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The Peel Commission’s “two-state solution,” 1937

Yesterday Naftali Bennett of the Jewish Home party became the latest member of Israel’s cabinet to call for an end to the pretense that a “two-state solution” could be a ‘solution’ in any sense.

The notion of having a two-state solution established in the Land of Israel is now at a dead end; never in Jewish history have so many people talked so much and expended so much energy in something so futile,

he said. Instead,

Bennett reiterated his stance that Israel should annex — “as quickly as possible” — virtually all the areas [Area C] that were not handed over the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo accords, including the Jewish communities and a handful of Palestinian towns. He further advocated that Israel devise “aggressive” new plans to drastically improve the economic well-being of both the Jewish and Arab inhabitants of Judea and Samaria.

Bennett said that Israel must continue its settlement activity in Judea and Samaria “in full force, because only facts on the ground would make everyone understand that it is an unrealistic proposition to have a Palestinian entity in the Land of Israel.”

Naturally this led to a storm of criticism — in some cases, abuse — from the Palestinians, the Israeli Left, Europe and the Obama Administration, just as last week’s remark by Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon that the government would not support a “two-state solution” did.

So what is the history of the “two-state solution?”

The original Palestine Mandate conceived of the establishment of a Jewish state in part of the area taken from the collapsed Ottoman Empire after WWI. The victorious Allied Powers also established a Mandate in what was to become the present-day state of Iraq, one for Lebanon and Syria, etc. The British took about 70% of the Palestine Mandate and created the Arab state of Transjordan.

But despite the plethora of new Arab states (and Mandates that would become states), violent opposition to Jewish sovereignty in what was left of Palestine arose among the Arabs, and for various reasons — oil among them — Britain abandoned its responsibility to the Jewish people. When the British were ultimately driven out of the region — in great measure by Jewish resistance — they sided with the Arabs in their attempt to abort the creation of a Jewish state.

In the lead-up to the 1948 war, there were various partition proposals to reduce even further the area allocated to a Jewish home, all of which were acceptable to the Jews. There was the Peel Commission report of 1937, which proposed a small Jewish state, a larger Arab state and a chunk including Jerusalem to remain under British administration. And of course there was the UN Partition Resolution of 1947. Both of these were rejected by the Arabs, who did not — as they do not today — accept the idea of any Jewish sovereignty in Palestine.

Note what the various “two-state solutions” were supposed to solve — Arab opposition to Jewish sovereignty. Of course only total elimination of the Jewish state could do that.

After the 1967 war, Israel accepted UNSC resolution 242, under which Israel would give back lands it had occupied to its neighbors in return for peace treaties that would guarantee “secure and recognized boundaries.” The clear intent of the resolution was that Israel would give back some of the land, but not necessarily all of it, particularly because the pre-war boundaries were not ‘secure’.

Israel signed a peace agreement with Egypt and evacuated the Sinai (unfortunately Sadat would not take Gaza as well). But in 1988, Jordan ceded its claims on Judea and Samaria to the PLO. Any peace treaty in the framework of 242, then, would have to be with the PLO.

The Oslo agreements of 1993 were intended to lead to such a peace agreement. As everyone knows, the PLO was not prepared to accept the terms offered at Camp David and Taba in 2000-1, and chose to make war instead — a war in which more than a thousand Israelis (mostly civilians) and possibly 3,000 Arabs (mostly combatants) were killed.

The PLO rejection of the offers was not a matter of technical details, but of fundamental ideological beliefs. This is shown by the refusal of the PLO to change its charter despite a massive effort by US President Clinton to get them to do so, by the persistence of both terrorism and incitement throughout the Oslo period, and by the ultimate recourse to war against Israel’s population.

Nevertheless, another offer was made, this time by PM Olmert in 2008. This offer was even more generous than that made in 2000-1. When its contents were revealed recently, many Israelis were shocked. But that offer was rejected as well.

Israel evacuated every last Jew from the Gaza Strip in 2005. They even dug up bodies from cemeteries and removed them. For reasons that I have never understood, the PLO was furious that the withdrawal wasn’t ‘coordinated’ with them.  Israel got absolutely no credit for giving the Palestinians what they had been saying they wanted for years! Of course, two years later, Hamas came along and viciously took over Gaza, murdering numerous PLO functionaries. But that wasn’t because the withdrawal wasn’t ‘coordinated’. In any event, it showed that evacuating territory near Israeli populations was a bad idea when Hamas ramped up its rocket attacks.

It has always fascinated me that those calling for a “two-state solution” seem to believe that once an agreement is signed and the IDF leaves the territories, then there will be peace. Is there any precedent that the Arabs might not honor an agreement? Could a regime change on the Arab side cause the abrogation of the agreement? Just to ask these questions shows the idiocy of the “two-state solution!”

As Abraham Katsman argues here, the security consequences of a withdrawal from Judea and Samaria are unacceptable:

…history indicates that withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines, absent major changes, is arguably the single most counterproductive act imaginable for long-lasting peace. There is no greater obstacle to peace than the perpetual temptation to launch another war against Israel from such lopsided lines.

What is so sacred about the pre-1967 lines, anyway? In 1967, there was neither peace nor an independent Palestinian entity. Similar lines were part of the 1947 Partition Plan, and were overrun by invading Arab armies. The pre-1967 lines were never an internationally recognized border — thanks to Arab insistence that they not be. They were merely the armistice lines of 1949, an armistice honored mostly in the breach. In 1967, Arab armies finally shredded the armistice by attacking across those lines, in spite of Israeli pleas to Jordan’s King Hussein not to do so. With new ceasefire lines in 1967 and 1973, the pre-1967 lines were rendered meaningless, having lasted all of 18 years, 1949-1967. R.I.P.

Even putting aside Israel’s own legitimate legal, cultural, and historical claims to disputed territories, Israeli withdrawal to those lines won’t happen now due to Israeli aversion to existential vulnerability.

The bottom line for Israel is a sovereign Jewish state with defensible borders. The PLO’s reason for being is to end the Jewish state. What’s surprising is that John Kerry and others continue to think that there’s room for an agreement that could be consistent with both.

Technorati Tags: two-state solution

In a previous post, I imagined the situation in 2018, with Israel’s traditional Arab and Iranian enemies mostly toothless as a result of Sunni-Shiite conflict and economic incompetence, while a new threat emanates from a viciously anti-Jewish Western Europe. There, traditional European Jew-hatred has combined with the influence of a rapidly growing Muslim population to produce a true witches’ brew of hatred for Jews and their state.

But as one commenter noted, there was a country that, despite its importance, was not mentioned even once: the US. And the reason was that although the trends for Europe seemed clear, my ability to imagine the future here in the US was far weaker, producing only cloudy visions.

Or maybe I just wasn’t comfortable with what I envisioned. But let me flip the switch on the time machine anyway.

It’s 2018. President Clinton is halfway through her first term, having been helped to a landslide victory by a lackluster Republican candidate nominated by a fractured party split between representatives of extractive industries, social conservatives and Tea Party libertarians. Although the media that had so single-mindedly shilled for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 had begun to tire of him when the heavy hand of the Justice Department fell on them in 2013, Ms Clinton convinced the press that she was on their side. After all, wasn’t her own daughter a TV journalist?

Demographic changes also helped. Hispanics and Asians represented a greater share of the population than in 2012, and these groups voted heavily Democratic, especially as Clinton and her husband had campaigned hard for the American Immigration and Diversity Act of 2014, which provided a relatively unobstructed path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants (and future Democratic voters). Many people voted for Ms Clinton simply because they thought it was time to give a woman a chance (it was hard to argue that male politicians hadn’t screwed up big time).

Although the Republican Party had traditionally been considered the party of ‘big business’, 2018’s biggest businesses — Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. — gave large contributions to Democratic candidates, and only smaller ‘insurance’ donations to Republicans.

Finally, there were some less savory aspects to the election. Small businesspeople thought twice about publicly supporting Republican candidates out of fear of regulatory agencies and the IRS, which were even more politically active than in 2013, despite the furor that had arisen then. Lists were compiled of voters that had moved or died, and since there was no requirement for ID to vote in most states, others voted in their places. Information from the massive NSA databases about ordinary Americans found its way to political operatives.

It was no contest for the presidency, and only slightly less unbalanced in the House and Senate.

Not that the Congress mattered that much anymore. Despite its constitutionally mandated role, its continued paralysis through the Obama years made it inevitable that the Executive Branch would find ways around it. By 2018, many of its debates were only political posturing, while the real decisions were taken by the administration by executive orders. Some politicians made quaint speeches about the Constitution, to little effect. “What can we do?” said administration spokespeople. “The Congress is dysfunctional.”

Although the Democrats had campaigned against income inequality, it turned out that the rich — especially the super-rich — were continuing to get richer, and the poor and middle-class poorer. Despite the commitments of the ‘progressive’ administration, health-care and other services for the poor, disabled, mentally ill, homeless, etc., suffered more and more for lack of funds. Many roamed the streets, begging and stealing to survive.

Shortly after Clinton’s election at the tail end of the Israeli-Hizballah war of 2016, Hizballah activated several terrorist cells who had infiltrated the US from South America via the Mexican border. They succeeded in detonating bombs at LA International Airport and several Jewish institutions in Los Angeles. They also invaded the Israeli consulate there, killing several security personnel and taking numerous hostages. Although Israel sent a security team, the terrorists began executing hostages before they arrived, and the LAPD stormed the building, resulting in a bloodbath of terrorists, hostages and police.

After the LAX bomb was determined to contain radioactive materials — a ‘dirty bomb’ — the centrally-located airport was abandoned at huge cost. Property values tumbled within a 30-mile radius (although the contamination was in fact limited to the airport area). The city of Los Angeles was forced to declare bankruptcy when it could not come close to balancing its budget.

Many Americans asked how this could have been allowed to happen, given the degree of surveillance that they had become used to, including tracking of cellphone usage, emails, monitoring of the content of voice communications, and a massive expansion of facial recognition software which received inputs from hundreds of thousands of cameras in public areas and matched it to databases of passport and driver’s license photos. Since these programs were revealed in 2013, they had become even more pervasive — and the security agencies developed incredibly powerful search tools than can spit out complete dossiers on the lives of individual people or groups, by analyzing literally trillions of database entries in moments.

President Clinton promised to “bring the terrorists to justice,” but Israel had already destroyed the Hizballah infrastructure in Lebanon, so all she could do was send the few surviving terrorists to Guantanamo (which she promised to close). US Muslim organizations such as CAIR, ISNA, etc., swung into action to forestall an expected ‘wave of Islamophobia’. Liberal churches and Reform Temples throughout the country held special meetings in which representatives of those organizations ‘explained’ the difference between ‘bad’ (Shiite) Muslims like Hizballah, and ‘good’ Muslim-Brotherhood types like themselves. They also hinted that the patience of even ‘good’ Muslims could run out if the US continued to support the existence of a Jewish state.

It was argued that ‘hate speech’ against Islam was partly responsible for the anger against the West, and that — while everybody had a right to free expression — certain videos and blogs should be removed from the Internet, because they exacerbated a bad situation. Many people agreed. The Clinton Administration hinted that “it knew how to deal with hate-mongers” and would take steps to do so.

The Administration issued a classified executive order called the “Homeland Protection Act” [HPA] which was explained as a response to the “West Coast 9/11.” Since it was classified, the contents were not revealed, but it was understood that it was necessary to deal with the emergency, just like the broad surveillance measures. It was thought that it temporarily suspended certain parts of the Bill of Rights. Again, many Americans agreed, and those who didn’t understood that they needed to be very careful about how they expressed their disagreement.

Some Americans were taken into custody under the HPA. Interestingly, they were mostly right-wingers, not Islamic terrorists. But the HPA apparently didn’t require that they be publicly charged, so in essence they disappeared.

The Canadian Prime Minister expressed his concern about the erosion of civil rights in the US, especially since many Americans were crossing the border into Canada daily. The US government responded by beefing up its control of the Canadian border, subjecting suspected emigrants to impromptu examinations to ensure that they were not trying to avoid their US tax obligations. The Administration issued an executive order than anyone leaving the US had to prove that they had paid all due taxes or post a bond. In some places, they built a wall.

Impossible? I wonder.

Technorati Tags: USA, Bill of Rights, Constitution

Patrick Mercer, MP

News item:

A British MP who was caught on camera branding an Israeli soldier a “bloody Jew” has apologized for his remark, the British-based Jewish News reports. …

Describing an encounter with a soldier while trying to enter an “intelligence establishment” during a recent visit to the Jewish state, he was reported during last Thursday’s program as saying, “An 18-year-old girl wearing a uniform, but with her sort of hair in plaits, and crazy jeweler [sic] and open-toed sandals, with a rifle up my nose. Who the f*** are you, you know? ‘Well I’m a soldier.’ Are you? You don’t look like a soldier to me. You look like a bloody Jew. And I’ve no doubt that if I’d come up with the wrong answer, I’d have had my head blown off.”

[MP Patrick] Mercer, who served as shadow homeland security minister under Michael Howard and Iain Duncan Smith, has told the Jewish News, “I’d like to apologies [sic] unreservedly for any offence I’ve caused to all my friends in the Jewish community.”

A pity he didn’t get his arrogant Jew-hating head blown off, in my opinion. And he doesn’t need to apologize to “all [his] friends in the Jewish community,” assuming that he still has any. He has to apologize to that young woman who, while doing her duty, taught this worthless prick an important lesson: that there is one place in the world where Jews don’t have to take crap from such as him.

MP Mercer expressed the thought held more quietly by so many, especially in Europe and the UK: they believe that it’s just not proper for there to be Jewish soldiers, a Jewish army, a Jewish air force, Jewish nuclear weapons, or a Jewish state. In their minds, Jews exist to be insulted, to be victimized in various ways, maybe to be pitied but never to be respected.

But those days ended in May, 1948, when MP Mercer’s own regiment, the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters, along with the rest of the British forces in Palestine, slunk back to England with its tail between its legs, after getting its ass kicked by Jewish soldiers like the young woman he insulted!

There. Now I feel better.

Technorati Tags: Patrick Mercer, IDF

Women of the Wall — the end of the Jewish state?

Sometimes our friends can be worse than our enemies.

Here is an argument made by Yori Yanover of the Jewish Press, to a correspondent named Dan Silagi, who found the “Women of the Wall” [WOW] relatively harmless:

Our entire justification for having conquered the land from the former inhabitants, which we have done, is that it was God given to us. Otherwise, we’re just European colonialists who pushed out the indigenous people for no good reason other than the power of the gun.

If we believe that God gave us the land, we must ask, what is our relationship with God? Do we bring anything into the relationship, or is the Gift from God argument, essentially, an empty slogan we don’t really believe in?

If we believe in it, then we must accept that our relationship with God is through the commandments, more accurately through our adherence to His commandments — because that’s what He, in his eternal wisdom, told us.

So that our adherence to halacha and our right to the land are inseparable, and if we don’t adhere to halacha, we have no rights here.

Now, the most essential, most central, most crucial part of halacha is submitting to the yoke of our sages. In this case, there is one sage who is the state appointed administrator at the Kotel, and he laid down the law — only to be defied both by the WOW and by two lower courts. Incidentally — the high court still sides with the Rabbi of the Kotel.

So, Dan Silagi, while I agree that your predictions are true, I also say that they make you and your ilk nothing better than the British and French oppressors of the black tribes of Africa, and that you, as a secular European invader devoid of justification for your occupation, must at once relinquish authority over the land to its rightful Arab owners.

Now I would be the last to argue that God did not give the land of Israel to the Jewish people, but like many other gifts, it didn’t fall on us like manna. We had to earn it. And we, the Jewish people, did earn this one. In fact, even for those who don’t believe in God, the right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is clear.

Yanover is apparently a Zionist, but he’s been listening to anti-Zionist talk for so long that he seems to believe it. We “pushed out indigenous people,” did we? Time for a short history lesson:

There were Jews in the land of Israel since biblical times, although many were dispersed by the Romans, murdered by Crusaders, converted by Muslims, etc. Mark Twain visited the land in the mid-Nineteenth Century — before the arrival of the first Zionists — and found a desperately poor land, where Arabs and Jews lived under unspeakable conditions, ridden by disease and exploited by absentee Ottoman landlords. Yes, there were somewhat more Arabs than Jews — so what?

The Zionists, as the cliché says, drained the swamps, reclaimed land that had been lost to agricultural use for centuries. They ultimately created industries and commerce. They turned wasteland into productive land and introduced modern medicine. These things benefited both Jews and Arabs.

When the Ottoman rulers were replaced by the British there were further improvements. The British built rail lines and other projects, for which they imported Arab workers. The Palestine Mandate area became a magnet for Arabs from neighboring countries, especially Syria, where there was continuing political unrest and famine, and Egypt. Many — probably most — of today’s ‘Palestinians’ are descended from Arabs that came to Palestine after the 1880’s.

Meanwhile, the Jews built the precursor of a state. They built roads, created health-care and pension systems, an army (well, more than one), established trade unions, and a ‘government’ which could negotiate with the British. The Arabs, most of whom were not ‘Palestinian’ nationalists but believed that Palestine was actually the southern part of Syria, followed a familiar pattern — anti-Jewish riots and terrorism. Their leader, al-Husseini, cooperated with Hitler and planned to establish extermination camps in Palestine after the German victory.

As the mandate period wore on, the British more and more sided with the Arabs, culminating with the White Paper of 1939 which more or less entirely reneged on the promise by the international community to the Jewish people of a national home in Palestine. But despite this, and with the expenditure of much blood — about 1% of the Jewish population died in the War of Independence — the Jews kicked out the British colonialists and established the State of Israel.

Of course I’ve left out a lot, including the flight of Arabs from the new state, the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab nations and their ingathering to Israel, and Israel’s struggle to survive through several wars afterwards.

But the fact is that God’s promise, if you look at it that way, was also embodied in international law and then made real by the labor, initiative and blood — a huge amount of blood — of the Jewish people, including secular ones.

So with all due respect, Mr. Yanover, don’t sweat the WOW.

The Jewish people can handle them, just like they can handle anti-Zionist Haredim and extreme leftist academics.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Zionism, Women of the Wall, Yori Yanover