A dream of two states

Editorial

Israel's government appears about to shift to the right, with the former and new Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu welcoming the perceived extremist Avigdor Lieberman into his government.

Concern is expressed around the world, most recently by Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign affairs policy head, who threatened that Europe's relations with Israel could be damaged if the new government was not committed to a Palestinian state.

Although recent months should have demonstrated to the world that a "free Palestine," as evidenced in an independent Gaza, is an existential threat to Israeli security, the world continues the self-delusion that it is Israel that stands in the way of peace and coexistence. As rockets rained down on southern Israel, observers like Solana continued to assert that not only the Gaza Strip, but the West Bank too, which is fatally entangled with Israel's border – as the world's incessant caterwauling about the snaking security barrier only proves – should be turned over to terrorists (called either Hamas or Fatah) whose explicit, written objective remains the destruction of Jewish statehood.

This delusional misinterpretation of the situation reaches both the heights of global opinion – the foreign policy enclaves of Europe, the United Nations and capitals everywhere – and its depths – the bloodthirsty street rallies of the Middle East, Europe and North America.

One of the characteristics of the anti-Israel movement in recent months has been a decided turn away from any pretense of moderation. While for most of the last nine years, since the current hysterical condemnation of Israel detonated, Israel's enemies insisted they believed that Israel has a right to exist, even as they declaimed it is an "apartheid" or "satanic" state.

It is possible today to promote a "one-state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – but only if that one state is Arab. But the idea that a unified country containing an Arab majority could be a pluralist democracy where a Jewish minority would have rights unlike any other Middle Eastern country is a conceit promoted by the deceitful or deluded. Nowadays, to openly express the idea that the area from the Jordan to the Mediterranean should be a Jewish state is to excuse oneself from popular, if misguided, conversation.

During the past three months, since the Gaza action brought the latest global outrage upon Israel, one of the most common chants has been "From the river to the sea ... Palestine will be free." The propaganda handed out, for example during "Israel Apartheid Week" on campuses, no longer imagine a Palestine astride Israel, but encompassing it.

It has been the most worrying characteristic of the recent attention focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that the primary prerequisite to a resolution is routinely the only ingredient absent from the shopping list of demands assumed necessary for peaceful resolution. Settlements, the security barrier, checkpoints: all of the long list of Palestinian complaints that the global community have unquestioningly accepted as the minimal requirements for peace are in fact no recipe for peace at all. The sole prerequisite to peace is that Palestinian leaders (and, ideally, other Arab countries, media and religious figures) cease their genocidal incitement against Jews and begin preparing their people to live in peace with the Jewish state. If this were to begin today, peace may be possible in a generation.

In 1947, the world offered the Jews and Arabs of Palestine coexistence. The Jews built Israel. The Arabs tried to destroy it. In 1967, Israel offered an immediate return of the occupied territories to the Arab world, which could have created a Palestinian state there. The answer: No, no, no. In 1993 and until 2000, the offer of a two-state solution – in historical terms, almost immediately – was on the table, ready for acceptance by the Palestinian leadership. The answer: intifada. In 2005, the disengagement from Gaza opened the door to a proto-state that could have proven the Palestinians were ready for coexistence. Israel received in 2005 and ever since, just what it received in 1947-48, 1967 and 2000: war for peace.

It may be time that the world recognized that a two-state solution is ideal but like many ideals, a dream. If the world were to demand that the Palestinians and the larger Arab world make genuine steps to educating their people with a mind to future coexistence instead of an inevitable march toward genocide and the eradication of the "Zionist entity," peace could be at hand in a generation or two. But to do so would require a complete reversal of the narrative, a rejection of the simplistic and murderously naive view that Israel – for reasons sinister and inexplicable – is the source of the conflict and its perpetuation.

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