What is the alternative to peace talks to nowhere?

A very watchable lecture in 13 parts that Ali Abunimah gave at Stanford on Nov 3, 2010, sponsored by Students Confronting Apartheid by Israel (SCAI).

Also well worth reading is a well-written piece in Ma’an News Agency, where Ali Abunimah responds with logic and vision to Hanan Ashrawi while she clings to a broken two state dream.

“Ms. Ashrawi ought to know better than anyone else that it is the totally fraudulent ‘peace process,’ starting with the Oslo Agreement which should never have been signed, which bought time for the occupation to deepen its tentacles in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and to impose — with the complicity of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah — the blockade on Gaza.”

Abunimah said that when Ashrawi argues Palestinians cannot not assemble a global coalition for the one-state solution “she displays a total lack of faith in the Palestinian people and their cause. Palestinian rights and demands are not a gift of ‘global partners,’ but a birthright. When the ANC demanded democracy in South Africa, they set the terms of the agenda, they did not wait for the permission of the US State Department before asking for their rights.

“The one-state solution is the only just, moral and practical solution which restores the rights of all Palestinians — the refugees and the diaspora, the Palestinians within the 1948 territories, and those in the West Bank.”

Abunimah also noted the significance of Ashrawi having to reckon with the one-state solution: “While skeptics and critics of the single state always dismissed it as a marginal idea, they now find it gaining ground to their dismay, and having to defend a so-called two-state solution that everyone knows will never lead to the restoration of Palestinian rights.”