Dream The Impossible Dream
Today Professor Cole suggested:
And, wouldn’t it be easier for the Israelis to give back the land they stole in 1967 to Lebanon and Syria and make peace, and let the Palestinians have their little state, and pay reparations for 1948, so then they wouldn’t have to try to police all their neighbors all the time? They are getting worse at the policing over time, anyway.
Obviously, this can’t work because it addresses all of the concerns of all of the parties involved, and undercuts all of the justification for the continuing war.
If Israel did this, Hezbollah would have no justification for its militia; the Ba’athists would lose their main justification for continuing to rule Syria; Hamas would have no justification for their militia; al Qaeda would lose one of its foundation issues. If Israel did this, the War On Terror™ would fade into history; so it will never be allowed to happen.
7 comments
Well, there’s also the problem that the Arabs wouldn’t be satisfied with this. They view Israel as a European imposition upon an Arab land no different from the 11th century Crusaders who raped and plundered their way through the area so long ago. Right now, Israel is a majority-Arab country where a mostly-European Jewish minority grants itself Israeli citizenship and has disenfranchised the Arab majority (via act of the Israeli parliament in the 1950’s) or relegated them to South Africa style “Bantu-stans”. Even though Jordan and Egypt have given up all rights to the Gaza Strip and West Bank in their respective peace treaties with Israel, Israel refuses to give its new Arab majority citizenship.
Setting up “Bantu-stans” did not satisfy the black majority in South Africa, and it will not satisfy the Arab majority in Israel either. They might accept it as a temporary measure, but the only satisfactory solution in the long term, as far as they are concerned, is a Lebanese-style multi-cultural society where the Jewish minority is in much the same situation as the Maronite Christian minority in Lebanon. It’s just sad that it’s going to take complete and utter military defeat as the U.S. loses its ability to support Israel militarily and economically before that can happen, because the Israeli Jews, unlike the South African whites, refuse to see the reality that maintaining an apartheid society in Palestine where the majority-Arab population is relgated to “Bantu-stans” is not a long-term sustainable project. In South Africa they handled the transition without bloodshed. In Israel, my suspicion is that there will be much blood running in the streets before this is all through — blood that could have been prevented if there was anybody sane left in Israel to look at the writing on the wall that says that the United States is on its way to has-been status and thus Israel will shortly lose the only thing currently keeping it afloat.
-BT
Would that mean that then Bush’s presidency would never had happened?… Please!!!!!!
Badtux, the biggest problem with this mess are people on both sides whose power is dependent on this continuing. Arafat has died, and Sharon may as well have, but instead of seeing the opportunity for peace, others have jumped in to fill their place.
Israel is doomed because of demographics. The European Jews who have settled in Israel are not having the number of children that the Israeli Arabs are having. Israel will be a minority Jewish state in 20 years if nothing changes. They can adapt, or they can commit suicide by continuing with this stupidity. The influx from East Europe has moved the date out slightly, but this is inevitable without even considering the Palestinians.
Trying to cut up the West Bank to steal the water is becoming obvious to everyone. The attack on Lebanon and military incompetence has eroded Israeli support among American Jews. There were too many unbiased witnesses in Lebanon taking pictures and sharing them; there are too many Lebanese Christians in the United States to combat propaganda. What happened can’t be hidden like actions in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, there were too many foreigners killed by Israeli bombs.
After this it is going to be hard to get $3 billion a year from a US budget that is leaking red ink all over everything. Israel is too close to the neocons and Bush, and it is going to hurt them.
CDDS, Bush is the nightmare we would all like to forget.
Oh, Badtux, your point on the general attitude about the people living in the area regarding Israel being imposed on them is noted, and I don’t disagree, but at this point I think everyone would just like some peace and quiet to get on with their lives without getting blown up every few years.
Support for militants is really based on Israeli actions. If there were some period of stability, the moderate voices might have a chance to be heard. It is difficult to be reasonable when you are being shot at or bombed.
Regarding the demographic issue, Israel is already majority-Arab, they simply refuse to grant citizenship to the Arab majority. Indeed, it is even discussed in Haaretz and elsewhere that the (relatively) small number of Israeli Arabs who do have Israeli citizenship (due to being descended from the 200,000 Arabs who did not flee the ethnic cleansing in 1948) should be stripped of said citizenship in order to prevent Arabs from ever being a majority within Israel. So what you have is a state where a minority of the residents are citizens, the majority of the residents are denied citizenship, and the majority is never going to be happy with that situation.
As for the wanting peace stuff, yeah, I think if someone offered every Arab in Israel the $300,000 necessary to migrate to a South American country and buy citizenship there, they’d do it, and Israel would be rid of its nasty “Arab problem” forever. Of course, that isn’t going to happen. Any more than Israel is going to allow the South African style “Bantu-stans” that they’ve carved out in the Gaza Strip and West Bank for their Arab majority to ever be truly independent. As long as they are a minority forcing their will at gunpoint upon a majority, there is never going to be peace in the Middle East.
-BT
You have to wonder how long can they can delude themselves and how many will die for this delusion.