Still, Halper writes, he sees two possibilities ahead — one (the second one) far more difficult than the other:

“I’m optimistic that 2011 will witness a game-changing ‘break’ that will create a new set of circumstances in which a just peace is possible. That jolt which smashes the present dead-end paradigm must come from outside the present ‘process’. It can take one of two forms. The first possible game-changer is already being discussed: a unilateral declaration by the Palestinian Authority of a state based on the 1949 armistice lines (the 1967 ‘Green Line’), which then applies for membership in the UN. This, I believe, would force the hand of the international community. Most of the countries of the world would recognize a Palestinian state – including not a few in Europe – placing the US, Britain, Germany and other reluctant powers in a difficult if not impossible situation, including isolation and even irrelevancy. Indeed, a Palestinians declaration of independence within those boundaries would be a unilateral act but rather one done in agreement with the member states of the UN, who have accepted the 1949/1967 borders as the basis of a solution. It conforms as well to the Road Map initiative led by the US itself. Such a scenario, while still possible given the deadlock in negotiations, is unlikely, if only because the leadership of the Palestinian Authority lacks the courage to undertake such a bold initiative. A second one seems more likely: in 2011, the Palestinian Authority will either resign or collapse, throwing the Occupation back on the lap of Israel. Given the deadlock in negotiations, I can’t see the PA lasting even until August, when (sort-of) Prime Minister Salem Fayyad expects the international community to give the Palestinians a state. Even if the 90-day settlement freeze eventually comes into effect, Netanyahu will not negotiate borders during that period, the only issue worth discussing. Either fed up to the point of resigning – Abbas may be weak and pliable, but he is not a collaborator – or having lost so much credibility with its own people that it simply collapses, the fall of the PA would end definitively the present ‘process’.”

Incidentally, Halper thinks there are seven elements which must be involved for any peace deal to work. He writes: “it is not difficult to identity the essential elements of any solution … These seven elements, I would submit, must configure any just solution. If they are all included, a settlement of the conflict could take many different forms. If, however, even one is missing, no solution will work, no matter how good it looks on paper”.

The seven elements that Halper lists are, in brief:

· A just, workable and lasting peace must be inclusive of the two peoples living in Palestine/Israel;
· Any solution must provide for a national expression of each people, not merely a democratic formula based on one person-one vote;
· It must provide economic viability to all the parties;
· No solution will work that is not based on human rights, international law and UN resolutions.
· The refugee issue, based on the right of return, must be addressed squarely.
· A workable peace must be regional in scope; it cannot be confined merely to Israel/Palestine; and
· A just peace must address the security concerns of all the parties and countries in the region.

Nusseibeh told Black: “If you think about it, when we talk about politics and history and how events unfold, sometimes we talk as if it’s all about metaphysical forces. We assume, like in this case, that there are objective impossibilities. I am a pragmatic philosopher. And when you look a bit more closely you realise that in the final analysis it’s not so complicated. It can be reduced to the actions of a person, and that person can in fact make a lot of difference … Things could work out if people put their minds to it … My faith is in the power of people to write history. One of the tragedies is that we very often sit back feeling that we have no power and that all we can do is express is our optimism or pessimism.”

Black’s profile reports that: ” ‘Until 1967′, he writes in his memoirs Once Upon a Country, published in Britain this week, ‘we had hardly existed in the minds of these fine people. [n.b. Israelis] This absence wasn’t a product of malevolence or ill will. Physically, we simply weren’t part of their world, with most Arabs having been cleared out 20 years earlier. Morally speaking, it was a case of out of sight, out of mind. Their humanism never had to face us’ … Nusseibeh recognised that Jews had emotional claims on the holy land (their roots in Jerusalem ‘existential and umbilical’), and refused to see Zionism as just another facet of western colonialism, or to ignore the role of the Nazi Holocaust in forging Jewish nationalism. ‘Isn’t the ability to imagine the lives of the ‘other’ at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?’ he asks … ‘The thing is not to try to change their ideology, but to win the people over to one’s own side. The relevant issue is not whether the ideology exists but how much support it has’. In 2002, at the height of the second intifada, with its bus bombings, martyrs and Israeli re-conquest of the West Bank (‘a catastrophic, slapdash brawl … a ruinous and sanguinary fit of madness’) Nusseibeh teamed up with Ami Ayalon, the dovish former head of Israel’s Shin Bet secret service [n.b., now a Minister without Portfolio in Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's cabinet], to try to galvanize the majority of people on both sides who say they want to live in ‘two states for two nations’ – but doubt whether it can ever be achieved … ‘In retrospect people will feel it was stupid to spend so much time over dividing this piece of land’, he muses. ‘I’m not saying it’s easy to reach a mathematical solution, but such a solution does still exist. I’m not saying that it’s guaranteed. It’s a question of deciding in which direction to walk’.”
Ian Black’s profile of Sari Nusseibeh in today’s Guardian is here.