The only people seriously suggesting that the Israel/Hamas war can be peaceably resolved by the existence of two states—Israel and a new Palestinian state— are so desperate for a solution that they’ll suggest one that’s completely impractical. (I would say “dumb”, but I’m trying to be kind here.) But Israel is out for victory this time, and won’t let the U.S., or anyone else, impose a cease-fire—which is the same thing as asking Israel to surrender.
I used to favor the two-state solution on this site, but realize now that it simply won’t work, and for a number of reasons. First, almost no Israeli would countenance it. Such a state would presumably include Gaza, not ruled by Hamas, and the entire West Bank, from which rockets and terror attacks could easily be launched over most of Israel. Nobody has suggested a credible leadership for such a state, but it can’t be either Hamas or the corrupt and terror-promoting Palestinian authority. Nor would Netanyahu, who, though despised, is not stupid, accept this solution.
And the Palestinians don’t want this solution, either. What they want is the elimination of Israel, which could occur by the totally off-the-table “one-state” solution. As the Tablet article below notes, and something that all sentient people know well, the Palestinians have, time after time, rejected the offer of their own state. Now it is too late. If such a state is ever to arise, it will, I think, take at least two generations—the time it takes for Palestinian children to stop learning in school to kill Jews and become martyrs.
The complete ignorance in which people suggest that a two-state solution will end the enmity between Jews and Muslims makes me almost laugh. And yet most of the West, including Biden and his administration, are trying to force this solution on Israel.
The best argument against this “solution” I’ve read appears in the new Tablet, and it’s by Israeli historian, author, and teacher Gadi Taub. From Wikipedia:
[Taub] is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Public Policy and the Department of Communications at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Taub is also an internationally recognized voice in the discourse on Zionism and illiberalism.
If you want to be up on discourse about the war, this is something that you must read. Click on the headline to do so:
Some quotes (indented). First, the Israeli view, including the depredations of UNRWA, which must be abolished:
By now most of us in Israel understand this dreadful math. If there was still a substantial minority among us who clung to the two-state promise against the evidence of the Second Intifada and everything that followed, that minority has shrunk considerably since Oct. 7.
We now know exactly what our would-be neighbors have in mind for us. We see that a majority of Palestinians support Hamas and are well pleased by its massacres. Most of us therefore believe that turning Judea and Samaria into another Hamastan to satisfy those who see the massacre as an inspiration and its perpetrators as role models would be suicidal. Who in their right mind would inflict the ensuing bloodshed on their partners, children, friends, and parents? If one is determined to feel overwhelming sympathy for one of the many stateless peoples of the world, why not start with the Kurds, or the Catalans, or the Basques, or the Rohingya, or the Baluchis, or any of one of dozens of subnational groups—none of whom seem likely to attain their longed-for goals of statehood anytime soon. After all, it took nearly 2,000 years for the Jews to succeed in refounding their state. If the Palestinians are determined to kill us on the road to replacing us, then presumably they can wait, too.
. . .To be sure, the two-state solution was a noble dream. But it turns out it always was just that—a dream. What enabled those who clung to it long enough to continue sleepwalking through the wrecks of exploding buses, the bodies of slain civilians, the constant wild calls for violence against us, the massive efforts to build terror infrastructures under our noses and on our borders, was our own tendency to imagine Palestinians in our own image. For all the fashionable talk of diversity, we too find it hard to imagine a people that is not like ourselves. Knowing our own striving for self-determination, we assumed that the Palestinians, too, want above all to be masters of their own fate in their own sovereign state.
But that is not what they want. The huge amount of international aid Palestinians have received since 1948 was never used for nation-building. It wasn’t used for building houses and roads or for planting orange groves. It was harnessed to one overarching cause: the destruction of the Jewish state. This is what the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) does: subsidize and shield Palestinian terror infrastructure. This is what the PA does with its pay-for-slay salaries—underwritten by the U.S.—to the families of terrorists. And this is what Hamas was able to do as a result of the billions invested in Gaza: It bought weapons, trained terrorists, and built a sprawling network of terror tunnels—and not one bomb shelter for civilians.
What kind of chowderhead would think that the PA would be a credible peace partner given that it still espouses terrorism and, in fact, pays off those terrorists who kill Jews—the more Jews you kill, the more pay you get? (If you’re incarcerated, your family gets the dosh.) Granted, Netanyahu is not a credible partner to confect such a solution, but given the feelings of Israelis and the terroristic bent and sympathy for Hamas of many Palestinians, the whole idea is a nonstarter no matter who’s in charge of Israel. Further, the “right of return”—invariably something that Palestinians demand in a settlement—is both risible and unprecedented:
As Einat Wilf and Adi Schwarz demonstrate in their bestselling book The War of Return, the Palestinian national movement has built its ethos and identity around the so-called “right of return” of the Palestinian “refugees”—by which they mean the destruction of Israel through the resettlement of the Palestinian diaspora, the so-called refugees that UNRWA numbers at 5.9 million, within Israel’s borders. But there’s no such thing as the right of return: First, it is not an internationally recognized right; second, if implemented it would not be a return, since almost all of those who demand it have never been to Israel themselves. And finally, of those who fled or were expelled from the land of Israel in 1948, only an estimated 30,000 are still alive today.
No other group of people on Earth is considered to be refugees decades after so many of its members have resettled as passport-holding citizens of other countries. No other group has its refugee status conferred automatically on its offspring. And no group of actual refugees is excluded from the purview of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), entrusted instead to the care of a special agency, UNRWA, whose mandate is to perpetuate the problem rather than solve it. UNRWA cultivates Palestinian hopes for a “free” Palestine “from the river to the sea,” allows for weapons to be stored inside its facilities and schools, and for a Hamas intelligence and communications center to be built under its headquarters, indoctrinates children to glorify terrorists—whom it also employs—and disseminates wild antisemitism, while still steering clear of what it should have been doing all along: resettling those who were, or still are, actual refugees.
What the centrality of the “right of return” to the Palestinian ethos means, of course, is that Palestinian identity itself is structured as a rejection of the two-state solution, and denies the legitimacy of any form of Jewish sovereignty anywhere in the land of Israel.
The Palestionian rejection of “two states”:
There never was a Palestinian leadership ready to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish nation-state. That is a constant fact of life in the conflict. The Arab side has rejected any and all partition plans starting with the Peel Commission in 1937, the United Nations partition resolution of 1947, and all the way through the various American mediation plans and Israeli offers, and those offered by Israeli leaders, including the Camp David 2000 offer, in which Prime Minister Ehud Barak agreed to the partition of Jerusalem, and the further concessions offered later by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. All have crashed on the nonnegotiable demand for the right of return. Even Salam Fayyad, the technocrat former Palestinian prime minister, a figurehead with no popular support at home but beloved by Western peace processors—and who’s receiving renewed attention in administration-friendly media—insisted on the right of return in an article he wrote mere days after the Oct. 7 pogrom.
Luckily, the Palestinians were never patient enough to even temporarily put a stop to terrorism or defer their demand for return until they could muster better-organized forces. It seems that the cult of death and the worship of martyrs make for an addiction to terror, and a need for violent venting. If you bring your children from kindergarten to stage plays where they pretend to kill Jews, you cannot also tell them to hold back forever on acting them out once they’ve grown up. The tree of Palestinian identity, it seems, must be constantly watered with the blood of Jews to sustain it through the many sacrifices required for a nonproductive life of permanent victimhood.
And the Biden Delusion:
The Biden administration, as well as the mainstream American media, may be seduced by Israel’s Bibi-hating press into believing that it’s Netanyahu who stands in the way of an agreement establishing a Palestinian state. But it is not Netanyahu who is the obstacle on the Israeli side. It is the vast majority of Israelis, who may or may not vote for Netanyahu but will certainly never again vote for anyone who admits to favoring a two-state solution. The allegedly moderate Benny Gantz retains his high polling numbers only because he avoids any talk of two states. He knows that if he mentioned the two-state solution, he’d sink in the polls faster than he can say “Palestinian state.”
But if the Biden team can be forgiven for misunderstanding the Israeli mood, it cannot be forgiven for imagining it can make Palestinian recalcitrance and violent intentions disappear by papering over their national ethos with fake Western jargon. There is no such thing as a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority, because there is no one who wants to “revitalize” it in such a way as to make it conform to Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s sales pitch. Even for a group of progressive wishful-thinkers, this silly coinage is a new low in the language of political narcissism.
Israel is a strong country, but it is also a small country surrounded by enemies. It is important for Israel to mark the difference between embracing folly and being polite. It is time that Israel and her leaders be more vocal about the folly of America’s misguided Middle East policy. We can afford to continue limping along with the burdens of the occupation for another generation or two, by which point many unforeseen things will have come to pass that may make a solution either more or less obvious. But we will not live that long if we are once again seduced by the two-state siren song.
Frankly, I’m tired of the U.S. trying to tell Israel how to run the war and, more recently, how to lose the war. Granted, the U.S. can withhold ammunition and money from Israel, but they are now voting on a bill to give it (and Ukraine) a lot of dosh. In the end, only those who don’t know the mood and situation of the Israeli people—and are familiar with the failed history of attempts to confect a two-state solution—could now think that such a solution is viable.
The latest delusional aspiration (in the Times of Israel). Click to read:
I can only hope that the “advice” the US is giving Israel is intended for the rest of the world to see and not for Israel to take seriously.
I’m hoping too. This is what Churchill meant when he said that in war, the truth is so precious she must be protected by a bodyguard of lies.
Me too.
When I leaned that the PA pays sizable sums to the families of terrorists for committing their acts of terror against innocent Israelis with money it receives from Europe and the US my stomach sank and I understood immediately there is no effing way that a two state settlement is a viable solution to the conflict.
There is just no way to live in peace next to a state and people who value their own deaths and the deaths of their enemy more than their self determination and peaceful development. It’s impossible. That’s the sad reality Israelis have to live with.
The West Bank Palestinians already have their own self-determination: they have their own government, their own vote, their own Judenrein territories. That they have not had an election for more than a decade and a half is on them and perhaps the UN, which never raises the issue as far as I can tell.
What I can’t figure out is why they deserve these assets. The Oslo Accords were a peace treaty. These assets are dependent upon an end to Palestinian terrorism. Israel has every right to abrogate the Oslo Accords, it seems to me, and to finally publicly assert their sovereignty over their own original territory, which was and still is from the Jordan river to the sea.
That’s what I was wondering. What’s the difference between the current status and having Gaza declared a “state”. Is it just legalese? Would Palestinians behave differently if they were recognized as a state?
I think it’s more that if Judea and Samaria (along with Gaza) become a sovereign Palestinian state, their own law will apply and they can do whatever they want with the Jews living there who have not been able to escape before statehood is proclaimed. Ironically, what would likely happen is that Israel would soon end up going to jus ad bellum war with them over their bad behaviour, conquering them again as in 1967, and here we will be again.
The most important difference is that a State of Palestine would presumably have the same rights and powers as every other nation-state, including the right to build an army, buy military weapons, etc., and Israel would have neither legal right nor practical ability to stop it from doing so. As long as the territory is controlled by leadership dedicated to eradicating Israel, supported by a majority of its people who support that goal, that would be a literally existential threat to Israel. As it stands, Israel has functional control over security for the entire territory. Until the Palestinians genuinely and permanently renounce their goal of eradicating Israel, Israel cannot allow that arrangement to change.
To quote myself, on the difference between de facto and a “real” state:
“Because with land, global recognition and international respectability they could do the one thing they find difficult now: buy arms. Lots of arms.
Free Palestine would bristle and guess who their first target would be. Revenge is hot in the chest, powerful and immensely satisfying. They’d import (more) missiles from Iran, cool Yemeni daggers, boatloads of deadly Russian junk and exploding Mercedes from Lebanon. Hell they’d buy nukes if they could: Hello, Pakistan?
Because martyrdom and Jew-annihilation isn’t in the recipe, it is the recipe.”
from:
https://themoderatevoice.com/the-suicidal-stupidity-of-a-two-state-solution/
—————————
So there’s a BIG difference. It must never happen.
D.A.
NYC
It is not just Palestinians who value their own deaths, Islamic Jihad is part of the muslim faith and until the planets two billion or so muslims modify their belief structure the rest of the world is at risk. Sam Harris said a long time ago that this is a fourteenth century horde with twenty first century weapons and that has not changed and the prospect of the proliferation of nuclear weapons into the hands of more muslim states should worry us all.
Islamic jihad is not just for Israel and the Jews it is for all the rest of us too. Israel is the only democracy in the middle east and it deserves our unlimited, unconditional support. No two state solution will ever be possible unless Islam changes fundamentally.
Infiltration by Islam is well under way in several western countries and the very democracy they despise enables this and if we do nothing we will end up living under sharia law. There are several London UK boroughs and other areas where this is close to reality now! A recent French commentator stated that the time for concern is when muslim youth start to join the nations armed forces in significant numbers.
We drift along in blissful ignorance of this threat at our peril. Our enlightenment is under threat like never before and I am not an alarmist.
The Islamic aim is a global caliphate.
If not a two state solution, then what? The fundamental problem is the existence of two peoples who have historical claims to the same territories are unable to coexist in a single state. If there is any solution besides two states or relocation of one side, I’d like to know what it is.
You seem to believe that terrorism and Jew hatred will miraculously disappear when two states are created. Maybe I’m wrong, but that appears to me to be the tenor of what you said. And, given that neither Israel nor the Palestinians WANT two states, do you have a solution. (I don’t have one except to absorb Palestine into the UAR (which of course isn’t feasible) or ask other Arab states to take them.
What “historical claim” do the Palestinians have to sovereign Israeli territory, considering that Jordan – inches away – is a Palestinian-only state that occupies 78% of the Mandate for Palestine? Jordan was created under the exact same auspices as Israel: by the League of Nations which divided the Mandate for Palestine into two and only two entities – one only for Arabs, and one as the National home for Jews.
The West Bank Palestinians were happily citizens of Jordan from 1948-1968, with absolutely zero aspirations for their own state in that exact same area. Their own manifesto at the time (that of the PLO) is explicit about that.
I don’t think you are quite right. The territory was not divided on the basis of who already lived there, but on geographical terms, notwithstanding the Balfour declaration.
All the same, the whole of Jordan is an arab kingdom, so there is effectively already a two state solution for the region.
Palestinians should emigrate to other Arabic countries.
I am an immigrant myself….not the end of the world, not pleasant at first, but still a good thing.
Not EVERYBODY deserves their own state. Ask a Kurd (though they probably do).
An active and loud insistence – of destroying Israel, backed up by violent deeds over the decades – morally forfeits the right to a state. Or if it doesn’t, what does?
Should ISIS have been left alone to “live in peace?” Do THEY “deserve” a state? They thought so.
Do you think, with the ability to buy arms, the Palestinians will say: “Great, now let’s live in peace and get down to solving our real problems.” ?
Do you have any actual evidence this could happen? Because there’s a mountain of refute to that assertion.
D.A.
NYC
I agree that a two-state solution is not a practical way to end the current war, and that the current rush to create a Palestinian state at this time is only destined to fail. It’s grasping at straws by those who are desperate to find some way to stop the conflict. I also agree that the way the Palestinian mind has been poisoned by decades of propaganda—including the teaching of Jew hatred to children by the UNRWA and the unorthodox claim of perpetual refugee status—have pushed any reasonable solution out generations.
Where do we go from here? I have only questions. After the war, does Israel reoccupy Gaza? (I hope not.) Can an international governance arrangement be established that can keep the peace? If the latter, will it incorporate trust-building programs so that Israelis and Palestinians can in the distant future live in peace? Can there be an eventual two-state solution, say, 50 years from now when I’m long dead? Or will the agony go on without resolution for 100 years or more? A one-state solution probably implies either the end of Israel (if the terrorists get their wish and wipe Israel off the map) or the end of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. (I say probably because there are other arrangements that I have read about, although they are not prominent.)
I wish we could solve this problem on this web site and get the parties to agree.
It seems to me that there are three phases to deal with:
1) an end to the current war.
2) an interim period of stabilization and planning.
3) an eventual stable solution.
It will take generations if it can happen at all.
The horror and the current status quo will endure for as long as there is Islam.
So… awhile probably.
THAT, and it will continue for as long as the Arab states and the Islamosphere’s only unity is in “anti-zionism”.
AND… as long as antisemitism is the load bearing ideology of so many.
Along with their idiot fellow travelers in the west.
It demeans us to take their moral claims seriously.
D.A.
NYC
I have a solution: quit these asinine religions that have you killing each other and find a peaceful and moral philosophy to follow.
Agree!
Alas, that really is the only solution, which means there is little hope for the region.
Great idea! Who goes first?
Practical question: Does the side that atheizes first lay down his arms first? Or does that side that atheizes first expect the other side to disarm first? After all, it’s not the religions that are killing people directly with their poison thoughts. It’s the guns, right? Isn’t that what we always say?
Yes, there’d be a careful ceremony with a rep from each side swearing to throw their holy book into a big fire on the count of three so it would be a simultaneous thing. Peter Paul and Mary tunes would play. There’d be cake.
Well many WEIT readers HAVE laid down the nonsense fairy tales.
Which is a very different proposition to laying down one’s arms.
The first is wise, the second is suicide.
D.A.
NYC
My sense is that the best that could happen to Palestinians is to emigrate elsewhere. The ideal would be Arabic countries where religion and language would not be an impediment.
But I think Hamas and other groups want them bottled up in Gaza and West Bank as they are big-time money makers. Hence, the billionaire status of Hamas leaders living in Qatar.
I am an immigrant myself and coming to the US was the best that could have happened to me. I came with my relatives as a child and no, it was not all a choice on their part to come to the US.
Unfortunately, Arab countries do not recognize citizenship by naturalization, and even by birth. Citizenship there is based on paternal origin. A Palestinian who settles in an Arab country (other than Jordan) will be a non-citizen until he dies. Moreover, his children born in the host country will also be non-citizens until they die. His daughters may marry local citizens and the grandchildren will be citizens thanks to their fathers, but for the sons, such an opportunity does not exist.
Nationality law there is a little more complicated than that but broadly what you say is correct.
Citizenship is mainly patrilineal in the Islamosphere and countries are resistant to giving out citizenship at all. (I’ve done a whole lot of research about comparative naturalizations).
As to why the other Arabs don’t want them AT ALL – even for a cup of tea and snacks, is explained in detail in my article:
https://themoderatevoice.com/worst-houseguests-ever-the-palestinians/
D.A.
NYC
“But there’s no such thing as the right of return: First, it is not an internationally recognized right; second, if implemented it would not be a return, since almost all of those who demand it have never been to Israel themselves. And finally, of those who fled or were expelled from the land of Israel in 1948, only an estimated 30,000 are still alive today.
No other group of people on Earth is considered to be refugees decades after so many of its members have resettled as passport-holding citizens of other countries. No other group has its refugee status conferred automatically on its offspring. ”
But the entire ethos of zionism is that diaspora jews were refugees with a right to return which was passed down to their offspring in 2000 years of exile. The law that gives any jew automatic right to israeli citizenship, regardless whether they have ever been to Israel is even explicitly named “Law of Return”.
How do you not see the contradiction?
The way I interpret this is that there is no inherent fundamental human right to return to some place one of your many ancestors once lived in. (And even if there were, how would I enforce this right against the modern-day immigration laws of the UK, Scotland (if it ever becomes sovereign), or Burkina Faso for all I know that say, No, I can’t live there?)
Israel has passed its own law that says Jews may move there from anywhere in the world even if they can’t prove their ancestors ever lived there. The presumption is that they all once did, of course. Countries can allow anyone they choose to move there, and exclude all others. There is no contradiction in inviting whom you want (or feel an obligation to) and rebuffing those you don’t. As a non-Jew I am perfectly comfortable saying this.
Yes. Absolutely Leslie.
D.A.
NYC
Every sane country has an immigration policy influenced by the culture of the prospective immigrant, and more precisely by its closeness to the dominant culture in the country. E.g. my country has a fast citizenship track for ethnic Bulgarians born elsewhere. The same way, if I convert to Judaism, I suppose it would be not too difficult for me to emigrate to Israel, though no known ancestors of mine have ever lived there.
The country of Israel was created to provide refuge for Jewish people throughout the world. How can you not see the difference from Palestinians leaving Israel (many of them on the advice of those who made war on Israel in 1948, others being expelled for fighting against Israel), and then later, after the war is over, saying that both they and their descendants have the right to come back. Israel was CREATED with the proviso that it was a home for the Jews. There is no proviso anywhere for a “right of return.”
Jews were a people without a state, expelled from many countries and persecuted throughout the ages in both Europe and in Muslim countries. When Hitler came to power, it turned out that there were no more countries willing to take them. Hence the Shoah. Finally the world understood that this persecuted people needed its own state to be able to defend itself. And, when the state was proclaimed, it decided – as is the right of any sovereign state – that they would allow any Jew to come to this safe haven.
Arabs living in Mandatory Palestine never had a sovereign state called “Palestine”. The majority were Arabs who came to this area from surrounding Arab countries after Zionists started to develop the economy of the country. After WWII, there were 21 Arab countries which could absorb their brethren who escaped the war or were expelled. But they didn’t want any Jewish presence in the lands which were previously under Muslim rule (this is a religious Diktat: once Muslim, forever Muslim. So they invented the “Palestinian nation”, got UNRWA exclusively for Arab refugees from Palestine, and appropriated the Jewish Rule of Return for the Palestinian Arabs. They turned these unhappy people into their “dogs of war”. And that is the situation today. If you are for the idea of giving the descendants of the refugees from 1948 the “right to return”, then you are condemning 7 million Jews to death or exile (assuming, in the latter case, that this time they would find a country willing to take them).
CAMERA published a backgrounder on the “Right of Return” back in 2000:
https://www.camera.org/article/backgrounder-the-palestinian-claim-to-a-right-of-return/
A point about language: perhaps best to refrain from using the terms set by one’s opponents. Whether that be in the DEI realm, “gender” wars, or a host of other contentious topics, the “progressive” left excels at dictating the terms of discussion and, thus, controlling the perceptions and bounds of debate.
The two-state “solution.” Notice it isn’t a proposal, an idea, a wish, a dream. It is a solution. Who could be against a solution? A solution SOLVES things! Except that this “solution” would prove quite a bit like another “Solution” the Jews once faced.
Good point.
Outstanding. How about we start using the phrase “final two-state solution”; maybe it will catch on. (The word “final” does already appear in the official Oslo documents, in “final status agreement”).
Einat Wilf is cited in the Tablet article and your excerpts. I had never heard of her until last week, when she was on the podcast linked below. Unfortunately, there is no transcript, and I know you dislike podcasts generally, but I found it enlightening. In particular, she posits a kind of master key for understanding the overall conflict: The #1 thing that the Jews have always wanted is a state, and the #1 thing the Arabs have always wanted is not to have their own state, but to prevent the Jews from having a state. When you think about the history that way, it all starts to make sense. You wonder why the Palestinians have rejected all kinds of offers of statehood, and it’s because statehood is not what’s most important to them, and the statehood offered has always included a Jewish state, so they reject it. Conversely, the Jews have accepted every offer of statehood, back to the Balfour declaration–even though that was for only a tiny sliver of land (~20% of the disputed territory) and didn’t include Jerusalem or their ancestral land of Judea. I found the whole conversation to be enlightening. https://unlocked.fm/episodes/the-cost-of-starting-a-losing-war-with-dr-einat-wilf
Jews did not “accept” the Balfour declaration. At the time of the Balfour Declaration, there were Jews who were Zionists and Jews who were strongly anti-Zionist. There was no stance on the matter by Jews as such. It is also simply not true that Jews have always wanted a Jewish state. Even Zionist Jews differed on this. There were Zionist Jews who favored a future state in which Jews and Arabs would be equal citizens. Among the best known supporters of this idea were Martin Buber and Judah Magnes.
Boy, this sounds pretty hopeless! I agree that Hamas doesn’t want a two-state solution, but I’m not sure about the other Palestinians. It makes sense to explore a Palestinian state under a re-worked Palestinian Authority (not with Abbas as leader, obviously). I think that there are many Israelis and many Palestinians who would opt for some solution where both sides can live a somewhat normal life, other than continue the status quo, which is just continual war.
We constantly underestimate the venom of the average Palestinian: men, women and children sent to “Kill the Jew and retake Al Asqua” camp for the under 12s.
They are not just mislead and exploited by meanie PA or Hamas.
Remember, Oct. 7 was supported by upwards of 80% of Arabs and 85+ of Palestinians in the West Bank. Still.
Hamas REPRESENTS.
THAT is what they want. We have trouble conceptualizing an entire “national” movement based on aggrieved, religious retribution and violence. We aren’t set up to get our heads around this fact.
Jihad is very real and the central motivating factor at work here. More than wealth, freedom or peace.
D.A.
NYC
— sorry, I’ve had more than my quota of posts today. I’ll shut up now. 🙂
That’s why any future Palestinian state should be an Israeli vassal/satellite state, similar to Platt Amendment Cuba in relation to the US a century ago. Otherwise the Palestinians might never get their own state.
Yeah, David, this could be just wishful thinking on my part. The Israelis and the Palestinians wouldn’t/couldn’t do it on their own. I certainly don’t think it could happen without the strong participation/urging of other “parties” (The U.S, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, China?, England? France?–don’t know about the U.N.). I still think it’ll be perpetual war of some kind if there isn’t a new kind of solution. I admit to now knowing anybody directly involved, but I believe there are plenty of people on both sides who would want peace.
The PA is rife with corruption, so I doubt there can be a “reworked” Palestinian state under that authority. Also, I agree that many Palestinians just want a normal, peaceful life and could live side by side with the Jews, but so long as there are any terrorist groups, that won’t be possible. Remember, Iran is still there funding them, and there’s also Hezbollah (and Hamas) in Lebanon, and those groups would also have to disappear in any settlement, which seems unlikely.
It was all botched decades ago.
also, on the top of all already said, to implement a state of palestine in the follow up of october 7th would be seen as an award, a gratification and would provoke more terroristic attacks in consequence.
Ok, understood, every single point of it. And I agree to all of them.
But, what are the alternatives?
A Palestina state in the Emirates or Saudi Arabia, founded by the UN initially, to keep them sufficiently away from Israel. Doubtful, as SA doesn’t need the UN’s money …
Syria then? Egypt?
I’m totally at a loss here – I see what will definitely NOT work, but I don’t see a viable solution to the whole situation.