By Ted Belman
Five years ago I wrote a major article, Israel from the Mediterranean to the Jordan. I proposed annexing Judea and Samaria and giving citizenship over time and subject to certain prerequisites, to the Arabs.
It was based on a new demographic study by the AIDRG which concluded that if Israel were to annex these territories the Jews would outnumber the Arabs by a ratio of 2:1 for the forseeable future. Israel Demography contains a number of articles which fully explain this conclusion.
Mike Wise who was part of this group went on to also propose annexation and the Democratic Jewish One-State Solution.
Over the years I have written a number of articles on the subject. And now I am happy to say that we are getting traction.
None other than Haaretz just published a major article entitled Endgame
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Once the sole preserve of the political margins, the approach is now being advocated by leading figures in Likud and among the settlers – people who are not necessarily considered extremists or oddballs.
Mike and I are some of those oddballs.
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They (the leading figures) talk about a process that will take between a decade and a generation to complete, at the end of which the Palestinians will enjoy full personal rights, but in a country whose symbols and spirit will remain Jewish. It is at this point that the one-state right wing diverges from the binational left. The right is not talking about a neutral “state of all its citizens” with no identity, nor about “Israstine” with a flag showing a crescent and a Shield of David. As envisaged by the right wing, one state still means a sovereign Jewish state, but in a more complex reality, and inspired by the vision of a democratic Jewish state without an occupation and without apartheid, without fences and separations. In such a state, Jews will be able to live in Hebron and pray at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, and a Palestinian from Ramallah will be able to serve as an ambassador and live in Tel Aviv or simply enjoy ice cream on the city’s seashore.
This is exactly what Mike and I have been proposing.
Thus we don’t have to divide Jerusalem, fight over our borders, transfer Jewish settlers, allow for the “right of return” or share the airspace. We would control everything as the only sovereign.
Of course the chore wil be to avoid civil unrest. I think we are up to that challenge.
My concept is this: Annex J & S. Give the Arab residents a choice of staying or going to a country of their choice; however, a pledge of loyalty must be made by the Arabs and a term of five years before they can become citizens of Israel. Arabs would have to recognize only one flag, that of Israel, all schools to be integrated with one basic curriculum.
Don’t know where you got this?
Maybe the best solution is to do nothing!
Whatever a government does, it likely does wrong. Bismarck weaved the most excellent policies, but they laid the foundation for two world wars. The League of Nations was a great idea, but it legalized the inaction which allowed Germany to re-arm. Partitioning states to satisfy both political camps seemed a viable strategy, but partitioned Vietnam fought a bloody war, and other cases proved equally unsustainable. Bleeding the communists in Afghanistan was a nice thing to do, but the aid to the mujahedeen created the Islamic terrorist threat. It is not an over-generalization to say that all policies are wrong. There are no examples of fruitful policies under heaven.
Method is a historically standard modus operandi: countries attack when threatened, punish offenders when they can, and secure their own habitat. Almost everyone agree on methods: both Jews and Arabs believe that offenders must be punished; punishment is a method. Methods have only immediate goals.
Methods rely on very short actions and are unlikely to create Bradbury’s Butterfly Effect of unforeseeable remote consequences. Most often, methods reinstate or secure status quo ante. Less frequently, methods prevent unforeseeable developments: European settlers massacred Red Indians so that no significant minority would be left to claim their ancestral lands.
How absurd it is to imagine a lion that enters a camp of gazelles to teach them manners, self-defense, or agriculture. No, lions are satisfied with the immediate goal of satiation—if at the gazelle’s expense. The peace process is similar. Israel has tried rejecting the Palestinians’ demands, acceding to them, and every option in between. Nothing has worked—because policies never work. The Middle East’s ecosystem is a textbook example of a complex adaptive system. Any policy would be wrong here. Who could honestly have predicted that Arafat would refuse the statehood Barak gave him on silver plate? Who knew Nasser’s mind in 1967, when he wanted to attack Israel? We don’t know whether Iran develops nuclear weapons or merely defends its right to conduct nuclear enrichment. There are myriad inherently unknown variables in the peace process equation. If Israeli Arabs are loyal, that calls for one solution; if they are not, the solution must be entirely different. If Palestinian Arabs want to live in peace with Israel, that’s one situation; if Gaza’s refugees would never accept a Jewish state, that’s a totally different situation. Would Egypt pursue a hostile peace with Israel, or would its Muslim radicals come to power and opt for war?
Mid-term economic planning proved a communist failure, but democratic states plan something incredibly more complex than economy—human societies. The peace process will invariably fail. The only solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict is to stop seeking a solution. Jews settled in the Middle East’s equivalent of inner-city slums. Former residents can be sent to jails (or refugee camps) but they will keep coming back. If Jews lack the resolve for the biblically mandated solution, the only alternative is enduring a smoldering conflict for centuries. That’s completely acceptable. That said, I can think of a hundred ways to force the Arabs to leave on their own but there must be a consistent will on all major political Zionist factions to act with that goal as an immutable tenet. In none of the ways I can conceive, is giving up even an inch of land included. Agreeing that this is highly unlikely to happen, I fall back to doing nothing.
A pipe dream. If one think the calls of “apartheid” are shrill now, just wait until the annexation of J&S and the 10-25 year interim period during which the Arabs must wait for full citizenship and rights. Terror will return with a vengeance; the international community will pressure Israel to disgorge the land through officially-sanctioned boycotts, divestment, and UN sanctions. And at the end of that period if Israel is able to hang on? A bi-national state with a permanent, hostile, irredentist 40 percent Arab-Muslim minority seeking power through the ballot box or “armed struggle”.
Expelling the Arabs should have been done 40 years ago along with the destruction of al-Aqsa but Moshe Dayan screwed up and now we live in a world where the Saudis, the BBC and HRW dictate Western policy.
It’s true the left is racist and thinks they can make the “Arab problem” go away by truncating Israel to ghetto proportions but the religious right would be happy to live as dhimmis in an Arab-dominated state so long as they can pray at the Kotel.
The solution is to carve the Philistines a demilitarized state out of Gaza and the Negev — get them out of Jerusalem and most of J&S and then annex. The Pals get their Judenrein state where they can live off Western aid and kill each other and Israel gets the Biblical Kingdoms with an 80-100 percent Jewish majority and defensible territory.
I have a different proposal for a one state solution. I say annex the territories and expel the arabs. This should have been done 40 years ago.
We must annex Judea and Samaria. What will the Palestinians say? Who cares? Israel offers those impoverished terrorist-supporters economic opportunities to work and steal. Some will fight, but they are fighting us anyway, and will continue to fight even if they obtain a Palestinian state. Annexation would ease Israel’s anti-terrorist operations, reducing them from military to police work. Many Arab Governments don’t want a Palestinian state, which they understand would become a safe haven for their own terrorists.
Israel must be careful not to annex Gaza, with its socially degraded Arabs. A Hamas state there should be encouraged, and the West Bank radicals expelled there. Sort of like a zoo.
Would the world accept annexation? It keeps quiet about the annexed Golan Heights. Annexing an aggressor’s land is de facto legal: consider the Kuril Islands, the Karelia, Polish, and Czech border rectifications, and the American annexation of a third of Mexico in response to guerrilla incursions. Annexation is a proper means of punishing an aggressor, and Palestinians have been conducting terrorist attacks on the Jewish state for decades.
Arab population of Judea and Samaria is 1.5 to 2 million heads. Even compounded with 1.5 million Arabs in Israel, that still leaves Jews a majority.
It would be so easy to get rid of the Arabs by perfectly legal means, without the questionable use of force. The Palestinians enjoy rioting. Pelting Israeli police with stones and Molotov cocktails has become their version of Disney vacations. That’s an opportunity. Legislate a fixed punishment for participating in riots, twenty-five years in jail, flat. But make it commutable to banishment. After every riot, round up a few thousand Arabs and sentence them to a quarter century in jail, but offer them the alternative of abandoning their Israeli citizenship and leaving the country immediately; most will go.
To prompt them to riot still more massively, abandon judicial pre-approval for house demolitions. The Arabs have built hundreds of thousands of housing units illegally. For our purposes of dressing their eviction in legal terms, it doesn’t matter that the Israeli government consistently refused re-zoning approval to Arab villages, which forced them to build illegally. Or that we provoked them still more by turning a blind eye to the illegal Arab (but not Jewish) construction. Today, to demolish an illegal building, the government has to file a court petition and wait for years for the decision; in many cases, courts evade responsibility and use any pretext for not issuing eviction orders. The procedure should become administrative rather than judicial. As long as a citizen cannot produce a title for his house, he is not an owner, and the house should be considered an abandoned property by default. The government should have the legal right to demolish any non-titled housing, and should do so on sight. When Israeli bulldozers leave hundreds of thousands of Arabs homeless, they will either get the message and leave our country, or they will riot, be sentenced, and leave it anyway, as a way of avoiding a twenty-five-year-long prison term.
Israel can have both: the West Bank and a country with a minimal number of Arabs.