LONDON — Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was just back from the Annapolis summit where U.S. President George W. Bush tried to reboot the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. More importantly, last week was also the 60th anniversary of the United Nations vote that divided British-ruled Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. That promised Arab state still doesn't exist, of course, but if the peace talks fail to produce it in the end, Olmert told the newspaper Ha'Aretz, then Israel is "finished."
"If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses," Olmert said, "and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights for the Palestinians in the (occupied) territories, then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished. The Jewish organizations, which were our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us, because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents."
It was an extraordinary thing for a rightwing Israeli politician to say: Israelis usually erupt in fury if anybody suggests a comparison between their country and apartheid-era South Africa. However, Olmert wasn't talking about the country as it is now — seven million people, of whom about five and a half million are Jews — but about the country that would exist if the peace talks fail definitively and the four million Palestinians in the occupied territories remain under Israeli control indefinitely.