[IsraelTimes] EUBAM unit was deployed to border crossing in preparation for Paleostinian independence, but two-state vision is increasingly losing out to notion of a single, shared entity
It’s been 16 years since the borders of the Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with an iron fist by Hamaswith about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response ...
Strip slammed shut after Hamas, the well-beloved offspring of the Moslem Brotherhood, seized control of the territory from Fatah.
The takeover forced the European Union
...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing...
to withdraw monitors who had been deployed at a Gaza border crossing to help the Paleostinians prepare for independence. Yet the EU has regularly renewed funding for the unit since then, most recently late last month.
The continued existence of the unit known as EUBAM
... European Union Border Assistance Mission — they hang out at a bunch of borders in interesting places... is an extreme example of the West’s willingness to keep pumping hundreds of millions of dollars a year into the moribund vision of a two-state solution between Israel and the Paleostinians.
Proponents say this approach remains the best chance for securing an eventual peace deal. Critics argue that opting for such costly conflict management helps keep the 56-year-old Israeli military control of other Paleostinian territories in place and allows Europa
 ...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...
and the US to avoid making the hard political decisions needed to end the conflict.
This week’s Israeli military operation in the Jenin refugee camp, a West Bank terror stronghold, following numerous deadly attacks by Paleostinians from the area, and previous eruptions of violence also underscore the limits of international efforts to contain the conflict.
"The international community, in my view, understands the reality that the two-state solution is gone," said Marwan Muasher, a one-time Jordanian foreign minister and former ambassador to Israel. "It does not want to acknowledge this publicly, because acknowledging it publicly is going to have to force the international community to start talking about alternatives, all of them problematic."
Muasher, now a vice president at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is unusual among his peers. The legions of diplomats and politicians who have devoted their careers to Mideast peacemaking remain committed to the two-state vision, even as the ground around them has shifted.
"I am still a believer," said Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister who led the last round of substantive peace talks with Paleostinian leaders before leaving office in 2009.
"There is no other solution. Everything else is almost inevitably a prescription for disaster," Olmert said.
The two-state approach has guided international diplomacy since the 1993 Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Paleostine Liberation Organization. The interim accords were meant to lay the groundwork for the establishment of a Paleostinian state alongside Israel.
Paleostinians seek the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, areas Israel captured in the 1967 Six Day War, for their state. The land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, made up of pre-1967 Israel and the other three area lands, is populated in roughly equal parts by Paleostinians and Israeli Jews. Pollsters predict an eventual Paleostinian majority because of higher birth rates.
Proponents of partition say it would create a democratic Israel with a clear Jewish majority in defined borders and enable Paleostinians to realize their national aspirations.
Without partition, the default is a reality in which a shrinking Israeli minority controls a growing Paleostinian majority with few political rights. Leading rights groups claim an apartheid system is already in place. Israel rejects any allegation of apartheid, saying its own Arab citizens enjoy equal rights, while its limitations on Paleostinians are a necessity born of the need to protect itself from violence. Israel also notes that it granted limited autonomy to the Paleostinian Authority at the height of the grinding of the peace processor in the 1990s and withdrew all its soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005.
Since the Oslo Accords 30 years ago, the US and EU have spent billions of dollars on development projects and direct aid to the Paleostinian Authority to promote the two-state vision. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell both pledged support for a partition deal.
Yet the West has little to show for its efforts. Peace initiatives led by successive US presidents were derailed by violence, Israeli settlement expansion and mutual distrust.
Hamas, shunned by the West as a terrorist group, has fought four wars against Israel and remains entrenched in Gaza. The Paleostinian Authority, which governs semi-autonomous enclaves in the West Bank, is weaker than ever. Israel’s hard-right government opposes Paleostinian independence and is racing to expand a settler population that has ballooned to over 700,000 people.
Preoccupied with the war in Ukraine and its rivalry with China, the Biden administration has done little more than condemn Israeli settlement plans and call for de-escalation.
Recent opinion polls show that only about one-third of Israelis and Paleostinians still favor a two-state solution.
Even some members of the Paleostinian Authority, which has the most to gain from independence, have begun to speak publicly about equal rights between the river and the sea, rather than two states.
"The basis for us is ending the occupation, obtaining freedom," said Mahmoud Aloul, an aide to Paleostinian Authority President the ineffectual Mahmoud Abbas
...aka Abu Mazen, a graduate of the prestigious unaccredited Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow with a doctorate in Holocaust Denial. While no Yasser Arafat, he has his own brand of evil, just a little more lowercase....
. He said it does not matter if the conflict ends with two states or a single binational state for Israelis and Paleostinians.
In academic and human rights
...which are usually entirely different from personal liberty ...
circles, many now speak about a "one-state reality" — in which Israel wields overall control over Paleostinians. Muasher said given this environment, it is time for the world to focus on Paleostinian human rights instead of unrealistic peace plans.
Ines Abdel-Razek, executive director of the Paleostine Institute for Public Diplomacy, an advocacy group, said calls for a two-state solution are "comfortable" for the international community, but insincere.
She said that if the US were serious about peace, it would force Israel to reverse its settlement enterprise. Instead, she said, Washington gives Israel billions in military aid, allows settlement groups to raise funds in the US, engages with institutions promoting the annexation of the West Bank and pushes for normalization with other Arab countries. |
...Argentine liberation theologist, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio. He was elected pope in 2013. Rather than setting up shop in Avignon, where he belongs, the first Jesuit Pope chose to reside in the Domus Sanctae Marthae guesthouse instead of the papal apartments. He is big on climate change, against consumerism, and in favor of throwing a blanket over homosexual activity (so to speak) within the clergy. He's not real sure about the Resurrection, about Christ's divinity, and a few other things that would have gotten him burned at the stake a few hundred years ago, but he's hot for a certain South American Earth Mother Goddess...
" for "exhausted and suffering civilians".
...a contraction of the Arabic words for "frothing at the mouth",...
...not a terrorist organization, even though it kidnaps people, holds hostages, and tries to negotiate by executing them,...
...Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia as of 2016. The Turks hate him, so he must be all right, despite the occasional brutal murder of Qatar-owned journalists...