By Urgh
We doff our rotting caps to it.
People make a big fuss over zombies rising from the grave and menacing the living, but at least you can kill a zombie again with the right equipment. Our staying power has nothing on the patently untenable Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Considering that the two-state vision was doomed from the get-go once the Palestinians rejected the idea of recognizing Israel as Jewish, it’s had a phenomenal run. Country after country, administration after administration, has touted it as the only viable resolution to the century-old conflict. Pundits continue to pontificate on the centrality of the two-state solution to any peaceful future for the Middle East, despite no practical indication that it could form the basis for constructive negotiations, let alone work. We zombies can only marvel at the phenomenal undead properties it has, and wish we, too, could continue to haunt the world despite repeatedly being shot down, crushed, buried, or otherwise rendered unviable.
It’s been almost a quarter of a century since that historic moment on the White House lawn, with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shaking hands as a a proud Bill Clinton looks on. Rabin may never have agreed to the formation of an actual Palestinian State, that didn’t stop anyone else from declaring it an inevitability – the only real possibility, in fact, if you take the Thomas Friedmans of the world seriously. But the two-state solution came into the world stillborn, as there was never a chance the Palestinians would accept Jewish claims to the Jewish homeland. Nevertheless, this already-dead blueprint for a final-status arrangement proved ridiculously hard to kill with any finality. It still dominates the thinking of a hefty portion of the left-leaning political class. No zombie could hope to take that much of a beating and still remain intact, let alone kicking. We doff our rotting caps to it.
Who knows how long this unholy creature will last? It certainly looked weaker than usual today, after Trump’s refusal to invoke it as sacrosanct in his press conference with Netanyahu, but the undead have a way of rising, and this undead creature has proved harder to get rid of than any other. So there’s no telling whether it will just disintegrate or continue to stagger around and consume people’s brains. Whichever outcome, I think it’s only proper that we in the zombie community demonstrate some respect for the two-state solution’s unprecedented achievement in lasting this long.
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