May 16, 2008

November 26, 2007

The Four State Solution

By Gamaliel Isaac
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has made clear that the upcoming Annapolis summit will be a step on the road to a two state solution to the conflict in the Middle East.  The absurdity of this becomes clear when one considers that there are already four de-facto Palestinian States.  They are the State of Jordan, the Palestinian Authority controlled state of Palestine in Judea and Samaria, the Hamas ruled Palestinian state of Gaza and Israel. 

Israel is a Palestinian state because the term Palestinian historically refers to people who lived in the region, both Arabs and Jews and not to a specific Palestinian people because there never was such a thing.  Joseph Criden in 1975 in a letter to the New York Times, which they did not see fit to print, wrote:
"Your newspaper frequently uses the term "Palestinian" to describe a section of the Middle East population which is Arab, to differentiate it from Israeli Jews.  As the holder of a Palestinian Identity Card and a Certificate of Discharge from a Palestinian Unit of the British army, I find this practice annoying and certainly untrue..."

The myth of a Palestinian identity separate from that of the Jews was created for tactical reasons.  Zuheir Mohsein, then a member of the Supreme Council of the PLO  told an interviewer of the  Dutch Daily Trouw in 1977 that:
"Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity is there only for tactical reasons. The establishment of a Palestinian state is a new expedient to continue the fight against Zionism and for Arab unity."
In 1923 the British gave Emir Abdullah three quarters of Palestine.  This area was renamed Jordan in 1946.   Arabs in Jordan and in Judea and Samaria have themselves admitted that Jordan and Palestine are one and the same.    In 1981 King Hussein (Abdullah's grandson and late ruler of Jordan) stated in an interview with an Arab newspaper:
The truth is that Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan."  
Likewise the 8th Palestinian National Congress declared:
"Jordan is linked to Palestine by a national relationship and a national unity forged by history and culture from earliest times.  The creation of one political entity in East Jordan and another in Palestine would have no basis either in legality or as to the elements universally accepted as fundamental to a political entity."
In 1947 the Arabs rejected a partition plan that would have divided the remaining tiny quarter of Palestine into an Israeli and Palestinian Arab state.  A day after Israel declared it's independence the seven neighboring Arab armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Yemen invaded Israel.

There is a very important lesson that American peace makers have failed to learn from this event in history.  The Arabs went to war even though all their current demands for peace were met.   There were no Arab refugees for which they now demand the right of return.  There was no "occupation" by the Israeli army of Judea, Samaria or Gaza yet the Arabs still went to war.  Why?  Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League, declared their intentions:
"This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."
Why this desire to massacre the Jews when there was no occupation and no refugees?  One only need watch  sermons of the Palestinian Authority  broadcast on Palestinian TV to understand why.  Muhammad Abbas is too smart to state his true intentions to the Bush Administration, which is all too eager to ignore his role in the murder of Leon Klinghoffer,  the murder of the Israeli Olympic team,  the rocket attacks on Jewish civilians and  to believe his statements in English that he wants peace while he incites hatred in Arabic. 

The unwillingness of American administrations to face reality has led to constant pressure on Israel to cede land to the Arabs for peace with predictably disastrous results.  The most dramatic example of this was the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, a land inhabited by Jews since Biblical times.  Israelis, as a peace gesture, gave the Palestinian Arabs Gaza and uprooted the Jews living there, knowing that if they left them under the rule of the Arabs those Jews would be annihilated.  The Arabs destroyed the synagogues and many of the greenhouses that the Jews left behind and fire barrages of rockets from the areas given to them at Israeli homes in Sderot and Ashkelon. 

None of this fazed Condoleeza Rice who announced that withdrawal from Gaza was not enough and that Israel must withdraw from Judea and Samaria so that a viable Palestinian State can be created.  The absurdity of this idea is compounded by the fact that yet another de-facto Palestinian state already exists in Judea and Samaria under the control of the Palestinian Authority.

Caroline Glick in an article titled Welcome to Palestine explained:
[A]s statesmen and activists worldwide loudly proclaim their commitment to establishing the sovereign State of Palestine, they miss the fact that Palestine exists. And it is a nightmare. .. Children are woken up in the middle of the night and murdered in front of their parents. Worshipers in mosques are gunned down by terrorists who attend competing mosques... women are stripped naked and forced to march in the streets to humiliate their husbands. Ambulances are stopped on the way to hospitals and wounded are shot in cold blood. Terrorists enter operating rooms in hospitals and unplug patients from life-support machines... Christians are persecuted, robbed and beaten in what can only be viewed as a systematic campaign to end the Christian presence in places like Bethlehem.
Secretary of State Rice claims that Judea and Samaria are necessary for the viability of a Palestinian state, but the only difference between the current de-facto Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria and the one that would be created if Israel gives up all military control of the area is that such a state would end the viability of Israel.  Such a state, positioned in the Judean hills overlooking the ten mile wide band of Israeli coast that would be left between itself and the sea  would arm itself with planes, tanks and artillery and pose a deadly threat to Israel.  Surely the Bush administration must know this; after all, a study commissioned by the U.S. government chaired by U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Earl Wheeler concluded that  "The minimum required for Israel's defense includes most of the West Bank and the whole of Gaza and the Golan Heights." 

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice gave a speech in which she said:
"...the United States sees the establishment of a Palestinian state, a two-state solution, as absolutely essential to the future of not just Palestinians and Israelis but also to the Middle East and, indeed, to American interests."    
The belief that such a state is vital for American interests stems from the belief that Arab anger at the United States is rooted in the lack of such a state, an absurd belief when one considers how many Palestinian and other states they already have. Arab anger is proportional to the Arab perception that anger will get them what they want.  Forcing Israel to make concessions in response to Arab demands will simply increase their demands. 

Making Israel indefensible will not dissipate Arab anger; on the contrary, the scent of victory will enrage the Arabs the way it did in 1967 and 1948.  The Bush Administration needs to remember the words of Ronald Reagan, "Peace through strength".  The path to war in the Middle East is through weakness, the path to peace in the Middle East is through strength.
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