Negotiations between two unequal parties cannot succeed. Success in
Palestinian-Israeli negotiations requires a reasonable balance of power,
clear terms of reference and abstention of both sides from imposing
unilateral facts on the ground. None of that existed in the talks that
were re-initiated in September.

Much like previous rounds of talks, these negotiations were dominated on
one side by an Israeli government that controls the land, roads,
airspace, borders, water and electricity, as well as the trade and
economy of the Palestinian side, while possessing a powerful military
establishment (now the third military exporter in the world) and a
robust gross domestic product, which has tripled in the last decade.

This same Israeli “partner” now also boasts a general public that has
shifted dramatically to the right, and to which an apartheid system for
Palestinians has become an acceptable norm.

On the other side is the Palestinian Authority — one that paradoxically
holds little real authority, and exists as a sort of fiefdom within the
Israeli matrix of control. Further debilitating the PA is a protracted
internal Palestinian division, total dependence on foreign aid and a
decline of democracy and human rights. Finally, the Palestinian
Authority is constantly pressured to provide security for its occupier
while failing to provide any protection whatsoever to its own people
from that same occupier.

How did we get here? The answer, in large part, has to do with the
continued and unabated construction of settlements in the West Bank,
including East Jerusalem, in the 17 years since the Oslo agreement.

In this time, the number of settlers has increased by 300 percent and
the number of settlements doubled. The settlements are only the front
line of a complex and profitable system that includes checkpoints, road
segregation, security zones, the “apartheid wall” and “natural
reserves.”

This matrix has for years eaten up the land, water resources and the
economic space of the independent Palestinian state supposedly being
negotiated in this same period. About 60 percent of the West Bank and 80
percent of water resources have been consumed this way.

We have reached, and probably surpassed, that critical point at which
any more settlements mean the death of the two-state solution.

The Israeli establishment knows this better than anybody. They also know
that their hard-line positions on issues like Jerusalem and borders
mean transforming the idea of Palestinian statehood into something much
less: isolated clusters of land in a system of segregation.

The International Court of Justice and endless United Nations
resolutions have ruled that settlements are illegal and should be
removed. Even the Road Map issued by the so-called Quartet (the United
States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia) in 2003 said
that all settlement activities must stop. Yet neither the United States
nor the Quartet as a whole has had the guts to exert serious pressure on
Israel to stop settlements.

So what is left?

The only way to save the two-state solution is for the Palestinians to
declare the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the
territories occupied by Israel in 1967, including East Jerusalem, and to
demand that the world community recognize it and its borders — as it
did in the case of Kosovo.

That would also mean supporting the right of Palestinians to struggle
nonviolently to end the occupation of their state. Any future
negotiations, therefore, would not be about the right of the
Palestinians to have their own sovereign independent state, but rather
about how to apply and implement that right.

This would be the true test of the state-building strategy of the United
States and the donor community. It would be the real instrument to
finally demarcate the difference between support for free Palestinian
institutions in a sovereign and viable state, or footing the bill of
occupation and using EU and US tax dollars to maintain under various
guises what will never amount to anything but an apartheid system
denying Palestinians their human and national rights.

If the world community turns its back on such a declaration of
independence by using the well-worn and insulting argument that every
step should first be verified with the Israeli government, then the
message will be clear: peace based on two states is no longer an option.

Mustafa Barghouthi is the founder of the Palestinian National Initiative
and a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. This essay was
originally published by the International Herald Tribune and is
republished with the author’s permission.