In July 13, former Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin issued a dire warning to the government of Israel: either it will reach some kind of two-state settlement or there will be a "shift to a nearly inevitable outcome of the one remaining reality — a state 'from the sea to the river'." The near inevitable outcome, "one state for two nations," will pose "an immediate existential threat of the erasure of the identity of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state," soon with a Palestinian-Arab majority.

On similar grounds, in the latest issue of Britain's leading journal of international affairs, two prominent Middle East specialists, Clive Jones and Beverly Milton-Edwards, write that "if Israel wishes to be both Jewish and democratic," it must embrace "the two-state solution."

It is easyshape before our eyes, is not obscure. Israel is systematically extending plans that were sketched and initiated shortly after the 1967 war, and institutionalized more fully with the access to power of Menahem Begin's Likud a decade later.

The first step is to create what Yonatan Mendel calls "a disturbing new city" called "Jerusalem" but extending far beyond historic Jerusalem, incorporating dozens of Palestinian villages and surrounding lands, and furthermore, designated as a Jewish City and the capital of Israel. All of this is in direct violation of explicit Security Council orders. A corridor to the East of this new Greater Jerusalem incorporates the town of Ma'aleh Adumim, established in the 1970s but built primarily after the 1993 Oslo Accords, with lands reaching virtually to Jericho, thus effectively bisecting