The two-state solution has to work this time.
Marwan Barghouti, held in an Israeli jail, may be the man to halt the Middle East killings.

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There is a real stupidity in this argument, demonstrating that it's not only the protagonists in the struggle who become mad. It isn't just the impressionistic problem of getting Tel Avivians used to the idea of being a minority in a country run by people who like their funerals to be full of gunfire and death-chants. It is the idea that the Jews of Israel will voluntarily give up their statehood - where no-one else in history ever has - that is so bizarre.

Well, people have given up their statehood. Or at least their leaders in the name of the people they led. Few examples:Texas in 1845, Sansibar in 1964, Sikkim in 1977. And then there´s Scotland in 1707. And of course there are the demands now made to Nauru, independent since 1968, that it should surrender itself to Australia, because it´s economy is a mess. Going deeper, one will find more examples of cases where people, or their leaders, "gave up their statehood". There´s nothing bizarre in these cases, usually only simple politics, less at least than there´s in writing an article in a big British newspaper, which contains descriptions of funerals among foreign peoples using racist stereotypes. After all, even in Britain there are still occasionally - and nowadays little more often - held funerals, where people fire guns towards the skies. And sometimes the dreadful Westerners even celebrate by firing cannons, can you believe it?

If you want to find an example of what unification of Palestine under a single state would mean, a better example is South Africa. It´s not a paradise - crime is rampant - but when the Afrikaaners gave up THEIR statehood in 1994, the sky didn´t fall and the oppressed didn´t massacre the oppressors, as doomsayers predicted. The fact is, that there´s a single state in Palestine now. The question is, which is easier:Giving equal rights to all people that live under it´s rule or to try to separate it in to a big and a small state so that even the small state, with a land area 1/5 of the bigger one and a population of 66% of the bigger one - if no refugees return (or will be returned by neighbouring countries, by force) - is, as Tony Blair tells us time after time(without telling what he exactly means by it), viable.

Of these, the latter would still be the easier solution, the more realistic one, but as time goes on, the former becomes more and more certain - minus the acceleration of the even now ongoing ethnic cleansing and acceptance of it by the international community. And the one-state solution doesn´t necessarily have to be that bad. People have to eventually learn to live side by side, whether one-state or two-state solution will prevail, even after terrible things have happened. Like they are trying to do in Ruanda, Burundi and many other places around the world. Surprisingly, most people can. Even if the mental wounds take generations to heal.