The agonizing death of the two-state solution between Israel and Palestine

Expulsions and demolitions of Palestinian family homes in East Jerusalem, and the approval of more settler settlements there and elsewhere in the occupied West Bank, doom the two-state solution, seen for decades as the only way out of the peace process in middle East Come in Israel Y Palestine.

“Prepare to attend the funeral of this solution with all the consequences of such a death for the lives of millions of people, Palestinians and others,” Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki warned last Wednesday before the UN Security Council. UN in New York in the periodic debate on the situation in the Middle East.

“The two-state solution that the international community has legislated and championed for so long does not need your words of comfort. She needs you to protect her,” he insisted in that forum, a few hours after the Israeli police forcibly evicted the Salhiya early Wednesday morning and demolished the two homes of that Palestinian family residing in occupied East Jerusalem.

Two days earlier, when the police went to execute an eviction order, the fifteen members of that family – including children and the elderly – had barricaded themselves with gasoline and gas cylinders on the roof of the house in the central neighborhood of Sheikh Yarrah and they threatened to “blow it up” if they were taken out of what had been the family home since the 1950s.

The eviction of the Salhiya

The Salhiya have since lived on these Sheikh Jarrah lands with refugee status, as they were forced to leave their home in the Ein Karem neighborhood in the western part of the city in 1948 when the State of Israel was formed.

The land where the Salhiya lived was expropriated by the Jerusalem City Council in 2017 to build a school for children with special needs, but for the family and other neighbors it is just an excuse to undertake “ethnic cleansing” of this strategic neighborhood, converted today once again a focus of tension and a stumbling block for an eventual peace process.

Israel has occupied the east of the city since 1967, which was annexed in 1980, and where it currently imposes its civil laws on a population of more than 370,000 Palestinians, the majority without Israeli citizenship and with revocable residence permits, and 200,000 settlers; although the Palestinians and much of the international community aspire to make the eastern half of Jerusalem the capital of the increasingly distant Palestinian state.

“They want to make the Jewish residents more than the Arab residents,” said the family spokesman, Mahmud Salhiya, who was released on Thursday after spending more than 24 hours in detention for “violating a court order, violent opposition and disturbing public order.” .

Another 70 Palestinian families in the neighborhood, also with refugee status, have eviction orders that respond mainly to lawsuits filed by Israeli settler organizations that claim ownership of houses from before 1948, based on laws that do not apply to properties. Palestinians in western Israel.

the international community

After the expulsion of the Salhiya, the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) rushed to judge what happened as “war crimes” and demanded the most forceful action of the international community, specifically the administration of President Joe Biden in the United States, to which demanded “that he assume his responsibility and intervene immediately.”

While the White House remains silent, the European Union (EU) did speak out on Thursday about the Salhiya case and warned that the growing trend of expulsions and demolitions in East Jerusalem and other parts of the occupied West Bank “poses the risk of increase tensions”, as has already happened in the escalation of the war with the Palestinian militias in Gaza.

The EU also called on Israel “not to proceed” with the plan – announced the same day they came to evict the Salhiya – to build more than 1,450 buildings in a new settlement between the colonies of Har Homa and Givat Hamatos, in occupied East Jerusalem. , which further disconnects the city from the rest of the West Bank and “could affect the possibility of Jerusalem serving as the future capital of both states.”

“Settlement expansion, demolitions and evictions are illegal under international law. They exacerbate tensions, threaten the viability of the two-state solution and diminish the chances of a lasting peace,” the EU stressed, along the same lines as the words of Maliki, who on Thursday met in New York with the secretary general of the UN, Antonio Guterres, to address the latest events in the occupied territories.

The new Israeli government, led by the ultranationalist and former settler leader, Naftali Benet, already approved in October more than 3,000 homes in new settlements in the occupied West Bank, where more than 400,000 settlers live, blurring the agreed borders for a future Palestinian state.

That announcement did provoke a wave of rejection in the international community, including the United States, although no one has raised the possibility, as the ANP claims, of imposing sanctions on Israel, which maintains a good diplomatic relationship with more and more Arab countries despite that the Palestinian issue is still up in the air.