MIDDLE EAST:Failure to negotiate a two-state solution with the Palestinians will sound the death knell for Israel, prime minister Ehud Olmert warned yesterday. If the Palestinians begin to demand a single state with equal voting rights, Israel will not survive as a Jewish state, the Israeli leader told the daily Haaretz.
"If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished," said Mr Olmert, a day after he and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas agreed to try and hammer out a peace deal by the end of 2008.
He said it was not the first time he had alluded to these fears. They were what had underpinned his support for Israel's unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, as well as his 2006 election pledge to pull out of most of the West Bank.
With the Palestinian population growing faster than the Jewish population, the Israeli leader is acutely aware of the demographic threat this poses to Israel as a Jewish state.
If the two-state solution dies, Jews will become a minority in the geographic space between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea and Israel will face charges that it has ceased to be a democracy.
"The Jewish organisations, 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."