Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords.

The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them.

In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B.

The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians.

Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories).

In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long.

The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.

John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector.

The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace.

Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago.

Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid.

Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority".

Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations.

"Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."

Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops.

“All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive.

Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him.

“I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.”

Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay.

“It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.”

He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?”

Illegal annexation

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community.

Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect.

“After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote.

Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation.

Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce.

Extreme poverty

Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower.

While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line.

“How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”.

“Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked.

“You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS.

Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities.

Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn.

Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank

Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent.

“Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found.

Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population.

To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones.

It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services.

“Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER).

Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”

Of the many controversial statements made by Senator Chuck Hagel over the years, none seemed to enrage Senator Lindsey Graham more than his remark that the Israel lobby intimidates U.S. Congressmen into advocating "stupid" policies. He challenged Hagel to name one such senator and to identify one such stupid policy.

The challenge created an unusual opportunity for Hagel, for there could be no better and conclusive evidence of the Israel Lobby's power of intimidation of U.S. senators on the subject of Israel than these hearings themselves, and most particularly Senator Graham's own behavior.

Unfortunately, Hagel could not take advantage of that opportunity. Had he done so, his nomination by President Obama to head the Department of Defense would undoubtedly have been dead in the water, for his former Democratic colleagues are no less guilty of yielding to that intimidation than Hagel's former Republican colleagues.

But the truth of Hagel's charge must be affirmed, particularly by those who are more concerned about Israel's ability to survive as a Jewish and democratic state than about jeopardizing contributions to their own electoral campaigns. The truth that needs to be affirmed speaks not only to the existential dangers created by the current Israeli government's illegal and often immoral behavior in the Occupied Territories but to the violation of the shared values that supposedly form the foundation of the unprecedentedly close ties between Israel and the United States.

It is not enemies of Israel but some of its most loyal and patriotic citizens, six former heads of Israel's Shin Bet, the internal national security agency on which Israel's security and existence depend, who blasted the policies of the government headed by Prime Minister Netanyahu as threatening Israel's very survival because of its colonial ambitions in the West Bank and its lack of interest in reaching a peace accord with the Palestinians. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand lectured Senator Hagel that America's ties with Israel are "fundamental" and not to be questioned, even if according to Israel's president, Shimon Peres, its right wing government's policies have put the country on a path to apartheid, a judgment with which two former Israeli prime ministers, Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, concur.

The heads of the IDF reportedly refused to implement a demand by Prime Minister Netanyahu to prepare for an assault on Iran's nuclear facilities, believing it would have catastrophic consequences for Israel. Whether they are right or wrong--given their unanimity, the high likelihood is that they were right--no one can question the patriotism of these generals and security chiefs or their motives. Successive Israeli governments trusted them and relied on their judgments in safeguarding Israel's existence. But such words of caution, when expressed by an American Congressman, are considered heretical, because the Israel lobby says so.

This record of Senate and House members' gutlessness in their subservience to the Israel Lobby was exemplified by Senator Graham's rudeness in his questioning of former Senator Hagel, repeatedly cutting him off as he was speaking. Apparently he believes that if he could have gotten Hagel to admit even one instance of disagreement with a policy of the current Israeli government, he would have made his case that Hagel is an enemy of the Jewish State, if not the Jewish People.

Of the many letters adopted by the Senate and the House to which Graham and other Senators referred, including letters criticizing Hamas, some of which Hagel would not sign onto, not one addressed the fact that the Likud, the party headed by Prime Minister Netanyahu, to this day officially opposes a Palestinian state in even one square foot of the West Bank, or that even after Netanyahu made his speech committing his government to a two-state solution, members of his cabinet and his party established a "Greater Israel" Parliamentary Caucus whose official goal is the prevention of Palestinian statehood and the annexation of all Palestinian territories.

The attacks on Hagel for his occasional dissent from Israel's policies came from a man from a political party that has established entirely new depths of abusive attacks on the policies and the personality of the President of the United States and on the policies of their Democratic colleagues. Neither Graham nor any of his Republican colleagues have, to the best of my knowledge, expressed publicly a word of criticism of colleagues who established as their goal the defeat of every policy proposal that would be made by President Obama, irrespective of its merit, in the expectation that their stonewalling would lead to his defeat in the upcoming presidential elections. Yet they proclaim that the slightest criticism of even the most reprehensible policies of Netanyahu and Israel's government disqualifies a person from serving in a high office in the U.S. government. How does one explain the Senators' bizarre notion that criticism of their own government's policies is a responsible exercise of their duties but criticism of a foreign government's behavior--in the case of Israel, of course, but not of any other foreign government--is not, except in terms of the Israel lobby's "influence" (to use the term preferred by Senator Graham).

Senator Hagel's confirmation has to await action by the Senate Committee and by the full Senate. But we do not have to wait for confirmation that with respect to the Middle East peace process, the U.S. Congress remains in the grip of the Israel lobby. This was more than fully confirmed at last week's hearing.

With his decision to oppose the U.N.'s granting Palestine non-member state observer status, President Obama leaves no doubt he is not modifying his pre-election position that "There is no daylight between Israel and the United States," and that no matter how deeply Israeli behavior violates international norms and existing agreements, U.S. support for Israel remains "rock solid." This continuity of U.S. Middle East peace policy was promptly reinforced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when she assured Israel that despite her condemnation of its decision to proceed with new construction in the E1 corridor that will doom the two-state solution, this Administration will continue to "have Israel's back."

The decision confirms America's irrelevance not only to a possible resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict but to the emerging political architecture of the entire region, whose shape and direction will increasingly be determined by popular Arab opinion, not autocratic regimes dependent on the U.S. for their survival.

The efforts promised by President Obama to renew Israeli-Palestinian peace talks will be seen universally for the empty and purposeless exercise they will be. To be taken seriously, a new American peace initiative would have to begin with an insistence that Israel's government accept the pre-1967 border as the starting point of resumed negotiations. Without such an American demand, backed by effective diplomatic pressure, the U.S. will have no right to ask Palestinians to return to negotiations that have no terms of reference, and therefore no prospect of producing anything other than cover for Israel's continuing predatory colonial behavior in the West Bank.

The Administration's admonitions to the Palestinians that they find the political courage to return to negotiations with a government whose intention to prevent viable Palestinian statehood has been clearly and repeatedly demonstrated are singularly inappropriate. A U.S. administration that since the third year of its first term has been pandering to the Israel lobby by withdrawing its insistence that Israel's illegal settlements project must end, followed by a muting of its demand that resumed negotiations be framed by reasonable terms of reference, should exercise considerably greater restraint before presuming to preach to others on the subject of political courage.

Netanyahu's decision to proceed with massive new construction in the Jerusalem area and elsewhere in the Occupied Territories is not what doomed the two-state solution. It was always clear this is what he intended doing. What dooms the two-state solution was Obama's decision to give Netanyahu the veto over Palestinian statehood, which is exactly what he did when he and his representatives at the UN insisted that the only path to Palestinian statehood is through open-ended talks with the Netanyahu and Lieberman-led government.

Both formally and politically, the U.S. position is patently untrue. Formally, the right to self-determination by a majority population in previously mandated territories is a "peremptory norm" in international law. The U.N. Charter is clear that the implementation of that right is one of the primary purposes of the United Nations' establishment, and international courts have confirmed it is a right that overrides all conflicting treaties or agreements. The only reason the Security Council has failed in its clear responsibility to implement the Palestinian's right to self determination is this Administration's veto.

Practically, it is true that given its overwhelming military power, and given the virtually uncritical support it receives from the U.S. in the exercise of that power, Israel's government can and will continue to block Palestinian statehood. But that is a reason not to subject the Palestinians' peremptory right to self-determination to an Israeli veto. Instead it is a reason to demand that the U.N. exercise the role assigned to it by its Charter. Israel's engagement with the Palestinians will cease to be the historic fraud it has been only when its government comes to believe that its continued stonewalling will lead to America's support for intervention by the Security Council.

Previous failures of the peace process continue to be dishonestly attributed by the U.S. and Middle East experts (particularly former "peace processors" who have left government for various think tanks) to "the absence of trust" between the parties. It is an explanation that serves as a convenient way of avoiding hard truths. If the lack of trust were in fact the reason for past failures, why have the years of endless negotiations not produced greater trust, but instead eroded what little trust existed to begin with. The Palestinian Authority and President Abbas have discredited themselves with their Palestinian public because they have been too trustful of Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, in effect collaborating with the illusion so successfully promoted by Israel that they are overseeing a transition to a two-state solution.

The Palestinian people have known all along how utterly disingenuous was Netanyahu's Bar-Ilan speech of June 14, 2009 in which he pretended to accept the two-state goal. Not only was this possibility precluded by the facts that Netanyahu and his government were creating on the ground, but members of his cabinet were the founders and leaders of the "Whole Land of Israel" Knesset Caucus that was established officially for only one purpose: preventing a Palestinian state in any part of Palestine. At no point did that caucus provoke a murmur of protest from the U.S. or from the Quartet. Imagine their reaction -- or the reaction of the U.S. Congress, for that matter -- if President Abbas' cabinet members had established a "Whole Land of Palestine" Caucus within the Palestinian Authority.

The credibility of any new U.S. initiative that seeks to restore the possibility of a two-state outcome depends entirely on President Obama's willingness to identify the illegal "facts on the ground" unilaterally created by Israel in the West Bank as the fundamental obstacle to a two-state solution. To be sure, it is a solution that would now be difficult to achieve in the best of circumstances, but it is clearly entirely out of the question when the occupying power has made the prevention of such an outcome its overriding strategic goal.

There would be no better beginning for a change in U.S. Middle East policy than an unambiguous U.S. declaration of support of the Presidency Conclusions of the European Council of March 25/26, 2004 in which European leaders unanimously declared that "The European Union will not recognize any changes to the pre-1967 borders other than those arrived at by agreement between the parties." Ironically, it is a position that was endorsed by -- of all people -- President George W. Bush.

Sadly, there is no reason to believe the Obama administration will do so, short of cataclysmic events in the region that threaten to damage U.S. vital interests so deeply as to offer him no choice. By then, however, the damage is likely to be irreparable -- not only to U.S. interests, but to Israel's continued survivability as a Jewish and democratic state.

The Middle East peace process is dead. More precisely, the two-state solution is dead; the peace process may well go on indefinitely if this Israeli government has its way.

The two-state solution did not die a natural death. It was strangulated as Jewish settlements in the West Bank were expanded and deepened by successive Israeli governments in order to prevent the emergence of a viable Palestinian state. The settlement project has achieved its intended irreversibility, not only because of its breadth and depth but also because of the political clout of the settlers and their supporters within Israel who have both ideological and economic stakes in the settlements’ permanence.

The question can no longer be whether the current impasse may lead to a one-state outcome; it has already done so. There is also no longer any question whether this government's policies will lead to what can legitimately be called apartheid, as former prime minister Ehud Olmert and other Israeli leaders predicted they would. Palestinians live in a one-state reality, deprived of all rights, and enclosed in enclaves surrounded by military checkpoints, separation walls, roadblocks, barbed-wire barriers and a network of “for-Jews-only” highways.

Until now, Israel’s colonial project has been successfully disguised by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pretense that he is pursuing a resumption of talks for a two-state solution with President Mahmoud Abbas. It has also been strengthened by the pretense of President Obama and EU leaders that they believe a resumed peace process can still produce a Palestinian state. But these pretenses cannot be sustained for long, if only because of the inability of settlers to restrain triumphalist pronouncements of their achievement of Greater Israel and their defeat of the Palestinians’ hopes for statehood—as Dani Dayan did recently in the op-ed pages of the New York Times and Haaretz, in which he proclaimed that because of the settlements’ irreversibility there will be only one sovereignty west of the Jordan River.

But paradoxically, the triumph of the settlement project contains the seeds of its own reversal—or of the demise of the Zionist project.

First, some history. Israeli decision-making elites long ago made a cold cost-benefit calculation that the benefits of establishing permanent Israeli control over the entire West Bank exceed the cost. Immediately following the 1967 Six Day War, Israel’s government announced it would withdraw from occupied territories in Egypt and Syria in return for those countries' recognition of Israel but made no such offer to the Palestinians. When asked in 1968 what would be the future of the Occupied Territories, Moshe Dayan—the legendary IDF chief of staff and, at the time, Israel's minister of defense—replied with characteristic bluntness: their future, he said, “is being implemented in actual fact. What exists today must remain.” In 1977, replying to that same question, he said, “The question is not what is the solution, but how to live without a solution.”

As for what to do with the millions of Palestinians who live within Israel’s enlarged borders, many Israelis believe that the long-unacknowledged silent ethnic cleansing that has been going on for years in what was designated by the Oslo agreement as area C, comprising over 60 percent of the West Bank, can continue for the time being. And when it no longer can, then Israel would unilaterally draw borders around areas A and B and call the imprisoned enclaves within that area a Palestinian state.

Advocates of Greater Israel also believe that by granting (or pretending to grant) citizenship to the small number of Palestinians who have managed to resist expulsion from area C, which would be formally annexed, the apartheid issue will have been neutralized—at least sufficiently so to placate American Jews and the U.S. administration. That was stated explicitly by Naftali Bennett, a confidant of Netanyahu and a settler leader who reported that his proposal for Israel’s annexation of area C was well received by Israel's political, military and security establishments.

There is one price, however, that the vast majority of Israelis, including many if not most settlers, will not pay for a Greater Israel: the loss of the state’s Jewish identity. Israeli polls have confirmed this repeatedly. It is an issue that Israelis believe can be finessed, either by continuing to hold out the promise of a two-state solution in an undefined future or by carving up the West Bank in a manner that excludes the heavy concentrations of Palestinian population from Greater Israel, as advocated by Bennett and others. But if those two options were precluded and the choice were to either grant citizenship to the Palestinian residents of a Greater Israel or a two-state arrangement with limited and equal territorial exchanges, Israel’s cost-benefit calculations would have to change.

And it would come down to that choice if the disguise of the existing Greater Israel were stripped away. The issue for the United States would then no longer be where the borders of a Palestinian state are to be drawn—a matter Washington has for all practical purposes left to the Israelis to decide—but whether it is prepared to defend what increasingly would be seen by everyone as an apartheid regime.

It is unlikely that even those Western democracies accustomed to pandering to their Israeli lobbies would be prepared to shield Israel from condemnations and sanctions when its apartheid can no longer be disguised. One must assume that no American president would again declare at a UN General Assembly that Palestinian victims of such a system should seek relief not from the UN or international courts but from their occupiers.

The key to changing the deadlocked status quo is therefore exposing the Greater Israel that has been created by the settlement project in the West Bank and the de facto apartheid regime under which Palestinians now live. But the United States and the European Union will not be the whistle-blowers, most certainly not as long as Palestinians themselves continue to collaborate with Israel’s pretense that a one-state reality does not yet exist, a collaboration implicit in their adherence to the Oslo framework and to the myth that the Palestinian Authority and the strengthening of its institutions can still pave the way for Palestinian statehood.

Nothing would expose more convincingly the Israeli disguise of the one-state reality now in place than a Palestinian decision to shut down the Palestinian Authority and transform their national struggle for independence and statehood into a struggle for citizenship and equal rights within the Greater Israel to which they have been consigned. Only by declaring that Palestinians will no longer be complicit with their occupiers in their own disenfranchisement will Israelis be confronted with the need to choose between a two-state arrangement and a single state that sooner or later will lose its Jewish identity.

In recent talks with Palestinian leaders, some of them told me they fear that Israel would take advantage of such a move to annex area C and consign Palestinians to enclaves in areas A and B, as proposed by Bennett. But Israel's government has already done so. Only those blind to the facts on the ground created by the settlements can believe there still exists a possibility for a two-state outcome that might be put at risk. And the sooner Palestinians expose their new reality the better. For an Israeli land grab in area C that would follow the launching of a Palestinian anti-apartheid struggle is far more likely to be seen by the international community as confirming Israel’s apartheid than a land grab that precedes it—i.e. when the issue is still presented by Israel as the setting of the border between two states.

Friends of Israel should fervently hope that such a Palestinian strategy will succeed in changing the cost-benefit calculations of Israel’s government, for the success of the settlements holds the seeds of Israel's demise. Palestinians have lived under Israeli occupation for nearly half a century and will endure, if they must, another half century. They have few alternatives.

However, it is highly doubtful that Israel can survive another half century of its subjugation of the Palestinians. The region has been radically transformed by the emergence of Islamic regimes that, unlike their predecessors, will not suppress Arab furies provoked by Israel's permanent disenfranchisement of the Palestinians. America's ability to impose its own political order on the region is in decline. Even Arab royals in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Emirates will be pressed to prove their legitimacy by joining efforts to deepen the ring of Arab hostility that surrounds and threatens the Jewish state. America's fading influence and Israel's growing vulnerability in this emerging regional order have already been exposed by Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi's decision, in defiance of American objections, to attend a conference of nonaligned nations hosted by Iran. The heightened sense of isolation and insecurity that Israelis will experience as Arab countries join the nuclear club, which in time they surely will, is bound to lead to an exodus of Israel's best and brightest, and in time it could spell the end of the Zionist dream. As reported in Israel’s press, the search in certain sectors of Israeli society for foreign passports and second homes abroad has already begun.

An honest Israeli offer of Palestinian statehood based on the Clinton parameters would avert such a calamity, remove the most incendiary issue from the region's agenda, and leave Iran and Hezbollah without a cause in the Arab world.

Paradoxically, only Palestinians can make that happen. By abandoning the Palestinian Authority, ending the ugly Fatah-Hamas rivalry and mounting a struggle for full citizenship rights in the Greater Israel they now live in, Palestinians will challenge not only Israel's public but also the United States and the international community to finally stand up to the most reactionary government in Israel's history. If that struggle does not bring back the two-state option, nothing will. In that case, the struggle that Palestinians will have initiated for citizenship and equal rights in Greater Israel could not have been more timely.

In 1975, a combination of malevolent and misguided governments managed to enshrine in a United Nations General Assembly resolution the defamatory accusation that Zionism is racism. That libel was rescinded by the General Assembly in 1991, the only time that one of its resolutions was revoked.

In 2012, having neutralized American opposition to its efforts to establish -- through the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank -- irreversible “facts on the ground” that will prevent the emergence of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, while at the same time denying Israeli citizenship to the millions of Palestinian residents of the occupied territories, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has succeeded in reviving the calumny that Zionism is racism, something anti-Semites and Israel’s enemies had been unable to do.

The founders of Zionism were among the most enlightened and progressive leaders of the Jewish world. They were not racists, and neither were the members of the U.N. General Assembly who voted in 1947 to create a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian state. But Netanyahu and his government have proven that although Zionism is not racism, Zionists can indeed be racists.

In the 1980s many in the American Jewish establishment (myself included) participated in demonstrations against South Africa’s apartheid regime. The struggle against apartheid was considered by the Jewish community (not only by liberals) to be a Jewish cause. But that was in the 1980s, and the apartheid was in South Africa. Today it is in Israel -- and not as a future possibility, as many have been warning, but a current reality.

Netanyahu and his government have sought to disguise their de facto apartheid regime by pretending the status quo in the occupied West Bank is temporary, and that it would lead to a two-state agreement if only Palestinians would return to negotiations in a peace process that has been a farce, having served no purpose other than to disguise the enlargement of the settlement project that created the apartheid to begin with. However, when there is even the slightest possibility that negotiations might actually be resumed on the basis of the pre-1967 line, a line Netanyahu has relentlessly been trying to erase from the world’s memory, he and his government revert to the claim that Israel has no partner for peace talks, and therefore negotiations must wait for one or more generations when a more reasonable Palestinian leadership might emerge.

When Palestinians turned to the U.N. last year to confirm their right to statehood, Netanyahu’s Foreign Ministry circulated a confidential document to various governments accusing Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, of encouraging terrorism and the delegitimization of Israel, among many other crimes. The document concluded that “no agreement [with the Palestinians] will ever be possible as long as Mahmoud Abbas leads the Palestinian Authority.” This of the man who Israeli security agencies and the IDF credited only recently with having helped put an end to terrorism in the West Bank.

When in 1991 Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir decided to bring into his government the rightwing Moledet party, headed by Rechav’am Ze’evy, Benny Begin, the son of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, warned that because Moledet advocates the “transfer” (forceful expulsion) of the West Bank’s Arab residents, its inclusion in Israel’s government “in effect confirms the U.N. resolution that says that Zionism is racism.”

Today, the ruling Likud party, in which Benny Begin is one of its most influential ministers, opposes Palestinian statehood and the granting of Israeli citizenship to Palestinian residents of the West Bank, confining them to enclaves behind checkpoints and barbed wire fences. While Netanyahu claims to oppose transfer, transfer parties are part of his government, and Palestinians are being systematically expelled from Area C territories (so designated by the Oslo accords) that comprise over 60 percent of the West Bank. A recent report from the European Commission notes that hundreds of Palestinian homes in that area have been slated by Israel for demolition.

If Shamir’s government deserved to be criticized by Begin as confirming the “Zionism is racism” resolution, what can be said for a government that is actually implementing what Ze’evy and his Moledet party only advocated?

Former prime ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak and others have been warning Israel for years now that the lack of progress towards a two-state solution threatens to lead to a loss of Israel’s democracy and to an apartheid state. But warning of a future threat instead of raising an alarm over a present reality that “looks, walks and quacks” like an apartheid regime has played into the hands of Netanyahu’s government. Netanyahu believes that by invoking the Holocaust and accusing critics of Israel’s de facto apartheid of anti-Semitism and Israel-bashing, he can continue to intimidate, discredit, and silence them. The failure of both the U.S. administration and the American Jewish organizational establishment to speak truthfully about Israel’s present reality has only served to reassure Netanyahu that his apartheid regime can be permanently disguised.

Nevertheless, Netanyahu is not taking any chances. Naftali Bennett, a close associate of Netanyahu who previously headed his Prime Minister’s office (and also a former head of Yesha, the settlers’ council for Judea and Samaria), recently announced that he presented a plan for the “solution” of the Israel-Palestine conflict to Israel’s political leaders and to its military and defense officials, and that the plan received “high praise.”

The key elements of Bennett’s plan, which one might reasonably assume is Netanyahu’s trial balloon, are: 1) unilaterally imposing full Israeli sovereignty in Area C (as noted above it constitutes 62 percent of the West Bank, leaving Palestinians less than 9 percent of pre-partition Palestine.); 2) “securing” all of Jerusalem; 3) an Israeli “security umbrella” across the entire West Bank, including the territory in which geographically disconnected Palestinian enclaves envisioned in this plan would be located; 4) disconnecting the Gaza strip from the West Bank and “assigning” it to Egypt; 5) rejecting a Palestinian right of return for the refugees even in the enclaves that would constitute a future Palestinian state; and 6) granting Israeli citizenship for the 50,000 Palestinians who, according to Bennett, now reside in Area C that is to be annexed to Israel. This brilliant move, Bennett announced triumphantly, “will pull the rug from under any apartheid argument.”

It should be noted that according to the European Commission report previously referred to, Area C is home to 150,000 Palestinians, which raises the question of whether an unstated aspect of Bennett’s plan is the “transfer” of 100,000 Palestinians out of Area C.

So far there has been not even a whisper of criticism of this appalling attempt to “kosher” Israel’s apartheid from America’s Jewish organizational leadership, who continue to confuse support for Netanyahu and his government that includes out-and-out racist parties (including a cabinet housing minister who publicly encouraged the exclusion of Israel’s own Arab citizens from Jewish neighborhoods) with support for the Jewish state envisioned by its Zionist founders.

Netanyahu’s policies have turned Israel into an ethnocracy similar to states such as Milosevic and Mladic’s Serbia, whose xenophobic nationalism, land grabs in Bosnia, demonization of Bosnia’s Muslims, and ties to a benighted Serbian Orthodoxy that provided religious support and encouragement for their leaders’ predations, mirror Israel’s present reality. (It should not surprise that Ariel Sharon was the only leader in the democratic world at the time who condemned NATO’s bombing of Belgrade. Indeed, he warned it might serve as a precedent for similar international measures against Israel.)

Netanyahu and his supporters in Israel and in the Diaspora are not only destroying Israel’s democracy but defaming both the Zionism and Judaism they misleadingly invoke to justify the apartheid being entrenched in Zion.

Neither Torah, nor justice or peace, will ever come forth from such a Zion.