Did Israeli settlements in the West Bank kill the two-state solution?

When did the dream of a two-state solution die? When it became clear that there are already two Palestinian states – the Hamas-run Gaza and the Palestinian Authority-governed West Bank? Or when the extremists of Hamas fired thousands of missiles into Israeli cities? Or last week when the ‘moderates’ of Fatah once again refused Israeli offers to go to the negotiating table and instead moved to circumvent their only negotiating partner via a diplomatic coup at the UN?

No, in the eyes of portions of the UK government as well as the international community, the two-state solution is threatened not by these consistent, physically and diplomatically violent moves; but by everybody’s favourite subject: Israeli settlement building.

In the wake of the PA’s latest attempt to avoid negotiations, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel would respond in the way it saw fit. This seems to be an order to re-start settlement building in the West Bank.

Fresh from his recent praise of the Muslim Brotherhood’s abilities as peacemakers, Ban Ki Moon has declared such a restart to be, ‘An almost fatal blow to remaining chances of securing a two-state solution.’ The British Foreign Office has issued similar warnings and now there is talk of ambassadors being summoned and even of London withdrawing its ambassador from Tel Aviv. Even the international stateswoman who presumes to speak on behalf of all Europeans on such matters – Catherine Ashton – has said she is ‘extremely worried’.

Nobody would guess that among Israel’s neighbours at the moment the Assad regime is still happily murdering tens of thousands of Syrians or that the government of Egypt is successfully pulling off a counter-revolution to ensure that Egyptian voters got one vote once. They would look in vain for strong sentiments from Ban Ki Moon or the British Foreign Office when considering the PA’s recent two-state destroying decision to go to the UN with a statehood bid instead of trying to work out final status border agreements in direct talks with Israel.