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Meron Benvenisti has been talking, writing and arguing about the guardian.co.uk on Israel">Israel-Palestinian conflict for much of
the last 40 years. Now aged 76 he is as forceful, articulate and
unconventional as ever – and convinced that President Barack Obama is
doomed to fail in his attempt to cajole the two sides to hammer out a
solution at the negotiating table.

Benvenisti, the Cassandra of
the Israeli left, has long held the view that the occupation that began
after the 1967 Middle East war is
irreversible and that Israelis and Palestinians need to find an
alternative to the elusive two-state solution that has dominated
thinking about the conflict in recent years. Controversial and
iconoclastic when he first advanced it, his thesis is gaining ground.

"The
whole notion of a Palestinian state now, in 2010, is a sham," he told
the Guardian at his Jerusalem home as the US intensified efforts to get
the long-stalled peace process moving again. "The entire discourse is
wrong. By continuing that discourse you perpetuate the status quo. The
struggle for the two-state solution is obsolete."

George Mitchell,
the US envoy charged with launchi... >>>