The One-State Solution

Apparently someone does.

You’re simply wrong. It was true at one point that the majority of the colonists were of English extraction. This is not even remotely true now. So I ask again, suppose the USA were not a nation-state. Would it pass your test?

Yes, we sided with England in two world wars. The English also cheerfully burned our capital nearly 200 years ago. We speak English, yes, but English is as widely spoken in India as it is here. In fact, it is often the only language Indians from different parts of the country share in common. Yes, we have inherited an English legal tradition. Who, it must be noted, borrowed enormously from Roman jurisprudence. Hell, the Romans had a republic, too! Our culture is obviously old republican Roman.

That would be India.

Why is the “int’l community” saying that the ONLY just solution to this problem is to give Palestinians full sovereignty, and make an additional nation-state called Palestine with Palestinians having full voting rights and control over their own territory**?

If so, you can take it off the table. It will never happen. The Israelis would be cutting their own throats.**

A two-state solution has the same problem as a one-state solution.

But a two-state solution means we can keep The Other in the ghetto where we can hate them across a fence. Woo-hoo. :rolleyes:

Maybe you could come up with an analogy that makes sense. Or at least, when you use an analogy that doesn’t make sense, not replace it with an analogy that makes even less sense. Or at the very least avoid to point out why it doesn’t make sense in your own post.

Where could we possibly find the Palestinians, indeed…I wonder…:rolleyes:

Well, since they’re the Rom, I think it would have to be Rome. Or Romagna. Or Romania. Right? :stuck_out_tongue:

In any case, it would be daft.

I wasn’t addressing you, but someone who stated basically that the seizure of Palestinian property was too old an affair to bother about.

ETA : and regarding not returning the exact same thing that was taken away, I’m not aware of Israel having offered any kind of compensation.

ignore this one

My apologies on the first point, shoul’ve realized you were responding to only one person instead of the general idea.

And I’m happy to give you some data.

So financial compensation to those who aren’t planning to return to PA territory, and investment in PA territory for those who do return.
Of course, previous negotiations have generally kept the status/compensation of refugees and their descendants for the Final Status phase.

Well, no, ideally, with a two state solution, the Palestinian state wouldn’t be a ghetto, but an independent state with full sovereignty. So the Palestinian right to self governance would be respected in a Palestinian state. At the same time, the Israeli right to self government would still be respected in an Israeli state. That’s the idea behind the two state solution.

It’s a pipe dream.

Within one year of the two-state solution, Israel asserts control over Palestine’s borders in the interest of Israeli security.

If there was already peace and security with the PA being willing and able to crack down on any terrorist Palestinians, why would any such thing happen?

And, you’d see fewer terrorist Palestinians for the PA to have to crack down on, because Israel would be out of there as an irritant to the Palestinians.

Ok so establish what the expiration date on reparations is and then we can discuss it.

Otherwise you’re just asking to trade one humanitarian crisis for another.

Then petition whatever government would be responsible for their hardships. I doesn’t absolve Israel of its responsibility.

  1. Are the Palestinians responsible for it? If I rob you, am I entitled to say that I’ve been robbed by someone else, so I’m not going to give you anything back?

  2. Generally speaking, this confusion Israel= Jews and Palestinians=Arabs irritates me. If, say, a Libyan Jew has been deprived of property, this particular Jew is owed something. Israel isn’t owed anything, even if it let this person in. And similarly a Palestinian doesn’t have a debt because an Arab state seized Jewish property.

  3. As for an approximatively equal numbers of Jews having left Arab countries : that’s true. Now, we both know in what conditions Palestinians became refugees. But when you wrote this statement, did you know in what circumstances Jews who left Arab states during the 50s did so? Or did you just assume they had been driven out and deprived of property, hence that the situation was equivalent? I personally don’t know. Do you know without looking it up?

The majority of them were coming from former French colonies, and a very large number specifically from Morocco. Are you sure Jews emigrated in large numbers from Morocco under duress, were denied the right to return, lost property? Again, I don’t know. Do you? Something like 150 000 came from Algeria. They were French citizens. Again, was their situation comparable to that of Palestinian refugees? Almost 100 000 came from Turkey. Were Jews oppressed in Turkey during the 50s? Did they lose property? Another large contingent came from Irak. Same questions.

Only if you total all of those you can come up with equivalent numbers for Jews who emigrated to Israel. So, can you tell me with a straight face that when you pointed at this equivalence, you actually knew that the situation of those various populations were roughly equivalent with the situation of Palestinian refugees?
4) If reparations owed to Palestinians are somehow cancelled out by reparations owed to Jews who left or fled Arab countries, should I assume that Palestinians can also legitimately be asked to pay money to the USA, Spain, France or Italy because those countries also let in Jews coming from the same places at the same time? If not, why not? The situation is the same.

As Israeli citizens, yes, they’ll be expected to pay for them. A new immigrant to the USA who becomes a citizen has to pay for the US national debt even if it were incurred before he immigrated.

And if they were themselves dispossessed (again, are you sure they were?) in Morocco or Iraq, it’s not to the Palestinians to foot the bill.

Indeed. And it’s not exactly a minor point. The situation of the Palestinians refugees and their descendants isn’t exactly similar to the situation of the people who immigrated to Israel and their children. I’m sure that a Palestinian currently living in a suburban house in Montreal is significantly less bothered by Grandpa’s former potato field in Israel than his cousin living with said Grandpa in a refugee camp in Lebanon.

And what about non-Arabs, for a change? Tons of people are seemingly bothered by the Palestinians’ plight. Why aren’t we willing to allow them to live as citizens in our countries, exactly?

And why, exactly? Shouldn’t 80 yo who’ve been deprived of property receive indemnities as soon as possible rather than during an hypothetical “Final status phase”?

And indeed, I note that it’s a new initiative, currently tinkered, that might or might not end up being actually proposed. It would be about time, don’t you think? It doesn’t contradict my statement about Israel not having offered anything yet.

Also, I note that it would a financial incentive for staying in their countries of residence (and what do said “countries of residence” think of it, by the way? Are they expected to grant citizenship to the refugees?). Not indemnities for losses incurred, with apologies for the theft on top of that. That’s a significant difference.
And why should Palestinians currently living in Palestine, or willing to return to Palestine be excluded, exactly? Again, it shows this isn’t in any way a compensation. It’s, indeed, an incentive for them to stay wherever they are.

The fact that such “petitions” have zero chance of success should factor into it, however.

The problem is this: that apparently only one party is being held up for responsibility. That’s hardly just.

It is the equivalent of saying “sure, we only bust Blacks for drug possession in this country. But they are still guilty of it, aren’t they?”

The Palestinians are not responsible for it - the ME countries who did the ejecting are.

They claim all sorts of sympathy for the plight of Palestinians. Why do they not, say, take the lands and goods they seized from Jews and give them to Palestinians? Everyone would be happy.

More simply - accept them as citizens and move on. This is the pattern set by countless other situations where people have been displaced by war - India/Pakistan, Greece/Turkey, Germany/Eastern Europe, etc.

The situation of the Palestinains is unique, and uniquely bad.

I’m not saying they do.

The problem is that, practically speaking, all of the individual rights and wrongs of history will never be solved, and it is unfair to push hard to compensate only some people and not others.

Also, it is not correct that there was no commonality between various Arab governments and the Palestinian cause:

http://www.jimena.org/faq.htm#3

You are asking for a lot of research.

Wikipedia, while of course not fully reliable, has a country-by-country breakdown:

This article contains some details:

http://www.aish.com/jewishissues/middleeast/The_Middle_Easts_Forgotten_Refugees.asp

More: http://www.mideastweb.org/refugees4.htm

Actually, the situation for the Jews was worse, in some cases. And yes, I already knew it.

Don’t understand your point.

The issue is not that one somehow cancells out the other, but that justice demands equal treatment for both - demanding justice for only one group and not the other is not, well, just.

Where are you getting the notion that Palestinians should foot the bill?

And why then is it Israel’s fault that they continue to sit in refugee camps in Lebanon? Isn’t that the fault of the Lebanese?

In some cases, we are.

There have been numerous attempts to resettle Palestinian refugees:

http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~peters/resettlement.html

My country Canada for example was willing to take in Palestinian refugees. The Palestinian leadership nixed that plan, burning our Minister in effigy for even offering:

That’s a very interesting question, and I actually asked it on the SDMB once long ago, but it didn’t raise much interest.

That said, you dismissed the concept that the refugees had a right to reparations by making silly comparisons with the knights templar. So, I ask you the question, again : does it apply too to all people who were victimized before 1950? Or is it a special rule that applies only to Palestinians?

I think its an excellent idea. Israel might as well absorb these territories as a means to reduce the low-scale humanatarian crisis that occurs on today. If these areas were apart of Israel, then the government would be compelled to provide basic infrastructure and aid to all of the citizens regardless of ethnicity, religion, or color.

The idea that Israel would be “suiciding” by agreeing to a One-State solution is absurd. Israel touts itself as a shining becon of democracy a geographical location darkened by monarchies and despots. It’s either a democracy or its not. I suspect, however, that Israel does think of itself as a democracy - a *Jewish democracy *- which really translates to an ethnocentric theocracy.

All people who were victimized beyond living memory. Basically the problem is you’d have to displace Jews to place the Palestinians, then you’d have to displace Germans to place the Jews, and what would you do with the Germans? Should the Americans pay for reparations since it was our design that repatriated Germans within Germany?