An honest Israeli offer of Palestinian statehood based on the Clinton parameters would avert such a calamity, remove the most incendiary issue from the region's agenda, and leave Iran and Hezbollah without a cause in the Arab world.

Paradoxically, only Palestinians can make that happen. By abandoning the Palestinian Authority, ending the ugly Fatah-Hamas rivalry and mounting a struggle for full citizenship rights in the Greater Israel they now live in, Palestinians will challenge not only Israel's public but also the United States and the international community to finally stand up to the most reactionary government in Israel's history. If that struggle does not bring back the two-state option, nothing will. In that case, the struggle that Palestinians will have initiated for citizenship and equal rights in Greater Israel could not have been more timely.

Henry Siegman is the president of the U.S./Middle East Project. He also serves as a nonresident research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Image: Soman