These days, people seem to take for granted that
the "two-state solution" is the way to proceed toward peace in the
Holy Land. Conventional wisdom, however,
is so often wrong that it ought perhaps to be termed "conventional lack of wisdom"; so it is true
here. I shall explain forthwith why the
idea of a Palestinian Arab state is one whose time will never come.
It's not widely considered that a
"two-state solution" has already been attempted. Consequent to Turkey's defeat in World War
One, the area then called Palestine (the land now bounded by Egypt, Syria,
Jordan, Lebanon, and the Mediterranean Sea) was mandated to Great Britain, to
be prepared for eventual independence. By
1948, the British had, understandably, wearied of administering the region, and
so turned over the question of Palestine to the United Nations, which voted to
partition the area into Jewish and Arab realms. The Zionists accepted this, but no sooner had
the United Kingdom ended its rule than their neighbors (both the established
ones, such as Egypt, and the Palestinian Arabs who the UN expected to coexist
with incipient Israel) attacked, proclaiming their intention to "drive the
Jews into the sea." (The fact that the Mufti of Jerusalem, Said Haj Amin
el Husseini, called for "extermination and momentous massacre"
suggests that the war cry was more than an empty slogan. The implication should unsettle people of
today who know of only the Holocaust; Jews were evidently threatened with
annihilation for the second time in a span of three years.) Fortunately, divine justice was on the side of
Israel, which not only triumphed versus great odds, but emerged larger than it
would have been had the violence not taken place. The Arabs, however, can claim no moral high
ground because of this, because of their war aim and because the new
borders merely followed the cease-fire lines of 1949.
This First Arab-Israeli War had great significance for
the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Holy Land, since the problem was caused
not by the Israelis but by the Arabs themselves. A superb article
by Efraim Karsh proves that those who became refugees were not driven from
their homes by the Zionists (who actually tried to get them to stay), but
ordered out by their own leaders. (Further, at the close of the conflict, the
Kingdom of Transjordan successfully claimed the West Bank, henceforward being
known simply as "Jordan"; yet, after the Six-Day War of 1967, when
Israeli armies occupied the Kingdom's unilaterally annexed territory, it
declined to absorb all the outflow of the people to whom it had proclaimed its
protection.) Thus was the first
two-state "solution" stillborn, through the Arabs' own hatred and intransigence.
What ought to be done, then, in place
of resurrecting this failed idea? My
proposal is to cut off the international aid squandered on the Palestinian
Arabs, and re-allocate this copious amount of money for the purpose of
resettling them, homesteader and refugee alike, in sparsely-populated Arab
countries. This would not create what (before
the USA in particular and the world in general became obsessed with
"diversity") was formerly recognized as a "minority
problem," because there is no ethnic distinction between the Arabs on the
West Bank (as well as Gaza) and those on the opposite side of the River Jordan (hence
the fact that I refer to the former as Palestinian Arabs rather than simply as "Palestinians", which would
give the false impression that they are a racially and/or culturally distinct
people). It ought to be added in conclusion that if the Palestinian Arabs ever
had a right to statehood, they long ago forfeited that prerogative through
their bald refusals to make even the most negligible concession for the sake of
peace, and through their election of the likes of Yassir Arafat and the Hamas
militia to their highest offices. If
world diplomacy wants to make an independent state of a region whose
inhabitants consider terrorists to be their leaders, it might as well
reëstablish the Third Reich or the USSR.
