#892 2/4/18 – This Week: Taking On The Next Sacred Cow, “The Two-State Solution”

WHILE YOU WAIT FOR THE START OF THE SUPER-BOWL: President Trump blasphemed a Sacred Cow when he declared, disclaiming political implications, that Israel’s capital is in Jerusalem.  Perhaps this is a precedent for taking on another Sacred Cow, “The Two-State Solution,” Jewish questioning of which has been “ridiculed by the media as unrealistic.” 

This Week:  Taking On the Next Sacred Cow, “The Two-State Solution”

The Israeli organization Legal Grounds, spearheaded by Israeli commentator Arlene Kushner and Jeff Daube, director of ZOA’s Jerusalem office, updated its members this week on its campaign “to defend the legal rights of Israel to the entirely of the land of Israel.”  Its update stated that although conferences led by Israeli leaders a decade ago to consider alternatives to the “Two-State Solution” had been “ridiculed by the media as unrealistic,” such consideration today is “enormously relevant as the President of the United States is said to be looking at all possible alternatives to end the conflict.”  To that end, Legal Grounds has been briefing U.S. Congress members on non-Two-State plans proposed by Israeli lawmakers.

The sacred-cow “Two-State Solution” belongs to the same sacred cow herd as “Jerusalem Is Not Israel’s Capital.”

The European nations which bitterly criticized President Trump for recognizing the incontestable fact that Israel’s capital is in Jerusalem, while expressly stating “We are not taking a position on any final status issues, including the specific boundaries of the Israeli sovereignty IN Jerusalem” (emphasis added), had themselves just a year before voted for a U.N.S.C. resolution (2334) that damn well took sides on Jerusalem and a “two-state solution,” declaring that

“the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-State solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace.”  [emphasis added a little]

Legal Grounds’ update urged its members and followers “to promote these [“Two-State Solution”] alternatives and to encourage lawmakers, both in Israel and the US, to broaden the quest for peace by evaluating a variety of options, rather than remaining caught in a non-productive two-state paradigm.”

Bravo, but beyond questioning UNSC 2334’s equating of a nine-miles-wide-in-its-lowland-middle Israel with “a just, lasting and comprehensive peace,” we need to take on all of the same-herd sacred cows in that above-quoted male-cow-waste-infested UNSC resolution:

***  Residential Jewish presence anywhere in the land of Israel, including in Judea-Samaria and Israel’s capital Jerusalem, is as of historical and legal right, and, while disputed by Arabs, is not, as per UNSC 2334, “settlements”;

***  Territory in the land of Israel is not, as per UNSC 2334, “Palestinian territory,” but disputed territory; just as Arabs claim the entirety of the land of Israel – “from the River to the Sea” – as Arab, we Jews (well, most of us, anyway) just as adamantly claim it as historically and legally Jewish, and it is the epitome of one-sidedness for the UN to call it “Palestinian territory”;

***  Jewish State presence anywhere in the Palestine Mandate west of the Jordan is not, as per UNSC 2334, “occupied since 1967,” but founded on historical presence and international legal documents including the Palestine Mandate calling for “close settlement” of Jews on that land;

***  the “East Jerusalem” referred to in that UNSC 2334 resolution as “the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem,” is the thing that has no legal validity, “Palestinians” never having ruled an inch of “east” or any other part of Jerusalem ever, while Jerusalem has been the capital of two previous Jewish states, Judah and Judaea, and now of Israel, the land of Israel’s next native state after Jewish Judaea, and has had a renewed Jewish majority since the 1800’s;

***  “the major obstacle to the achievement of the two-State solution” is not, as per UNSC 2334, the presence of Jews in Jerusalem, including in what had been fleetingly for 19 years ended a half-century ago not “Palestinian” but [internationally unrecognized] Jordanian “East” Jerusalem; the real obstacle to the “two-state solution” is that “Palestinians” have never accepted it in its U.S. promulgator-defined definition as “two states for two peoples”; and

***  Palestinian Arabs aren’t “THE Palestinians,” the UN itself in its 1947 Palestine Partition resolution having defined Palestine’s Jews (c 600,000) and its Arabs (c a million) “the two Palestinian peoples.”