It was like reading a David Duke speech. He starts with something reasonable and your head goes north-south in agreement. He uses some nice words and the next thing you know you are nodding along with the most outlandish ideas.
An op-ed proposing a one-state solution in Israel/Palestine. Read it, it has a lot of nice ideas and wonderful words. It admits the Israelis need a homeland, it admits the Holocaust, it points out a two-state solution means an armed Arab state right at Israel’s narrowest point. Lots of pretty words.
Then it proposes one big democratic state covering all of Palestine. Equal rights for all. Hopefully people will get so confused over who is who and who lives where that civil war would be impossible.
Frankly it sounded good to me. (And I do realize there is a trap.) I never looked at the author.
Well, the author is Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan leader. People in the Times letter section are up in arms.
The reason is obvious. In a secular one state, the Jews would be completely outnumbered. Why would one state be a model of co-existence in region where everyone is nuts? (I think there is something in the water.)
But is not one big state a better solution than what we have now? If one big state means the end of a religiously-based, well that just means that religious states are a darn silly way of organizing things. Further, demographics being what they are, the Jews will be outnumbered in fifty or so years anyway.
OK, so talk me down. I am agreeing with Qaddafi and I know that must be nuts. Is not a one-state solution worth a shot given the two-state model seems to be fatally flawed?
According to the jewish virtual library, there are 5.5 million Jews and 1.5 million arabs living in Israel. link. There are 1.5 million people living in the Gaza strip, and 2.2 million in the west bank, presumably all Arab. Adding those up gets 5.2 million Arabs vs. 5.5 million Jews. That is dangerously close to an Arab majority, and imho Israel will never accept anything other than a Jewish majority. That’s the ideological barrier.
Edited to add: I don’t know if these numbers double count some people in disputed territories, i.e. Jerusalem.
Practically, how are you going to work the right of return. Most of the homes these people left are now owned by Israelis. They aren’t going to want to leave, and the Palestinians have no money to buy them out. How are you going to integrate some of the poorest least educated people in the world with a rich high tech country? I just don’t see it happening.
Plus, there will be some Palestinians that still hold a grudge, and will use the opportunity to extract revenge against Israel.
I had a very similar reaction to reading that yesterday.
The big thing I liked in the column was refugee return. I think Israel needs to man up and allow maximum refugee return rights: seizing the homes of people who fled an expected massacre was a loathsome act, and Israel needs to make right on it. If they did, I think it’d go a very long way toward cooling tensions in the area, but that’s a secondary benefit: the primary benefit is that it’s the right thing to do.
It is much easier to stop/defend against them when they are in a different country. If they became Israeli citizens, they would be free to move about the country and buy weapons, or materials to make them.
They fled an expected massacre of the Jews, not them. They left so their fellow Arabs would have a free hand to slaughter the Israelis. This was not helpless people fleeing machete-carrying mobs like Rwanda - it was a calculated strategy to aid and abet the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Palestine. It just didn’t work out that way.
Besides it was a long, long time ago. You can’t seriously expect people living on that land now, who have been there for two or three generations, to just get up and walk away.
And of course Israel will not tolerate a situation where Arabs might gain voting control. The whole point to the existence of Israel is self-determination for the Jews, who have discovered through painful history that without their own state, they tend to be scapegoats and targets in countries around the world.
Would .3 million Arabs really make a difference? I understand (to an extent) why the Jews would want to have a majority and wouldn’t want to give that up, but I think it’s doable.
A very valid point that rests on a problem I have long pondered. “When do we stop feeling bad about Neanderthals?”
If 1948 is a Long Time Ago, then the Holocaust is an even longer time ago and the scattering of the Jews is a much Longer Time Ago than that and the granting of Israel to the Jews by God is a darn Long Time Ago.
If Palestinians lost their right to this land due to passage of time, certainly the Jews lost title even before that.
And may I ask how you know this? Do you have special access to a mind-reading machine that allows you to know the innermost thoughts of the mostly dead Palestinians who choose to flee. Isn’t it simpler to assume that they were just civilians getting the hell out of a war-zone. Occam’s razor and all that.
As for the OP I don’t think a one-state solution is crazy or immoral. In some ways it is a more idealistic solution than two ethnically defined states. However it isn’t practicable and even if it could be implemented it would be likely to lead to ethnic strife as in Lebanon. However if a two-state solution isn’t achieved in the next decade or two, a one-state solution could become the international consensus by the middle of the century.
I think Israel is in trouble, any way you slice it. There is no way it is going to be able to withstand the inexorable march of demographic change.
The USA is fortunate in that it was founded on an idea that can absorb any number of immigrants from any number of backgrounds: life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.
Israel, in contrast, was founded on a different idea: Safety for the Jewish people. That has been Israel’s paramount goal since its founding. Anything that threatens the potential safety of the Jewish residents of Israel is antithetical to the nation’s founding principles, and will be met with violent reaction. Integrating the Palestinians will create a near-majority of non-Jewish citizens. Unfortunately for Israel, given a century, the birth rates of the current Israeli Arab population will also create those same conditions. Either situation creates the threat of tyranny of the (now non-Jewish) majority, which could lead to a threat to Jewish safety.
One could hope that either integrated Palestinians or natural-born Israeli Arabs would see themselves as nationals before they would see themselves as Arabs. But somehow I doubt that. Perhaps I am too pessimistic. My feeling is that, within a few generations, we are either going to see Israel fall out of Jewish Israeli control due to demographic pressure, or Israeli will have to become a genuine racist Apartheid state, restricting the power and rights of its native non-Jewish population in order to protect the safety and privileges of its Jewish citizens. Either way, it can’t last long.
The basic problem is this: It’s quite obvious that these people don’t get along. They haven’t for the last 50 years. They are constantly trying to kill each other. They both think they are right, and the other one is wrong, and they don’t trust each other.
How does merging them all into one country solve this?
I would say so. The argument for the state of Israel does not rest on land title 2,000 years ago, but rather on the more recent actual existance of the state.
As for Quadaffi - he has, for the last few years, been positioning himself as a “reasonable statesman”.
The one-state solution is not workable for the same reason that one cannot reconstitute British India out of Pakistan and India. History has moved on, these people do not regard themselves as “one people”, and artificially pasting them together would lead to a disfunctional state at war with itself.
A state is not simply a set of borders, but also at minimum a set of agreed-on ideas and/or a sense of fellow-citizenship. In the US, this is based on ideals (the American Dream"); in other cases, such as (say) most of Europe, it is based on a shared ethnicity, which may be as much cultural as genetic - to be German or French means to embrace a certain heritage. But it must, in the last resort, be based on something.
Others upstream have said it (much) better than I can. The idea of a Jewish (or a White, or a Muslim or a Han Chinese) state seems weak and doomed in the long-term. In any case, it is hard for an American to get his head around.
The uneducated majority would vote its own interests against the interests of the educated minority, bleeding the economy and turning it into a failed state.
What about a Bosnian state? Or an Eritrean? Or an East Timorese? Or for that matter, a Tibetan state? There are several dozen more nations today than there were 20 years ago due to breakups on ethnic lines (and make no mistake, the Arab-Israeli conflict is ethnic, not religious). Several other nations - Belgium, Iraq - may be on the verge of splitting.
In fact, I’d say that large, multi-ethnic states are weak and doomed in the long term. Balkanization seems to be the going trend.
WTF?!