RE: Why are liberals anti-semetic?
Interesting how closely his complaint about the branding of anyone who says anything bad about Israel as "anti-Semitic" compares to his own frequent branding of any criticism of blacks as "racist."
His whole argument seems to rest on the idea that the land was somehow the Palestinians' for thousands of years and therefore the Jews are engaged in some sort of unjust land grab. The problem with that is that it's simply not true. This land was nobody's in 1920. It was basically abandoned, with maybe 300,000 Muslims, Jews, and Christians living in an area that now houses 9 million. The caravan trade had died out with the advent of sea routes to India, the water table had been depleted by thousands of years of irrigation, and it was pretty much a lawless area in no man's land between Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, who often fought over control. When the Brits got the mandate after WWI, they saw the need to repopulate so they opened it up to immigration. First in were Palestinians who had been outcasts in the Arab world (much like Jews in Europe). This had never been their ancestral home (Sinai was) but from about 1924 on they started to populate, first the cities and later the hills on the West Bank area. So any claim that this is their "ancestral home" has a whopping 70 years of history behind it. They beat the modern Jews by about 20 years, but Jews have more of an ancestral claim. Jews started coming back slowly at first (they apparently lived better in Europe than the Palestinians did in the Arab world, and thus were less interested in returning, until Hitler and the Holocaust, of course). The problem really lies with the decision by the Brits to settle both Jewish and Palestinian outcasts in the same area. I'm generally very much an Anglophile, but this is one that they screwed up. One thing that gets too little attention is that the Palestinians are not welcome in any Arab country. Some will underwrite Palestinian efforts to terrorize Israel, but none of them want to help ease the problem by taking in Palestinians.
The problem is simple but unstated. The current footprint of Israel cannot sustain both the Jews and the Palestinians. There are too many of them and too little land and water. It is about 3/4 the size of Massachusetts, with a larger population, and much of the land is uninhabitable desert. That means that there is no truly viable two-state solution within the footprint of Israel. The pre-1967 borders leave Israel an indefensible 12 miles wide, and the resulting Palestinian state would be split into and would have close to zero economic viability.
If you want, as Hill seems to suggest, to give the land to the Palestinians, then what do you do to the Jews? You have to find a homeland for one or the other somewhere else. I don't know where you would move the Jews. Sine the Arab countries don't want the Palestinians, you can't just send them back to wherever their ancestors came from in the 1920s. I would think a useful framework might be:
1) Purchase enough land from Egypt for a Palestinian nation in their ancestral homeland, Sinai. Egypt is in great financial difficulty and they are unable to maintain law and order in Sinai, so their price might be cheap. They want to do a big water and power project in the Qattara Depression, and that might be the tit for tat.
2) Build the infrastructure to make Sinai truly livable. Making it better than the Gaza or West Bank hell holes is probably not that hard. They would have some oil and some nice tourist beaches and SCUBA dive spots, so there is potential economic viability that is lacking in their current areas. The real need is water. Do some sea water desalinization with pumped storage in the Wadi el-Arish area, which could be dammed at several spots. We're talking not cheap here, with step 2 probably more expensive than step 1, but I don't see a cheaper option.
3) Do the Tom Clancy thing and make Jerusalem an international city in exchange for Arab recognition of Israel's right to exist. I'd create a corridor to the Jordan border, wide enough to include an international airport, so Muslim pilgrims can come and go without having to pass through Israel.
I would propose purchasing all of Sinai east of longitude 33E, with the Palestinians getting everything between 33E and 34E, and Israel extending its borders to 34E. That would give it control of one side of Sharm el-Sheikh, which is strategically important to them. If you did create dammed storage along the Wadi el-Arish, that waterway could be the border between Israel and Palestine in the north.
I think it's fair and equitable. Selling it could be a problem, primarily because of the Arab reluctance to give up territory to the hated Palestinians, but if the US put its weight behind it and got Europe to agree, I think it could be done.
(This post was last modified: 05-18-2018 10:29 AM by Owl 69/70/75.)
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