Howard Epstein – TWO STATE SOLUTION, RIP
Those too young to remember the stuck gramophone record may still experience the dissonance it cau… it cau… it cau… it caused, by listening to those still advocating the Two State Solution(“TSS”). This magic (err) bullet continues to be hyped as the way for Palestinians and Israelis to live side-by-side in perfect harmony.
These days no one promotes TSS more enthusiastically than Jovial Joe, US President Biden. Yet TSS, if it ever came, would be merely DOA.
This moribund idea – originally “Partition” – has been dead ever since first proposed, as “Partition”, in 1937 by the British Royal (Peel) Commission to Palestine. Chaim Weizmann saw it as the solution to constant conflict in British-administered Palestine, between the incorrigibly constructive Jewish Yishuv and the adamantly nihilistic Arabs. True to that description, the Arabs rejected it out of hand.
Ten years later, Partition was on offer again at the United Nations (of all places) with a vote to be taken on the creation of contiguous states for Jews and Arabs. No need to tell you who accepted and who rejected it.
For Weizmann and the other Zionists, it was obvious that a small percentage of something was better than 100% of nothing. For the Arabs, the Naqba (catastrophe) followed, with the birth of the Israeli State in May 1948. The Palestinian Arabs shifted up several gears in their attacks against Jewish settlements and convoys, somewhat bolstered by five Arab armies invading from all points of the compass.
After Israel’s War of Independence, the Egyptians had been pushed south from what later became Ashdod to Gaza and the Sinai peninsula; and the Jordanians were left in control of Judaea and Samaria (the West Bank). For two decades, no one spoke of Palestinian aspirations for a state of their own. Only after the Six Day War of June 1967, which left Israel in control of Judaea and Samaria, the Golan Heights and the Sinai – again, including Gaza – did Yassir Arafat and his terrorists vociferously and violently demand a Palestinian state.
Now let us fast forward through the War of Attrition to the Yom Kippur War of 1973. With sufficient initial gains for Egyptian president Sadat to claim the restoration of Arab pride (despite Israeli forces ending the war only 101 kilometres from Cairo, and half of that distance from Damascus), for Sadat to go to Jerusalem, and speak at the Knesset, Egyptian-Israeli peace talks followed. And they continued, long after the main issues were agreed upon, over whether Tabah, a beach and a Hilton hotel just southwest of Eilat, should be returned to Egypt (it was) but with no debate over Gaza. How so? Egypt made it crystal clear that, although Taba was to them like Cornwall is to England, they would not touch Gaza with our barge pole, let alone theirs.
And that’s how Gaza became Israel’s problem: Palestinians in Gaza and other Palestinians in Judaea and Samaria (the West Bank). Two Palestinian entities separated by democratic Israel.
Not to be outdone in the democratic stakes, the first legislative and presidential elections for Palestinians were held in 1996 and again in 2005. On the latter occasion, Mahmoud Abbas was elected president of the Palestinian Authority (“PA”) for four years (a position he still holds nearly 20 years on). At the same time, in Gaza, there were elections that were won by Hamas. They proceeded to assassinate the 200 or so local representatives of the PA and imposed their cruel totalitarian regime on Gaza. In 2007, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon forcibly withdrew Israelis from their homes in, and the IDF from, Gaza; and Hamas set out to implement their covenant, which is to kill all Jews everywhere.
What sort of solution was that you wanted, Jovial Joe? Two states, you say? There are and have been for many years three entities in the Holy Land. Now, how Gaza is to be administered when finally, perhaps many weeks or months from now, the IDF has completed its mission of destroying the ability of Hamas ever again to cause suffering and damage to Israelis and Israel, nobody knows. If it were to be the Palestinian Authority that took control of Gaza, might one then speak of a Two State Solution? How acceptable would that be to anyone other than Jovial Joe and the EU? More importantly, how acceptable would it be to Israel?
Mahmoud Abbas – nom de guerre, Abu Mazen (don’t bother Googling for his nom de paix), wrote a thesis for his PhD in Soviet Russia, seeking to disprove the Holocaust. Oh, and that From the River to the Sea chant you hear? That means that Palestinians want Israel, and its nearly nine million Jews, gone. Not to live alongside them in peace. Gone. Out of there. That old maximalist demand of 1937 and 1947 is alive and well and living in Ramallah.
Finally, even were the PA to announce (as if they would dare, having never prepared the “Arab Street” for it) that Israel can live as the state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea in peace, are they acceptable to us as our neighbours, given they held a kangaroo court last week and then publicly executed three fall guys for collaboration with Israel? Not in medieval times but last week. Can a democracy such as that of Israel live next to neighbours like that?
By way of an answer, consider this: without the IDF supporting the PA’s security forces, Hamas would have defenestrated Abu Mazen and his whole PA coterie long ago. Let us be crystal clear. Hamas needs to be eradicated as a force not only in Gaza but in Judea and Samaria too.
Two-State Solution, RIP.
© Howard Epstein – November 2023 – www.howard -epstein.com
