“And I will set your border from the Red Sea even unto the sea of the Palestinians, and from the [Sinai] wilderness unto the River; for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand; and you shall drive them out before you. You shall make no covenant with them, nor with their leaders. They shall not dwell in your land…” Exodus 23

Two states for two people is a nice slogan, but a flawed concept.

There are no two peoples: Palestinian Arabs are linguistically and culturally identical to their Syrian and Jordanian brethren. At most, Palestinian Arabs are a group whose history distinct from their neighbors goes back just six decades. On other hand, Jews are the oldest nation on earth, with a unique culture, language, history, and religion. To put Jews on the same level of legitimacy as Palestinian Arabs is an act of denigration.

There is nothing like two states. Arabs have twenty-two states, many of them called “Arab,” all banning land sales to non-Arabs, all officially Muslim, all hostile to Jews. “Arab” is not a generalization: they speak of themselves as a single community, thus Arab League, United Arab Emirates, and an abortive attempt at United Arab Republic. The difference between Saudi and Syrian Arabs is much smaller than that between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, let alone the Russian subset. If Saudis and Syrians are separate nations deserving separate states, then Jews need quite a few states: for Sephardi, Western Ashkenazis, East European Ashkenazis, semi-Slavs, Ethiopi
ans, and atheists.

While one state for a people is recognized as Arab only and officially free of Jews, the Jewish state must be ethnic-blind. Moreover, it must accept a decisive Arab minority which constitutes now 34 percent among its young. No other state is expected to accommodate so huge a minority, especially when it is openly hostile and claims the country as its own. Even Lieberman’s innocent plan to redraw the borders to leave most Israeli Arabs in a Palestinian state drew immense opposition. Why? In 1947, the UN specifically drew borders to create ethnically homogeneous enclaves. If the Palestinian “people” want a state of their own so much, it follows logically that the part of that “people” which lives in Israel should also prefer to live in a Palestinian state. If Israeli “Palestinians” don’t want to become a part of Palestine while remaining in their villages, but just by border adjustments, then perhaps that “people” does not want a state.

The two-state solution is tilted against Jews. The illegal Arab construction both in Israel and Palestine—hundreds of thousands of housing units—must be legalized while Jewish settlements must be dismantled. Palestinian refugees may return after leaving in exile for sixty years while Jews must leave after living on this land for forty years; four generations lived in the settlements. Most Palestinian refugees had lived in Jerusalem, Haifa, and Jaffo for less than a generation, but their fourth-generation descendants must be allowed to return. The Jews—including 110,000 children—who lived in Judea and Samaria for four generations must be uprooted.

Of the two states, the Jewish one is expected to surrender its sovereignty. Its Jews must become ethnic-blind while its Arabs are allowed to remain ethnic-conscious. The Jewish state cannot wall itself off from its neighbors to prevent the flow of immigrant workers and terrorists. The Palestinian state is allowed to cut the Jewish one in half with the West Bank-Gaza road and receives the Ashkelon offshore gas field to become viable while Jews import their gas.

There is a problem of iterations: Israel first divided the Dead Sea in half with Jordan, and Jordan engaged in predatory pumping. Now the Jews are supposed to give three fifths of the Israeli part to the Palestinians. So the Jews are left with 20 percent. Why not have the Palestinians take their part from Jordan?

The two-state solution once appeared in a very different context, which is long lost. In 1947, the UN saw the two states as a solution for the problem of Jewish DPs: hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors were staying in German camps for displaced persons, having nowhere to go. The Palestinian Arabs refused a bi-national federation, leaving the Europeans with only one way to dispose of their hated Jews: by creating two states in Palestine. Arab countries rejected the two-state option: the three Palestinian enclaves were claimed by Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, respectively. Two decades ago, Israeli leftists resurrected the two-state notion, but it meant something very different then: the Arabs would have received their areas of settlement in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza while Jews retained their settlement blocs and Jerusalem. A critical point was the assumption that in return for being given a state, the Arabs could enforce security, which was indeed possible under Arafat’s authoritarian rule. Since the democratic reforms in the PA, which were pushed through by the Americans, no Palestinian leader can enforce peace on all the terrorist groups. Thus, the two-state solution retained its name but changed its substance: as it is currently advocated, the two-state division leaves Israel an indefensible eight-mile-wide patch of land and offers no security from Palestinian terrorists. In fact, a Palestinian state would assuredly become an Iranian-controlled terrorist nest. Western powers close their eyes to this obvious security debacle when pushing Israel to make peace with the Arabs.

The two-state solution was meant originally “to end all wars,” as reiterated in the Saudi peace initiative. Iran, however, won’t sign a peace treaty with Israel regardless of the peace with the Palestinian Arabs. Since offering them a state does not pacify Israel’s most implacable enemy, the two-state solution is objectively worthless.

Nor is it promulgated for the sake of justice. If justice were of any concern to the West, we would have heard condemnations of the Jordanian monarchy, which stripped local Palestinians of their basic democratic rights; Lebanon and Syria, which ban Palestinian refugees from dozens of mundane professions lest they compete with the locals; Kuwait for expelling its huge Palestinian community; and Egypt for shelling Gazans with artillery when it ruled the area.

The West Bank Arabs oppose the two-state solution because it would inundate them with refugees returning from Lebanon and Syria. Brotherly feelings aside, the West Bankers would hate to see that criminalized, degraded mass return home. When Sharon tried to resettle some Gazans in the West Bank, local Arabs drove them out. As time passes and the population of the refugee camps balloons on UNRWA’s free lunches (and dinners, too), any solution becomes increasingly impossible: the wave of returnees would destroy the already thin fabric of the West Bank’s societal relations. If Hamas were not enough, criminal and hateful returnees would also launch a wave of terrorism against Jews.
Enough Arabs are dissatisfied with the two-state solution to ensure the continuation of terrorist attacks. Already, the Galilee Freedom Battalions of Israeli Arabs demand the “liberation” of Haifa, and Hezbollah demands independence for former Shiite villages in the Galilee. Bedouins, mistakenly urbanized by Israeli authorities, have ceased to be our friends and became common Arabs: the Negev is increasingly just as off-limits to Jewsas the Galilee. Ben Gurion’s nightmare, the Little Triangle around Lod in the center of Israel, has become a refuge of illegal Arab immigrants, and police have long ceased operating there because it is too dangerous. Only a Jew with an urgent death-wish would enter an Israeli Arab town such as Umm al Fahm.

We can put up with an illogical, unjust, painful solution, but it has to be a solution. The two-state option solves nothing—unless the goal is to get rid of the Jewish state.