Washington insiders are now touting a misguided Obama-dictated plan to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Most recently, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Stephen Solarz took to the pages of the Washington Post to float the idea of an imposed peace, which largely undermines non-negotiable historic Palestinian rights. The authors call for the annulment of the Palestinian right of return, and the creation of a "demilitarized Palestinian state."
The trial balloon avoids any talk of Israeli parliamentary dynamics and the incapacity of the Netanyahu government to cede anything without sowing the seeds of its own dissolution, something Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu probably realized while negotiating the composition of his coalition government. But its most glaring failure is the presumption that Palestinians will meekly accept American dictates regarding the right of return. As a Palestinian, I believe that any plan that seeks to sacrifice our inalienable human rights to ensure race-based majorities in Israel will fail.
Brzezinski and Solarz begin their piece by paraphrasing a statement made by Israel's current defense minister, Ehud Barak. They write that the "absence of the two-state solution is the greatest threat to Israel's future." Presumably, Mr. Barak is indirectly referring to the one-state solution, or the growing call by Palestinians and anti-Zionist Jews to create a democratic state in all of historic Palestine. It is telling that the Israeli defense minister -- and Messrs Brzezinski and Solarz -- appears to view a growing movement in the Holy Land for equal rights and enfranchisement as "the greatest threat to Israel's future."
In a sense they're right. To the extent that Israel must exist exclusively for the Jewish people, the enfranchising of the roughly four million Palestinians living under Israeli occupation today does pose a threat to its existence. But so do the approximately 20% of Israelis who are non-Jews (mostly Palestinian citizens of Israel) who are growing more rapidly as a population than Jewish Israelis. It is this anachronistic obsession with the racial makeup of the state that created the Palestinian refugee problem in the first place. Mandate Palestine was ethnically cleansed by Zionist armed forces in 1948 to create room for a Jewish majority state, as documented by the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Incidentally, it is this original sin that Brzezinski and Solarz seek to reward by obliterating the Palestinian right of return which is enshrined in humanitarian and international law. One wonders what prescriptions Barak, Brzezinski and Solarz will offer in the event of a Palestinian baby boom within Israel in the coming decades.
Putting aside the racial justification that underpins the existence of the Jewish state for a moment, it's worth examining the reasons any two-state solution cannot work today. First, as previously noted, Palestinians will not relinquish the right of return. Mr. Abbas, who cannot claim any electoral or moral legitimacy, is hardly in a position to negotiate the right away. Second, there are approximately 500,000 Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and no one is capable of removing them from their homes. One can talk about land swaps, but the reality is that the Israeli state has done a thorough job of colonizing large swaths of land around Jerusalem and deep into the West Bank, effectively cutting it in two. Territorial contiguity is enormously important when engineering a state and it doesn't appear likely here. Third, the Holy Land is relatively arid. Much of the water Israelis consume comes from the Coastal and Mountain aquifers, both of which lie under Palestinian land. Notwithstanding international law and the prevailing sentiment of much of the world, Israel simply will not relinquish control of such strategic freshwater reserves.
Finally, there are Israeli security considerations. As Brzezinski and Solarz generously admit, Israel will never agree to a Palestinian state with a conventional military. A state without a military option isn't really a state at all, especially since Israel will likely continue to conduct raids into Palestinian territory.
Because the two-state solution is unworkable, both for practical and moral reasons, there is only one outcome that satisfies basic American liberal values of freedom of speech, race-blindness, equality under the law, etc. That's the one-state solution. When I lived in New York, I lived alongside people who hailed from places around the world, many of whom were American Jews and Israelis. However, I do not have the same right in my country of birth. Reasonable people can ask why Jews can live alongside Palestinians in America, but cannot fathom living alongside Palestinians in Israel.
The road to the one-state outcome is fraught with much difficulty. The struggle is likely to be as protracted as South Africa's struggle, and contentious issues like national rights, official languages and a suitable flag will need to be hammered out. But many Palestinian and Jewish activists have already embarked upon this road. Many of these individuals have come to support the one-state solution after accepting that the two-state solution is never going to materialize; Bantustans are all the international community can realistically offer the Palestinians, something few Palestinians will agree to.
My advice to the American president is to accept reality for what it is. We Palestinians will struggle for equal rights in our country in the same way blacks in America fought for their rights. We will persist in overwhelmingly demanding the implementation of our right of return. Our right of return is our right to sit anywhere on the bus, or attend any school. It would be a tragic irony if America's first black president leaves office with a legacy of supporting the world's last apartheid state.
Ahmed Moor is a Palestinian-American freelance journalist living in Beirut. He was born in the Gaza Strip, Palestine.
MJ Rosenberg: Elie Wiesel and the Rest Of Us : Compassion on the Cheap
Americans are too often like Wiesel. We built a Holocaust museum to point out what the Germans did in Europe but not a museum about slavery. Maybe that one will be built in Berlin, along side a museum about the slaughter of the American Indian.
"Because this(u.n. resolution 194, article 11) only recommends that refugees be permitted to return, it can hardly be characterized as creating a “right.”
....."not only does the UN admit the figures are of doubtful accuracy, there being obvious reason for families to claim more members and thereby receive more aid, the UN also admits that the total includes 1,463,064 Jordanian citizens, who cannot by any stretch be considered refugees. Indeed, if they are refugees, then the more than 500,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries who came to Israel after 1948 were nonetheless still refugees even after receiving Israeli citizenship, as are their descendants (since, in these claims, descendants of Palestinian refugees are themselves considered refugees). That is, there would be in Israel today at least 2 million Jewish refugees from Arab countries. "
"Arabs who lost property in Israel are eligible to file for compensation from Israel's Custodian of Absentee Property. As of the end of 1993, a total of 14,692 claims had been filed..."
"Jews expelled from Arab countries left behind $30b. in assets"
http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~jkatz/legal.html
Egypt, Jordan, Israel.
The so called palestinians could easily go back to being the Jordanians and Egyptians they were prior to 1967. There are no language barriers, and no troublesome religious disputes.
It's the easiest and best solution.
very good points
particuarly the fresh water reserves that no one in their right mind would give up in a desert.
So basically your argument is no compromise, no negotiation and demand the right of return - a right Palestinians never had. Now THATS a road to a Peace! (not). We call this moving the goal posts.
As a result, the greatest challenge Israel faces today is not posed by militants, whose every rocket attack serves to justify harsher Israeli retaliation, but from Palestinians who until now were willing to settle for their own state on just 22 percent of original Palestine. Sari Nusseibeh, the president of Al Quds University in Jerusalem and a respected scholar of Islamic philosophy, is an advocate of nonviolence. He is not only a longtime supporter of a two-state solution but has expressed a willingness under certain conditions to give up the Palestinians’ right of return. His Aug. 20 interview with Haaretz was therefore a strong warning to the Israelis that their time is running out.
http://www.washington-report.org/archives/November_2008/0811007.html
Here's a suggestion. How about the "right of return" to the Arabic lands that millions of Palestinians have been thrown out of for generations, most of them predating the Israeli state? Why not demand that Syria, Lebanon and Jordan dismantle the refugee camps they themselves built and allow the Palestinians living within their borders full participation in civic life there?
If for no other reason, it seems morally repellent to me to encourage the spread of Islamic control over more women and girls on real estate where they currently enjoy a high level of equality. Sharia law brooks no compromise when it comes to repressing half of the citizenry, and they most certainly will find expressions of the Jewish faith repellent. Remember when they had control of ALL of Jerusalem? Or are our memories really so short?
Speaking of moors.....Hamas is now indoctrinating children to believe that one day, Andalus ( moorish Span) will be theirs again.
Message to Israelis: You can't survive without Palestinian water!!! And don't think it's gonna come cheap!
Israelis want to have their cake and eat it too. Their mantra is: I want-I want-gimme-gimme, more Palestinian land, their water, quarries, their best agricultural land! Just crowd them in a corner and eventually they'll get fed up and go away!
Too bad Palestinians are staying put and growing in size. Oh what will Israelis do with this advancing reality?
I wish Palestinians could have their own sovereign state, the settlers would get up and abandon the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the refugees could return and a vast majority could settle in the West Bank, but deep down we all know we're been played and Israelis are merely playing the stalling game which will get them into more hot water than they care to consider today.
So although I'm wishing for the fairytale, I know reality is calling for a One-state Solution with equal rights for all, of course.
This is the kind of article that draws the real racists out of their closet.
On that part, I agree.
Hard to find a better example than that.
"Arab Muslims majority" and "economic powerhouse" are two incompatible notions.
It is the Western ethos and commitment to sober reality, education, equality of women and Jewish intellectual prowess that made Israel the economic, scientific and military power.
Add a few more million of overbreeding Arab Muslims to the mix, and... results are evident all throughout the Middle East and Africa. And this not even taking into consideration the resurgence of radical Islam in Arab societies through out world.
There is a reason India and Pakistan separated and India became a great democracy,and Pakistan became a militarized kleptocracy.
Think about it.
Are they overbreeding Jews or do you only make racist comments about one particular type of people?