The five enablers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

AIPAC has refused to use its considerable leverage to press for peace-oriented concessions and territorial compromise. Instead, it has rendered the two state solution an empty slogan while supporting the Israeli policies that make it impossible. In doing so, AIPAC has directly contributed to the ever worsening conflict and put Israel's security under constant threat. Still, AIPAC has not awakened from its blind support that jeopardizes Israel's very existence and, with that, scuttles any prospect for an Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Israeli opposition parties' dismal failure

Israel's opposition parties have failed to offer a credible, sustained alternative to the right's permanent conflict paradigm, and in doing so have gravely weakened Israel's chances for peace. Instead of forcefully championing a two state solution, most opposition leaders tiptoe around the very words "Palestinian state," intimidated by electoral backlash and the charge of being "soft" on security. Their political inaptitude has allowed the right to define what is "realistic," narrowing the political options to endless occupation and recurrent war.

Thus, they have directly contributed to the current impasse, making the conflict ever more intractable. Without a major party willing to argue that Israel's long term security depends on a two-state solution, the public hears only variations of the same message: manage, contain, punish, but never resolve. This abdication cedes the strategic debate to the extremist Netanyahu and his messianic lunatics, who are creepingly implementing their scheme of greater Israel, which would bury any prospect for peace.

It is a dire reality for the country that the opposing parties failed to coalesce and present a united front to push for a two-state solution, even following the Gaza war, which has unequivocally demonstrated that after nearly 80 years of conflict, only peace would provide Israel with ultimate security. Every leader from these parties feels they are the most qualified to be the prime minister, but has failed miserably to offer realistic plans to end the conflict.

By failing to unite, organize, educate, and mobilize Israelis around a clear two state vision, these parties are undermining Israel's security, eroding its international standing, and endangering its very future as a Jewish, democratic state.

The record of these five enablers is devastating. They made a just peace ever more remote, pushing Israel precariously toward an apartheid one state reality it cannot sustain morally, demographically, or strategically, while abandoning the Palestinians to the cruelest, inhumane occupation.

They must change course now-or condemn Israelis and Palestinians to generations of bloodshed that will erase Israel's reason for being and extinguish Palestinian nationhood.