Bibi’s Dead End
If there are no peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians for an independent Palestinian state, war next year is inevitable.
So King Abdullah II of Jordan has told the London Times: “If we delay our peace negotiations, then there is going to be another conflict between Arabs or Muslims and Israel in the next 12 to 18 months.”
Whether the king’s timetable is correct, endless cold war, erupting into hot wars, seems the fate of Israel if “Bibi” Netanyahu holds to his pledge never to allow a Palestinian state on the West Bank.
For, as John Mearsheimer, author of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, writes in the May 18 American Conservative, if there is no Palestinian state, there are only three possible alternatives.
All involve “creating a ‘greater Israel’ … that effectively controls the West Bank and Gaza, or all of what was once called Mandatory Palestine.”
What are Bibi’s three remaining options?
The first is annexation of the West Bank. But this would bring 2.4 million Palestinians into Israel, giving her a population 40 percent Arab. With a higher birth rate, Palestinians would soon outnumber Jews and vote to abolish the Jewish state, thus creating a bi-national state.
That would mean the end of the Zionist dream.
The second option is the Meir Kahane solution. The late rabbi urged the expulsion of the Palestinians from the occupied territories. But the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands or millions of Palestinians would mean innumerable casualties, a severing of all ties to the Arab world, the moral isolation of Israel and a break with the United States. America could not stand by and let such a human rights atrocity take place.
The third option is the Netanyahu option: no annexation, no ethnic cleaning, no Palestinian state — but permanent control of the West Bank to assure the “Hamastan” in Gaza is never replicated on the West Bank.
What is wrong with the Bibi option?
It requires permanent control of Gaza, with Israel holding its 1.5 million people in what amounts to a vast penal colony with no access to the outer world by land, sea or air, except by permission of the Israeli military.
On the West Bank, this means permanent control of the 2.4 million Arabs through confinement in enclaves bordered on the west by the Israeli wall, on the east by the Jordan, bisected by roads set aside for the exclusive use of Israelis and dotted with checkpoints. Travel inside and outside the West Bank would be by sufferance of the Israeli military.
It is this prospect that caused Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to blurt, “If the two-state solution collapses,” Israel will “face a South African-style struggle.” It is this prospect that caused President Carter to warn of Israel’s becoming an “apartheid” state.
For what other comparison comes to mind if the 4 million Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza are to be confined to such Bantustans, with no country to call their own, their economy and movement subject to Israeli authorities and the Israeli military?
There is another and fatal flaw in the Bibi option.
According to the U.N. Population Division, the Occupied Palestinian Territories (West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem) will be home to 4.4 million Palestinians in 2010, but 10 million by the centennial of the Jewish state in 2048. Palestinians in the occupied territories alone will equal the population of Israel, and Israel’s population of 10 million will itself be about 30 percent Arab. By mid-century, Palestinians west of the Jordan will outnumber Israeli Jews two to one. And there will be 6 million more Palestinians in Jordan.
Moreover, according to Mearsheimer, since 2007, more Jews have left Israel than have come in. Some 700,000 to 1 million Israeli Jews live abroad, and a 2007 poll reportedly found that nearly one-half of all young people are considering leaving.
Yet Netanyahu’s case is not uncompelling. We left Gaza and got Hamas. Never again! And as Hamas is committed to the destruction of the Jewish state, we will never negotiate with Hamas.
Which means no negotiations and no peace. For, in any free election, Hamas will win 35 percent to 65 percent and control or be part of any government coalition. And there will always be the possibility that Hamas will be voted into power in a new Palestinian state.
Netanyahu wants Obama to commit to go to war if necessary to denuclearize Iran, but he cannot force Obama to fight a war he cannot want. Obama wants Netanyahu to accept a Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem, but lacks the clout in his own country and Congress to force Netanyahu to comply.
Where there is no solution, there is no problem.
In the short run, we shall find out if the King of Jordan is right.
In the long run, demography is destiny.
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
For what other comparison comes to mind if the 4 million Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza are to be confined to such Bantustans, with no country to call their own, their economy and movement subject to Israeli authorities and the Israeli military?
Only one. That old mediaeval institution known as the ghetto.
Buchanan writes with insight about the problem, but avoids what would need to happen to solve things, and for obvious reasons. True conservatives, in order to participate productively, would have to disavow the Christianist wing of the Republican party that has been dining out on ridiculous apocalyptic visions since at least the Eighties. One is reminded of Woody Allen’s quip about what Jesus would do if He were to return now… ‘be unable to stop vomiting.’
My hope is the rise of a Palestinian Gandhi or Martin L. King Jr. to realize that cessation of atrocities on the part of the oppressed people is the most efficient path to liberation; that nonviolent resistance is not merely a question of morality but superior both tactically and strategically in a practical sense.
Lastly, bridging to a critical social issue, can we not all insist that grown men who assume positions of grave responsibility adopt adult names? It should not be permitted, for example, to head a country and be called Bibi, nor to be the Chief of Staff of the Vice President and be called Scooter. At such people’s swearing-in ceremonies, they should be required to find some sort of mature appellation to associate themselves with. Should they refuse, in tribute to the genius of the late William Frawley, they should all be called, by common consent, Fred, or Bub.
How does Buchanan know that what he calls “Bibi’s Dead End” isn’t looked upon by Bibi and indeed Israel as a perfectly fine thing to live with for however long, especially so long as the U.S. continues to fund it?
In fact isn’t all the evidence that Israel has a much longer view than we do and is perfectly willing to live with no matter how much of the obloquy of the world it incurs for however long in exchange for keeping what it thinks the Bible promised it? Indeed, that at least some segment of Israeli society actually likes that obloquy because that justifies the belief that alone amongst people they are special because everyone hates them?
And as to the demographic threat due to the reproduction rate of those arabs who *are* citizens of Israel isn’t that call of Netayahu for arab recognition of Israel as “a jewish state” nothing less than groundwork laying for Israel’s expulsion of however many arabs it takes in the future to preserve its jewish identity?
Right now Bibi and Israel don’t want to talk about a two-state solution because they haven’t yet established all the “facts on the ground” in the form of settlements that they want hoarding all the best land and water and etc. After they’ve done that I don’t think they care what happens to the rest, whether it’s called a state or a statelet or part of Jordan or whatever so long as it or they are utterly under practical Israeli control. Indeed they’ll need some non-Israeli territory that they can expel their Israeli arab citizenry to when the time comes. Or as Mr. Lieberman would put it, tell their arabs to assemble their bundles and go.
After awhile even the dumbest have to concede that no matter what someone says, if that person has been doing something long enough and determined enough that gee, their intention is to continue doing it until it’s accomplished?
Cheers,
Bibi and the Israeli majority can wait until the settlements eat up a good part of the West Bank leaving the dregs for the Palestinian Arabs. So, we are left with the South African solution: bantustans for the muslim Arabs and the country for the Jews.
How will Europe and the USA handle that. Rely on AIPAC to cheer.
Time writer Tony Karon, a South African jew himself, says that Israel is already an apartheid state, it is but for the world to notice. http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090322/OPINION/714980252/1001
Desmond Tutu likened Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to apartheid 7 years ago . http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/apr/29/comment
Apartheid is not the future, apartheid is now.
Us American taxpayers can look in the mirror if we want to know exactly who has been (unwittingly) aiding and abetting this apartheid -despite no one ever having asked our permission (thanks to the hold the Israeli lobby has on Congress and elsewhere in government).
America needs another Independence – Independence from Israel.
Free America – and the rest will follow.