinian and Israeli Realities

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Mitchell's Challenge
After Gaza, Five Questions about Palestinian and Israeli Realities
By Sandy Tolan

The deep irony of the Israeli-Palestinian "peace process" first struck me in 1996 as I was driving through the West Bank from Hebron to Jerusalem. I had turned off the potholed main road that passed through Palestinian villages and refugee camps and headed west into Kiryat Arba. In that Israeli settlement, admirers had erected a graveside monument to Baruch Goldstein, the settler from Brooklyn who, in 1994, gunned down 29 Palestinians in Hebron's Cave of the Patriarchs. From the settlement's creepy candlelit shrine I cut north, and soon found myself on a quiet, smooth-as-glass "bypass" road. The road, I would learn, was one of many under construction by Israel, alongside new and expanding settlements, that would allow settlers to travel easily from their West Bank islands to the "mainland" of the Jewish state.

How strange, I thought naively, as I traveled that lonely road toward Jerusalem on a gray winter afternoon: Isn't this part of the land that Palestinians would need for their state? Why, then, in the middle of the Oslo peace process -- barely three years after the famous Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn -- would Israeli officials authorize construction that was visibly cementing the settlers' presence into Palestinian land?

Twelve years later, these post-Oslo "facts on the ground" have all but doomed the traditional path to peace. The two-state solution, the central focus of efforts to end the tragedy of Israel and Palestine since 1967, has been undermined by the thickening reality of red-roofed Israeli settlements, military outposts, surveillance towers, and the web of settlers-only roads that whisk Israelis from their West Bank dwellings to prayer in Jerusalem's Old City, or to shopping and the beach in Tel Aviv. So dense had the Israeli West Bank presence become by 2009, so fragmented is Palestinian life -- both physically and politically -- that it now requires death-defying mental gymnastics to imagine how a two-state solution could ever be implemented.

Five Questions for an Israeli-Palestinian Future

Former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, Obama's respected, fair-minded Middle East envoy, will bring his considerable skills to bear on this ever more daunting problem. It is Mitchell's widely acknowledged fairness that has prompted jaw-dropping comments from some hardline pro-Israeli lobbyists and Christian Zionists who became accustomed, under George W. Bush, to getting whatever they wanted; this in itself is a signal that Obama's approach to the region may represent a genuine break from the past.

To an honest witness like Mitchell, for whom the facts and the aspirations of both peoples seem to actually matter, it may become quickly evident that the traditional two-state solution is now on life support. Seeing that, he would do well to keep an open mind and be prepared to ask some hard questions. Among them might be:

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