Summary

Virtually overnight, the Arab Middle East has been unrecognizably transformed. The implications of that transformation for America’s vital interests in that region and for Israel-Palestine peacemaking will be far-reaching. The peace process so far has been a meaningless exercise as successive US administrations chose to ignore the reality that Israel’s  long-planned goal of establishing irreversible control through its settlements over Palestine was clearly in sight, if not already an accomplished fact.

Given the vast imbalances between the two parties, and the commitment of successive Israeli governments to expanding the settlement enterprise, there was never the slightest chance of a two-state solution without forceful US intervention. That intervention never came, as the US, deferring to domestic political pressures, pretended it believed Israel’s declared commitment to a two-state accord.

Israel’s leaders believed that Arab authoritarian regimes, whose survival depended to a considerable extent on the US security umbrella, would keep in check popular Arab outrage over the failure to halt Palestinian dispossession. The fall of Mubarak and the tremors it has caused in neighbouring Arab regimes will henceforth prevent them from exercising that restraining role, or from collaborating with the US and Israel in an anti-Iran coalition, thus undermining Israel’s strategic situation.

Rescuing a sovereign Palestinian state offers the US a chance to restore the credibility and influence it has been losing in the region and to weaken Iran’s. Given the tectonic changes in this area and the threat they pose both to American and Israeli interests, a US intervention to end the Israel-Palestine conflict is not only politically conceivable but, perhaps for the first time, achievable.