From Gush Shalom
DURING WORLD WAR II, when German bombers terrorized Britain, a small group of gallant airmen faced them every day. Their life expectancy was numbered in days.
Once, a genius at the propaganda ministry devised a poster: "Who is afraid of the German Luftwaffe?"
When it was posted at one of the Royal Air Force bases, an anonymous hand penned underneath: "Sign here."
Within hours, all the airmen had signed.
These were the men about whom Winston Churchill said: "Never have so many owed so much to so few!"
If somebody today were to devise a poster asking "Who is afraid of the settlers?" I would be the first to sign.
I am afraid. Not for myself. For the State of Israel. For everything we have built during the last 120 years.
LATELY, MORE and more people in Israel and around the world have been saying that the "Two-State Solution" is dead.
Finito. Kaput. The settlers have finally killed it.
Peace is finished. There is nothing we can do about it. We can only sit in our comfortable armchair in front of the TV set, sigh deeply, sip our drink and say to ourselves: "The settlements are irreversible!"
When did I hear that for the first time?
Some 40 years -- or was it 50 years -- ago, the noted Israeli historian Meron Benvenisti used it for the first time. The settlements, he proclaimed, have resulted in an "irreversible" situation. No Two-State solution, which my friends and I were insisting on. Sorry, irreversible. At that time, there were less than a hundred thousand settlers in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and even some in Sinai.
Now, this slogan can be heard everywhere. Irreversible. The sheer mass of the settlers has made the Two-state Solution a pipe-dream.
It is said that there are now some 450 thousand settlers in the West Bank, and an additional 150 thousand in occupied East Jerusalem.
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