A reasonable surmise now — even without considering last weekend’s violence — is that in Palestine we have reached not only the end of the road map, but the end of the road. Israelis and Palestinians soldier on. The former manned their checkpoints, shot their missiles, continued building their infamous wall — miles beyond their property line — inside the occupied territories, and found time to bomb a target deep inside Syria, threatening to turn the three-year old Palestinian uprising into a larger regional conflict. And the latter sent a Palestinian civilian to kill Israeli civilians in a crowded restaurant in Haifa.

Both, in their own way, were leaving their calling cards.

Yet, there is no symmetry here. Israel is a merciless occupying power, pitted against a people gasping for breath, no longer sure what life is about and whether there is any supreme worth in living it.

At first blush, one is tempted to wonder, as a case in point, why Hamadi Jaradat, a young law school graduate, who had her whole life ahead of her, would choose to become a suicide bomber. But what kind of life are we talking about when you have to go through any of the hundreds of checkpoints, manned by foreign troops, to get anywhere — in your own homeland?

Rage wells up in you at the realization that you belong to a subjugated people already into their fourth decade of living under the rule of the gun. The day comes — as it had done for young, proud and brave men and women all the way from Algeria to Zimbabwe at one time in their struggle for independence — when you want to feel what your tormentors feel: the anodyne of power. You want to scrub the grime of subjugation off your body and soul, and experience the cleansing force, through an act of violence, of having freed yourself from your feelings of impotence, inferiority and helplessness. And when your occupier tells you, as occupiers are wont to do, that you cannot choose how to live, then by God, you tell him that you’re still endowed with the freedom to choose how to die.

Israelis — at least those among them who still cling to fin-de-siecle colonial ideas about pass laws and checkpoints and settlements and barbed wire and “restless natives” — are today caught in a time warp, believing improbably that their state, comprised of occupier and occupied, has a place and a future in the modern world.

Israel has become an anachronism, a cruel joke perpetrated against the Jewish people themselves. For have you noticed how this entity, established as a “haven” for Jews, has evolved into the only corner in the world where Jews are not safe? Rather than create a state where Jews could live in peace, looking confidently to the end of anti-Semitism, as a banished shadow, Zionists instead pounced on the little, native people of Palestine, demonizing them as five-headed monsters that you shoot missiles at, humiliate at checkpoints and build a Berlin Wall against.

These Zionist leaders — from Golda Meir to Yitzhak Shamir, and from Ariel Sharon to Benjamin Netanyahu, along with all the other yahoos who have ruled Israel since 1967 — have lost it. By pursuing the policies they have, opting to be occupiers ruling over the destiny, territory and resources of another people, they created, in effect, a failed state.

“The depressing truth is that Israel’s current behavior is not just bad for America, though it surely is,” Tony Judt (no Gentile he) has written in the venerable New York Review of Books. “It is not just bad for Israel itself, as many Israelis silently acknowledge. The depressing truth is that Israel today is bad for the Jews.”

Not only have we reached the end of the road map, I say, but the road itself — a road, alas, that does not fork.

There is only one solution to the Palestine question and that is, as this column continues to suggest, binationalism, a pluralistic state with equal rights for all the inhabitants of the Holy Land — a solution that history’s crazy, but immutable, laws will one day dictate.

Look, if you have a better idea, let me know, because, sure as heck, everything else has failed.

— Arab News Opinion 9 October 2003