T. Belman, As I have written before, what does confederation mean and what will be confederated? It is my belief that the only lands to be “confederated” with Jordan are Areas A and Gaza and such lands won’t be a state but will simply territories over which Israel is sovereign and Jordan replaces the PA and Hamas as the administrator.
By Daniel Gordis
With President Biden’s visit to Israel and Saudi Arabia this week, the future of the Palestinians—an issue that to their frustration has mostly disappeared from the news—may return to the headlines once again.
Many people’s “mantra” is that the only possible resolution of the conflict lies in a “two-state solution.” But as popular as the “two-state solution” is in European capitals, in Washington DC and among many Diaspora Jews, the harsh reality is that the two-state solution may be dead.
Only a minority of Palestinians support a two-state solution, and contrary to what many believe, the same is true in Israel. A majority of Israelis no longer support the idea, either.
What, then, might be an alternative? There are several (including, in the minds of some, doing nothing, and letting the status quo continue), but one that has been around a long time is now getting a bit more traction than it has in recent years. The proposal involves not two states, but a confederation of Jewish and Arab entities.
How would a “confederation” work? How would it be different from the two-state solution? Why might its chances of success be greater? What are its weaknesses? To get a sense of all this, we spoke with Dahlia Scheindlin, a respected journalist and activist in Israel, who has of late been trying to help revive the idea.
Agree with it or not, it’s important to understand the idea since it may once again be in the news.
@peloni
As long as it is not conveniently made in preparation for the Nachala setting up new outposts in Judea and Samaria and to be applied selectively to Jews ONLY (which I think it was).
The punishment is not only for terrorism:
Among the crimes for which citizenship may be revoked are terror, espionage, and treason.
Gantz has already called the settlers and the Nachala supporters “terrorists”, I think.
Here is the latest “from the front” [emphasis mine]:
Supreme Court okays revoking terrorists’ citizenship
This Ruling is receiving very little coverage thus far, but it is in fact a very important ruling.
All by itself, this is an important deterrent to counter the terrorists who live within Israel, profiting from their privileged to exist inside a nation where they are provided all the civil and social benefits representative of the very liberal democracy which they are exercising murder and violence to protest against. The limitation of this Judicial fiat supporting the removal of citizenship, however, is that the subject whose citizenship is to be revoked must be allowed to remain in Israel since he lacks citizenship in another nation, ie he can not be deported.
However, should Mudar’s efforts prove successful, and the JO be seen to gain support of the relevant parties, the extension of Jordanian passports to the Arabs would remedy this restricting caveat and provide for the deportation of these terrorists to Jordan where their upkeep and penalty will be subject to Jordan’s control. In addition to the obvious deterrent provided by these butchers being deported to a nation which might still exercise the death penalty for capital crimes, it will also completely eliminate the motivation for Hamas and others in kidnapping Israeli soldiers to release the terrorists which will be living in a Jordanian cell if they are living at all.
@Michael S.
Thanks, Michael, for posting the views of Jabotinsky on this.
I thought about finding and posting the quotation but despaired of it making any impression.
Is that what Jabotinsky said?
“Any native people – its all the same whether they are civilized or savage – views their country as their national home, of which they will always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birth right to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are 500 years behind us, spiritually they do not have our endurance or our strength of will, but this exhausts all of the internal differences. We can talk as much as we want about our good intentions; but they understand as well as we what is not good for them. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. To think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the realization of Zionism in return for the cultural and economic benefits we can bestow on them is infantile. This childish fantasy of our “Arabo-philes” comes from some kind of contempt for the Arab people, of some kind of unfounded view of this race as a rabble ready to be bribed in order to sell out their homeland for a railroad network.
“This view is absolutely groundless. Individual Arabs may perhaps be bought off but this hardly means that all the Arabs in Eretz Israel are willing to sell a patriotism that not even Papuans will trade. Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement.”
— https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/mideast/ironwall/ironwall.htm
@Ted
Symbiotic cooperation with each party benefiting, leading to each party becoming interdependent upon the other, for trade, travel, security and peace. The Arabs will be happier, thriving while building a more secure nation for their children, while the Jews will be positioned to do the same. A very well incentivized, bilateral process which will, in turn, lead to it also being a very stable arrangement.