Here’s something you don’t read every day—an op-ed columnist willing to forgo the wishful thinking and tell the direct unvarnished truth: A sovereign Palestine? No chance.

For the sake of reality, let’s put aside whatever views and prejudices you may hold on the Palestinian question. Put aside any animosity about grasping Jews or murderous Arabs. Put aside the Holocaust, and Muslim anti-Semitism. Put aside hopes and judgements. Simply look at what has happened on the ground. Stripped of all emotion and prejudice, right and wrong, one reality becomes clear: there is no chance of a sovereign, autonomous Palestinian state. Not within our lifetimes. No chance. None.

Not only won’t there be a sovereign Palestinian state, there can’t be.

It’s no longer viable. At every historic juncture since Israel was created in 1948, rhetoric has taken precedence over pragmatism in the Arab world. As a result, every one of these historic junctions has resulted, without exception, in material defeat for the Palestinians.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE at 1/2/07 3:08:34 pm:

And speaking of wishful thinking, I give you the incoming Secretary General of the UN, who has bought into the same old stupid line of propaganda marketed by cynical Arab states for decades: ‘Israel-Palestinian conflict is key’.

Ban Ki-Moon, the new secretary-general of the United Nations, said on Monday that the Israeli-Palestinian issue was at the core of solving all the problems in the Middle East.

In an interview with the South Korean Hankyoreh newspaper, he followed the lead of his predecessor, Kofi Annan, and other international leaders such as British Prime Minister Tony Blair by focusing on “Palestine.”

“If the issues with the conflicts between Israel and Palestine go well, [resolutions of] other issues in the Middle East, including Lebanon, Iran, Iraq and Syria, are likely to follow suit. I will meet with the concerned parties as soon as possible,” Ban said in an interview posted on the paper’s English Web site Monday.