The Real Two-State Solution
Equitable Division of Palestine Between Arabs and Jews
Western publics’ gut sense of fairness and justice envisions as Arab-Jewish conflict resolution a Palestine equitably divided between the long-warring Arabs and Jews. American Jews and our central pillar institutions, including AIPAC and the Reform and Conservative movements, rabbis and all, share this sharing-Palestine sense and publicly advocate, as a “two-state solution,” creating a new inside-the-land-of-Israel Arab state.
I share a shared-Palestine solution sense too, but by me American Jewish advocacy of creating a new Arab state inside the land of Israel is nuts. Not only would it be security-wise suicidal for Israel and sacrifice, indeed undo, fulfillment of the dream of generations for the Jewish homeland’s meaningful sovereign redemption, but Palestine has already been equitably divided between Arabs and Jews.
The key, of course, lies in defining what constitutes “Palestine.”
The Mandates for future states which the League of Nations created in dismembering the old Ottoman Empire after World War I allocated the vast majority of Middle East lands to what have become Arab states. The Palestine Mandate, with its recognition of historic Jewish connection to Palestine and call for reconstituting therein the Jewish National Home with close settlement of Jews on the land, embraced what are today the states of Jordan and Israel. That Palestine Mandate included a clause authorizing the Mandatory, Britain, to suspend or withhold most of the Palestine Mandate’s provisions to the 78% of its territory east of the River Jordan. This Britain did, giving rise to all-Arab Transjordan, today’s Jordan.
The Arab and, alas, American Jewish position today is that that first division of Palestine doesn’t count, that what’s Arabs’ is Arabs’, what’s Jews is divisible.
Yes, the Arabs in charge of what’s Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan today are British-enthroned Hashemite Arab kings, not Palestinian Arabs. But is the equitable fix for that to be found, not in that 78% of the Palestine Mandate which the first division allocated to Arabs, but in re-dividing between Arabs and Jews Palestine’s first division’s 22% left for the Jews? Would that not be a “three-state” Palestine Mandate division, two (not even counting Gaza) for Arabs, and just one – 9-miles-wide in the lowland middle, sans historic Jerusalem (?) Israel – for Jews?
The Jewish Right to Western Palestine – The Land of Israel
But even our effectively making the case that Palestine, which included 78% Jordan as well as 22% Israel, has been equitably (3:1 favoring Arabs) divided between Arabs and Jews will not put to rest western publics’ nagging qualms whether Israel’s Jews really are the indigenous people of that land – western Palestine, by us for three millennia “the land of Israel.”
There are two aspects to this, ancient and modern. The first has Palestinian Arabs preposterously incessantly clamoring their descent from the Canaanites. Where were these latter-day Palestinian Arab Canaanites when the Jews, in defending our homeland, took on Assyrians, Babylonians, Seleucids and Romans? Ironically, the “indigenous origin” school of archeologists contends it was the Jews, not Arafat’s ancestors, who arose out of the pre-Israelite Canaanite population (discussed, if not unequivocally bought, in Verlin, Israel 3000 Years, chapter 1).
The Arabs’ modern times’ claim is that the Romans exiled the Jews and they were gone for close to two thousand years, and that they came back to an Arab land. A lot of western Christians, e.g., Jimmy Carter in the chronology in the front of his charmingly-titled Peace Not Apartheid book – believe this. The fact is We Never Left. Although reduced, mainly by foreign conqueror slaughter, to a minority in the land, our continuous tenacious homeland-claiming presence, as historian Parkes rightly put it, wrote today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.” Between Hadrian and Herzl, when supposedly there were no Jews in the land, no Arab or other native state came into being. The State of Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea, every ruler in between having been a foreign empire invader, and mostly non-Arab at that. We need to drive our continuous homeland-claiming presence home to western publics as strenuously as Palestinian Arabs clamor they’re “Canaanites.”
Instead, we go around calling Palestinian Arabs “THE Palestinians,” as though there’s no Jewish equity in “Palestine” and “Palestinian.” This too is nuts. The Romans renamed Judaea as “Palestine” to disassociate what had been Jewish from Jews, and during the Mandate it was Jews, far more than Arabs, who called themselves and their institutions “Palestinian.”
The Magnitude of Our Folly
What baffles me most is American Jews’ non-appreciation of both the monumental significance of the seminal Jewish history event that has taken place in our time and the catastrophe that would flow from driving Israel back to the ceasefire lines of 1949.
The Holocaust wasn’t an aberration. Every device of ethnic cleansing – Pale of Settlement, ghetto, Holocaust, Inquisition, pogrom – was invented over the centuries in civilized Christian Europe, heartland of Western civilization, for Jews. I think sometimes about terrified Jews, caught up in pogroms, about to be slaughtered, about asking them would they like to change places with me, and if so how would they feel about Israel.
It was only three years after the biggest Jewish catastrophe ever that homeland Jewish independence was reborn and Ben-Gurion called on that day, during my lifetime, on the Jews of the world to stand by Israelis in the struggle for fulfillment of the dream of generations for our homeland’s sovereign redemption.
That redemption, Jewish homeland independence, wasn’t completely fulfilled in the 1948-49 War of Independence, momentous achievement though that partial victory was, but it was completed with redemption of Judea-Samaria and above all historic Jerusalem in 1967.
And AIPAC, and the American Reform and Conservative Jewish movements, would throw this away, give up the heart of Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria, where PM Netanyahu said this very week “We are not foreigners in Hebron, we will stay here forever,” restore Arab armies to Latrun (did they not read of the battles of 1948) and the steep slopes lining the Jerusalem corridor (did they not read of the battles of 1967)? Talk about “nuts.”
But is this then the eventual portion of the Palestine Mandate – a portion of a quarter – to which its high-sounding recognition of the Jewish people’s historical Palestine connection, with reconstitution therein of its Jewish National Home with close settlement of Jews on the land, actually applies?
My friends, it’s up to us grassroots American Jews to try to talk sense into our inside-the-land-of-Israel new-Arab-state-championing leaders: Palestine has been equitably divided (3:1) between Arabs and Jews. If Palestinian Arabs aren’t in charge of the 78% allocated by that first division to Arabs, solve that in that 78% of the Arabs’, not by re-dividing between Arabs and Jews that first division’s 22% left for the Jews.