Would Someone Please Explain? March 17, 2015 The conflicts in Israel and Ukraine have a striking series of elements in common. Each involves a minority population that natively speaks a different language from the majority and wants to form its own separate state. Both separatist movements are receiving help from much larger countries against whom the U.S. supports economic sanctions. Both continue to be involved in peace negotiations that always end up breaking down, and month after month more and more people on both sides lose their lives in the ensuing violence. The U.S. responses to these two situations are strikingly different. President Obama and Secretary Kerry consistently say that in Israel "the way forward is a two-state solution" while at the same time insisting that what they refer to as Ukraine's "territorial integrity" must be preserved, this in spite of the fact that while the boundaries of Ukraine as it is now only trace back 24 years to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Israel's trace back 48 years to the 1967 war. So my question is, why isn't Israel's territorial integrity at least as valid and worth defending as Ukraine's, or looking at it from the other direction, why isn't "the way forward" in Ukraine a "two-state solution"?