Enough is Enough: Palestinians Should Demand the Right to Vote in a Binational Israel

The definition of insanity, it's been said, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Someone should hurry up and tell the Israelis.

A year ago, as Vice President Joe Biden visited the region hoping to restart stalled negotiations with the Palestinians, hard-liners in Jerusalem loudly trumpeted plans to build 1,600 new homes for Jews in occupied parts of the city. A furious Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned the action as "insulting" and warned that Israel risked undermining trust and confidence in an already tenuous peace process. U.S. relations with Israel were "in their worst crisis since 1975," to quote the country's ambassador to Washington. "A crisis of historic proportions."

A year later, the dimwits in Bibi Netanyahu's government appear to be up to no good again.

This week, as American and European negotiators worked feverishly to contain the diplomatic damage from a Palestinian application for full U.N. membership, Israel announced its decision to approve the building of 1,100 new settlements on (illegally occupied) land claimed by the Palestinians as the capital of a future state.

The project literally places a Jewish neighborhood in an "integral part of central Jerusalem," according to the international Quartet on the Middle East. Which casts a long shadow of doubt on the viability of a future Palestine.

Let's be brutally honest: A scattered patchwork of non-contiguous territories can never be taken seriously as a state. And the uninterrupted shrinking of Palestinian space kicks the whole idea of an independent Palestine deep into the realm of political fiction.

So perhaps politicians in Ramallah should abandon the fantasy of a two-state solution once and for all. Maybe it's time they asked for a binational state in which Palestinians have the right to vote.