Professor Asher Susser's new book explains why a two-state solution is in everyone’s best interests.
By RALPH AMELANOptimist’s despair(photo credit: Courtesy)
If anyt hing was needed to confirm that Israelis are wise to relegate their long-running dispute with the Palestinians to a poor third in their list of concerns, behind the Iranian nuclear threat and social justice, this book is it.Professor Asher Susser, former director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle East Studies at Tel Aviv University and still a senior fellow there, directs his fire and ire against the fashion in some academic quarters to have Israelis and Palestinians coexist in a single state. He has no trouble in demolishing their case, showing how both peoples, as well as the Jordanians, regard a two-state solution as being in their essential interests.This solution has been stymied mostly by the Palestinian refusal to compromise on their demand to resettle large numbers of Palestinian refugees within Israel’s 1948 borders, even while Israel offers proposals based on treating those borders as a basis for a final border. A violence-punctuated stalemate has been the result: an attempt to impose a single-state solution on both sides would just lead to violence.Susser’s analysis, a useful, tough-minded, and comprehensive summary of the tangled relations between Israelis and Palestinians, offers no way out for an optimist.All Israel can do, he suggests, is to disengage, avoid friction, and settle for small changes in the hope that this will improve the climate. Something just may turn up: the wisdom of Charles Dickens’s eternal optimist Mr. Micawber could triumph.To this, the peace process has come.
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