One state or two?
A two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine crisis has been growing more and more distant. Prospects suffered yet another blow last week when a government commission in Israel recommended that all Israeli settlements in the West Bank be declared legal.
The stance, if adopted by the Israeli government, would mean that Israel is entitling itself to create settlements wherever it wants in the occupied territory. According to the commission, led by retired Supreme Court jurist Edmund Levy, Israel is not technically occupying the land.
The left-leaning lobby group J Street called the proposed policy “disastrous” for Israel. Perhaps more significant, a group of moderate-to-conservative U.S. Jews—including Thomas Dine, a former executive director of the lobby AIPAC, and E. Robert Goodkind, a former president of the American Jewish Committee—warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that adopting the panel’s findings would ”place the two-state solution, and the prestige of Israel as a democratic member of the international community, in peril."
