In This Week’s Exponent: A Minority View on The Consequential Issue Confronting American Jews
WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: American Jews largely support our major American Jewish institutions’ call for a western Palestine “two-state solution.” No solution is probably realistic until the Jewish state is recognized as legitimately indigenous to the Mideast, but there’s an alternative both much better for Jews and equitable to Palestinian Arabs that American Jews should make part of the eternal Western discussion of “Middle East peace.”
Why We Wrote What We Wrote
Lee Bender and I had an article on JNS last week, “Two-State Solution” Isn’t Best for Either Side. It was picked up this week by Philadelphia’s Jewish Exponent. We argued that unlike the much-talked-about western Palestine “Two-State Solution,” on which both Israelis and Arabs have reservations, an alternative “Jordan option” is better for both sides: Recognize Jordan and Israel, both alumni of the Palestine Mandate, with respective Palestinian Arab and Jewish majority populations, as an already-effected equitable Palestine partition solution.
Lee and I didn’t think that the lay and religious leaderships of American Jews’ Reform and Conservative movements and the major organizations that joined them in their open letter to President Trump should have told Israel’s Jews, who defend Israel’s boundaries, what Israel’s boundaries should be. So where then do Lee and I, in writing an article titled ’Two-State Solution’ Isn’t Best for Either Side, muster the chutzpah to tell Palestine’s Arabs, let alone its Jews, what’s best for them?
Our article wasn’t addressed to the Mideast’s Arabs or Jews. It was a minority plea to our fellow American Jews, mostly supporters of a western Palestine “two-state solution,” not to present that resolution to our own community, the American public and the American President as the sole equitable Arab-Israeli Palestine conflict solution. It’s not equitable, but a wrongful taking away from Israel of its half-century-ago-won defensible borders and full Jewish homeland sovereignty redemption achievement. The American public needs to be told by American Jews that there’s an alternative, vastly fairer to Jews and equitable to Palestinian Arabs, resolution.
What “The Two-State Solution” Surrenders
British Col. Kemp and other military experts have convincingly made the case, which doesn’t really need military experts to make, that a nine-miles-wide in the heavily populated lowland middle Israel, visually overlooked by a sovereign Arab state in the Judean-Samarian hills, and surrounded as it is by other Arab states, would be militarily indefensible. It would virtually invite renewed attempts to destroy it.
And The Six Day War achieved for the Jewish homeland of Israel more than boundaries that were more defensible than those of 1949. It restored to Jewish sovereignty historic Jerusalem, the core of the core as Bibi later put it, and the land of Israel’s historic hill country heartland. Withdrawing from historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria, reversing the result of the Six Day War, reneging on the dream of generations for the Jewish homeland’s full sovereign redemption, as called for in UNSC 2334, would be beyond devastating.
The “Two-State Solution” embodied in the American Reform and Conservatives’ and others’ open letter to President Trump calls for borders between Israel and a new western Palestine Arab state that “hew precisely to the 1967 borders” except for “any territorial adjustments” agreed to “in a signed agreement between the two sides.” [“The 1967 borders,” of course, were merely 1949 military ceasefire lines declared in their defining document to be without prejudice to either side’s political borders claims. Unlike military ceasefire lines, in this instance those replaced by the ceasefire lines of renewed 1967 fighting between the same sides, actual borders stick.]
The Jordan Option Benefits Both Sides
The original post-Ottoman Palestine Mandate, with its recognition of historic Jewish connection to Palestine and its call for reconstituting there the Jewish National Home with close settlement of Jews on the land, included today’s Israel and Jordan. Early on, the 78% east of the River was excised as all-Arab Transjordan, leaving the remaining 22% left for the Jews.
That Jordan’s Palestinian Arab majority is not today in charge of Palestinian-Arab majority Jordan should be solved by democratizing the 78%, e.g., by making it a “constitutional monarchy,” not by again dividing the remaining 22% again between Arabs and Jews.
This “Jordan option” allocates more than three-quarters of the Mandate to Palestinian Arabs and less than one-quarter to Jews. But Israel would have secure natural boundaries in the land of Israel’s historic place, and Palestinian Arabs would have a far larger state than a landlocked rump of a piece of the smaller piece of the Mandate with borders defined by the ceasefire lines of a 1948-49 war supplanted by those of a nineteen years later war. Within the Jordan-sized piece of the Palestine Mandate, Palestinian Arabs could absorb the descendants of the Arab-Jewish conflict’s Arab refugees, just as Israel has absorbed the conflict’s Jewish refugees.
Obstacles Abound for Both Solutions, Not Just the Jordan One
“It Will Never Happen” doesn’t apply just to “the Jordan Option,” but to “The Two-State Solution” as well. America and Israel define “Two-States” as two states for two peoples, but Palestinian Arabs have expressly rejected this and demand a “right of return” for millions of descendants of 1948 Arabs to a truncated Israel.
Jordan’s minority Hashemite kings were enthroned by colonial Britain, and the Arab Spring may yet come to Jordan. It would be hastened by Jordan being next-door to another Palestinian Arab majority state. Jordan might devolve into a failed terrorist state (cf. Gaza), but so might a western Palestine Arab state, inside instead of alongside Israel.
Summing Up: Making the Jordan Option Case to the West
Among the multitude of terms we ourselves misuse to our detriment is calling the Jordan option “Jordan is Palestine.” This disclaims Jewish equity in “Palestine,” coined by Romans long ago to disassociate what had been Jewish from Jews. Jordan is Arab Palestine.
Jordan as Arab Palestine is vastly better for Israeli security and for Jewish homeland sovereignty significance and realization than the creation inside the historic land of Israel of a sovereign Palestinian Arab state, “demilitarized” or not. And Jordan as Arab Palestine allocates to Palestinian Arabs 78% of the Palestine Mandate, which should strike Western publics as equitable.
Both Jordan As Arab Palestine and The Two-State Solution have real acceptance problems among both Arabs and Israeli Jews, and no solution seems implementable until acceptance of the Jewish state as indigenous to the Mideast if ever becomes real.
But the search for the holy grail of a solution to the Arab-Jewish Palestine conflict, magnified in the West to “the Middle East conflict,” is and will remain a Western obsession, and we have to contribute to the debate. We do ourselves an immense disservice by failing to bring to that “peace process” discussion equitable alternatives to major American Jewish institutions’ call for a two-state solution that would “hew precisely to the 1967 borders” except for mutually agreed adjustments. Jordan As Arab Palestine is one such alternative. Let’s us get out there and make it more fully part of Western public perception.