In this time, the number of settlers has increased by 300 percent and the number of settlements doubled. The settlements are only the front line of a complex and profitable system that includes checkpoints, road segregation, security zones, the "apartheid wall" and "natural reserves."
This matrix has for years eaten up the land, water resources and the economic space of the independent Palestinian state supposedly being negotiated in this same period. About 60 percent of the West Bank and 80 percent of water resources have been consumed this way.
We have reached, and probably surpassed, that critical point at which any more settlements mean the death of the two-state solution.
The Israeli establishment knows this better than anybody. They also know that their hard-line positions on issues like Jerusalem and borders mean transforming the idea of Palestinian statehood into something much less: isolated clusters of land in a system of segregation.
The International Court of Justice and endless United Nations resolutions have ruled that settlements are illegal and should be removed. Even the Road Map issued by the so-called Quartet (the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia) in 2003 said that all settlement activities must stop. Yet neither the United States nor the Quartet as a whole has had the guts to exert serious pressure on Israel to stop settlements.
So what is left?
The only way to save the two-state solution is for the Palestinians to declare the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, including East Jerusalem, and to demand that the world community recognize it and its borders -- as it did in the case of Kosovo.
That would also mean supporting the right of Palestinians to struggle nonviolently to end the occupation of their state. Any future negotiations, therefore, would not be about the right of the Palestinians to have their own sovereign independent state, but rather about how to apply and implement that right.
This would be the true test of the state-building strategy of the United States and the donor community. It would be the real instrument to finally demarcate the difference between support for free Palestinian institutions in a sovereign and viable state, or footing the bill of occupation and using EU and US tax dollars to maintain under various guises what will never amount to anything but an apartheid system denying Palestinians their human and national rights.
If the world community turns its back on such a declaration of independence by using the well-worn and insulting argument that every step should first be verified with the Israeli government, then the message will be clear: peace based on two states is no longer an option.
Mustafa Barghouthi is the founder of the Palestinian National Initiative and a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. This essay was originally published by the International Herald Tribune and is republished with the author's permission.