In its annual survey of American Jewry published last October, the American Jewish Committee found that 75 percent of American Jews agree with the statement, “The goal of the Arabs is not a peaceful two-state agreement with Israel, but rather the destruction of Israel.”
And yet, American Jews supported the establishment of a Palestinian state 50% to 47%.
Next week over 10,000 predominantly Jewish American supporters of Israel will gather in Washington at AIPAC’s annual policy conference. Given their high commitment to Israel, probably most of those gathered belong to the 47% of American Jews who opposed Palestinian statehood.
Yet at the conference they will embrace the two-state formula. And on March 4 they will go up to Capitol Hill and tell their representatives that they support it.
They will do so not because they are addled. They will do so because for the past 20 years all they have heard is that Israel has no alternative to the two-state plan.
Israel’s fervent and committed supporters at AIPAC have been told that Israel needs a Palestinian state more than the PLO does. Only by bringing such a state into existence in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem can Israel get the Palestinian demographic albatross off its neck.
These committed supporters of the Jewish state have been sternly lectured that Israel is doomed if it doesn’t give the Palestinians an outlet for their political impulses outside of Israel, because within a year or two there will be more Palestinians than Israelis west of the Jordan.
The same day AIPAC’s delegates meet with members of both houses of Congress, my new book, The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East will be released by Crown Forum, a division of Random House.
In my book, I show that the demographic time bomb is a dud, and a malicious one at that.
In 1997, the head of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics Hassan Abu Libdeh told The New York Times that he was carrying out a census which would serve as a “civil intifada,” that is, as a statistical terror assault.
And he was right. The goal of terrorism is to force a target population to take actions it otherwise would not have taken. The goal of statistical warfare is to manipulate numbers to coerce a target society into taking actions that it would otherwise not take.
The Palestinian census claimed that by 2015, Arabs would be the majority west of the Jordan River. And once Jews were the minority, the Arabs could destroy Israel just by demanding the vote.
The Clinton administration, the US Jewish leadership and the Israeli Left rushed to embrace the findings, even though they were totally inconsistent with annual Palestinian population surveys the Israeli military government conducted from 1967 through 1996.
All crowed that true, the PLO still supports terrorism, but if Israel didn’t cough up the territories, it would be demographically overwhelmed.
It took seven years until an independent group of Israeli and American researchers studied the PLO data and exposed the fraud at their foundation. The American- Israeli Demographic Research Group showed that the Palestinian data inflated the Arab population by a whopping 50 percent.
The news for Israel has only gotten better in the intervening years. The Jewish fertility rate has increased as the Palestinian rates have collapsed along with those of the Muslim world as a whole. Israeli Jews now have higher fertility rates than the Arabs of Judea and Samaria, (3.04 vs. 2.91 children per woman). Israel’s immigration rate is high and rising. Palestinian emigration rates have skyrocketed over the past decade.
The demographic good news has percolated throughout Israeli society. And with the news, more and more Israeli politicians have come to favor applying Israeli law to all or parts of Judea and Samaria, just as Israel successfully applied its laws to united Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in the past.
Most Likud members of Knesset and all members of the Bayit Yehudi party support partial or full implementation of Israeli law in the areas. 59% of Israeli Jews support such action as well and support doing so unilaterally.
Indeed, even leftist Israelis support Israel’s unilateral application of its laws to parts of Judea and Samaria. For instance, former ambassador to the US Michael Oren supports the unilateral withdrawal from parts of Judea and Samaria. But Oren foresees the retention of the major Israeli settlement blocs under Israeli law. In the absence of a peace deal, such a step can only be taken through the unilateral application of Israeli law to those areas.
In the current Knesset session, members have submitted two bills calling for the application of Israeli law to the large Israeli population centers in Judea and Samaria and to the Jordan Valley, respectively.
But while all of this is going on in Israel, Israel’s supporters in the US remain in the dark about the existence of a better – facts based – alternative path for Israel.
In The Israeli Solution, I fill in the blanks that plague the American discourse on Israel and the Palestinians.
I provide a 360-degree analysis of a policy that I call The Israeli One-State Plan. That plan involves applying Israeli law – and through it Israeli sovereignty – throughout all of Judea and Samaria.
I divide the discussion into three parts. Part One provides the 90-year history of failure that has attended the two-state model, from the end of World War I through the present day. I also show how the US’s embrace of the two-state model has worked to blind US policymakers from both parties to the realities of the region and so guaranteed the failure of US Middle East policies.
Part Two presents the case for Israeli sovereignty from the perspectives of demography, international law, history and civil liberties.
Far from transforming the areas into a race-based state, as Israel’s opponents threaten, such a move by Israel will free the Palestinians from life under the PLO’s terror supporting kleptocracy and provide them with full civil and legal rights as permanent residents of Israel.
They will also have the right to apply for Israeli citizenship.
Even if all the Arabs of Judea and Samaria were to become Israeli citizens, Israel would retain a strong two-thirds Jewish majority. And it would avert the only real demographic threat. That is the threat posed by a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria which would permit millions of hostile, foreign-born Arabs from Lebanon, Jordan and Syria to immigrate to its territory.
In Part Three, I discuss the probable responses of the Palestinians, the larger Arab world and the EU to a decision by Israel to apply its laws to Judea and Samaria and abandon the two-state policy model.
I also discuss how such a move will impact Israel and the United States.
Most delegates at AIPAC do not realize that Israelis have moved on from the failed two-state formula. It is my hope that in the year between this AIPAC conference and next year’s conference, they will read my book, and understand that they needn’t support the establishment of a Palestinian terror state. There is a better option. It is better for Israel. It is better for the Palestinians. And it is better for America.
If they do read my book, I hope it will open a long-belated discussion about Israel’s true options. If they do, I can assure them that next year’s AIPAC conference will be more realistic, and more optimistic than next week’s conclave.
Annex it all as @ Salomon Benzimra:
A sound plan but time might not allow. I say take those very measures in conjunction with immediate annexation of all of J&S. It would be a mistake to think that world censure will be any less if only a part as opposed to all of it is annexed.
Glick is dead wrong to think that even a 30-40% Arab population would be tolerable. Just look at the havoc they cause in Europe with a much smaller percentage! I agree transfer is the correct approach but will not take place short of war and perhaps not even then. So let those that behave stay as alien residents and declare that Israel considers them Jordanian citizens which is exactly what they were till 1988 when Jordan illegally terminated their status. The annexation will greatly enhance Israel’s security and stature. This plus the resurgence of anti-Semitism world wide will accelerate Jewish immigration to Israel. Make Israel more “Jewish” and therefore less inviting to Arabs and offer them financial and other incentives to leave. This is the solution!
@ Bear Klein: I think your proposal makes practical sense. it is based in reality rather than ideologies or “principles”. no reason to give citizenship to hostile populations just because you want the land. devise a solution that meets first the desires and needs of Israel. as you say, be flexible regarding A & B and no need to commit to a future plan just because they and others want it. If they don’t like it they can leave.
I am for transfer but I do not see that happening except in a war, and even then Israel would probably not seize the day. I would definitely not build up their economy as then they will want to stay and make trouble. Better they leave to seek greener pastures.
I would like to see proposals emerge that are driven by Israeli interests and NOT driven by Pal desires and demands. Less focus and thinking about the Pals and more thinking about the Jews, in real time spent.
Why on earth are we so obsessed about “solutions”?
There is so much to do before we can formulate a coherent solution.
And that is:
a) Vigorously assert Israel’s Legal Rights to the Land, and
b) Thoroughly demolish the fake Palestinian narrative upon which all the previous failed “solutions” have been hatched.
Then, after we observe a significant shift in public opinion, we will be able to reasonably talk about “solutions.”
Walk before you run! Annex Area C (and certain parts of Area B needed for secure borders) and find a careful slow mechanism (10 to 15 years) to vet the Arabs there before citizenship is bestowed on to loyal, Hebrew speakers, with no controversial backgrounds (including family members).
Do not relinquish Area A (do not give up the option to annex it in the future) and keep it as a security zone. Figure what to do overtime.
Try Arab self government and test if it can work.
Allowing the immediate incorporation of 2 million Arabs into Israel as residents or citizens who could move anywhere geographically into Israel is idiotic.
SUICIDAL idiots.
Quite true Yamit. I do however, have some questions as to Glick’s premise that stability would be found in her solution because Jewish Israelis would maintain a majority given that the Israeli birthrate now exceeds the Arab/Palestinian birth rate.
1. What has caused the decline in the Palestinian/Arab birthrate? Could it be the depressed economic situation in Mid East nations and Palestinian society, that wealth and opportunity for therefore are reserved only for the rich and the massive poor population see having larger families will be harder to sustain, infant/youth mortality rates in Palestinian/Arab society have declined, lessening the need for larger families to ensure some children survive, political instability and other associated factors?
2. Assuming Palestinians would ever to agree to becoming residents/citizens of an Israel expanded by sovereign annexation which in current circumstances, is impossible to see, with improved economic conditions and greater opportunity for advancement, would Palestinian birthrates increase?
Glick’s premise seems to rely largely on the assumption that Israeli birthrates will exceed Palestinian in perpetuity. That cannot be an accepted given.
3. In such new one Israeli state, will fundamentalist Islamists still continue to preach and teach their flock to hate/reject Jews and Israel and keep the dream alive that one day Palestinians will destroy Israel, eliminate Jews from the land or subjugate them and that all the land of Israel will be returned to Islam. That imperative dream is Hamas’ raison d’etre which is clearly stated in its charter, evidenced in its leaders words and deeds and what the approximate 1 million Palestinians under their control are indoctrinated with daily.
The 2SS now pushed by Obama/Kerry completely ignores Hamas’ existence and what that existence means now and portends for the future.
Glick’s solution, as distant as it is from being feasible today, requires Israel to incorporate a potential army of quislings who will set themselves the agenda of eventually destroying Israel.
While the 2 state solution appears to be more a dream, if not a nightmare than a feasible solution, at least for Israel as leading nations increasingly pressure Israel alone to make concessions it can ill afford to make, Glick’s solution raises similar questions as to whether it can ever bring a true, enduring and secure peace for both Israelis and Palestinians.
If not a 2SS or a 1SS, then what?
The Israel Solution
Self serving article selling her book.