A Tibetan solution to the Palestinian problem?

No one talks much about Tibet anymore. I mean about Tibet, as a sovereign state, or even, as the Dalai Lama once proposed, an autonomous region. China doesn’t like such talk and China is too powerful to cross.

And no one talks much about Palestine anymore. I mean about Palestine as a sovereign state. Israel has the support of Donald Trump’s America and the US is too powerful to cross.

In the run-up to the April 9 election, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rallied voters by saying that re-election would mean a government “move to the next stage”. Ie to consider “imposing Israeli sovereignty” on Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

The Palestinians are literally being rendered invisible before our eyes. The prospect of the Israeli annexation of Palestinian lands may trigger international caterwauling because much of the world views the settlements themselves as illegal. But loud laments will not revive the idea of a “two-state solution”. Israel has managed to render that long-term quest inoperable.

What might, however, happen is something else. The plight of the Palestinians might shift the global focus away from the absence of a Palestinian state to the absence of democratic rights for the millions who live under Israeli military rule.

That would be something. But still not a Palestinian state.