Is the Israeli leadership capable of ever acceding to a two-state solution?
It is hard to imagine, in the Israeli situation, to get from where we are to a viable solution even if the Israeli leadership is willing. Because the settlement movement has gone so far on the West Bank that it would probably generate a war in Israel if a leader there tried to eliminate the settlements. If you think of a single, unified confederal Israeli-Palestinian state, that would mean giving up the Zionist project. And that too would produce an Israeli civil war. It is very hard to see how the Palestinians reach that level of self-determination. There have been attempts to de-legitimise Hamas. Have they been successful? It has been much more successful than it was expected to be. If you look at the record, Hamas, when it was elected in Gaza in January 2006, immediately established a unilateral ceasefire and offered to deal with Israel politically. It maintained the ceasefire for almost a year despite the fact that Israel continued with its policy of assassinations from time to tim
