Friday, March 29, 2024 -
Print Edition

Two-state solution? It’s been offered on a silver platter for 64 years

Last Tuesday was November 29, 2011. Sixty-four years earlier, the UN voted to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and a Palestinian state.

The Jews said yes.

The Palestinians said no.

Israel was created.

A Palestine could and would have been created.

A Palestine, by the way, much bigger than Israel, based on the proposed lines of Nov. 29, 1947.

But the Palestinians and their Arab brothers said: We don’t want a two-state solution.

We want a one-state solution.

One Palestinian state.

No Jewish state.

They rejected the two-state solution.

Now, the UN resolution of 1947 is still on the books. A two-state solution has been handed to the Palestinians on a silver platter.

Needless to say, were the Palestinians to say “yes” today, 64 years later, to the two-state solution, then the borders of both the Palestinian and the Jewish states of 1947 would have to be renegotiated.

Read the related IJN blog post “Abraham must be rolling in his grave”

That is because, when the Palestinians said “no” to a two-state solution in 1947, they

said no with guns.

With war. With an attempt to destroy the Jewish institutions, including the Jewish army, in Palestine; with an attempt to starve the Jewish residents of Jerusalem; with an attempt to kill the Jewish residents elsewhere in Palestine.

Parenthetically, please note: On Nov. 29, 1947, when the two-state solution was offered to the Palestinians, not a single Palestinian refugee existed.

Palestinian refugees came into being entirely, exclusively, solely, because of the decision of the Palestinians and their Arab brothers to reject the two-state solution, to go to war to destroy the Jewish state.

Anyway, because of that war, the 1947 borders were changed. The Jewish state became demarked by the 1949 armistice lines. Note: armistice. Not an end to hostilities, not peace.

Because of the 1967 war — which was nothing more than the Arab activation of hostilities based on the formal state of war against Israel still maintained by every Arab state — when, again, the Palestinians and their Arab brothers rejected a two-state solution with war, the 1949 armistice lines were changed. Again, lines not based on an end to hostilities, not based on peace.

That’s where we are today, 64 years later: the two-state solution is still rejected by the Palestinians and by their Arab brothers, except Egypt, which made peace with Israel in 1982, and by Jordan, which made peace in 1994.

This time, the Palestinians reject the two-state solution, or so they say, because they want their own state on the basis of the 1949

armistice lines.

They say: Forget that we went to war to destroy the Jewish state. Go back to the way things were before we tried to destroy you. Go back to 1949. Pretend nothing happened in between.

Pretend that the Jewish state did not build itself up on the land it secured by defending its existence against wars based on the Arab rejection of the two-state solution of 1947.

Make no mistake.

It is not only, and not even primarily, the border issue that keeps the Palestinians from a peace agreement with Israel today.

If Israel were to throw away all of the homes and cities and industries and highways it built on the lands secured by the 1947-1949 war and by the 1967 war, the Palestinians still would not accept the two-state solution.

If Israel agreed, as a precondition, to negotiate on the basis of the preJune 5, 1967 lines — which are synonymous with the 1949 armistice lines — the Palestinians would still reject a two-state solution.

That is because the 1947 partition called for a Palestinian state and a Jewish state.

The Palestinians reject a Jewish state.

Simple as that. Nothing has changed in 64 years.

The Palestinians still do not accept the two-state solution that gives, to the Jewish people, a Jewish state, for which the term “Israel” is a synonym, and not some Western-imposed, imperialistic, ethnically and religiously neutral appelative.

So here we are. Don’t get confused by the Palestinian refugee issue and by what the Palestinians call their “right of return.” Had the Palestinians accepted the two-state solution on Nov. 29, 1947, there would not have been a single Palestinian refugee. The Palestinians refugees are the sole responsibility of the Palestinians and, more broadly, of all of the Arab states who rejected the two-state solution in 1947.

Don’t get confused by the border issue, either. It is critical, but it is also secondary to the Palestinian refusal, 64 years on, to accept a Jewish state.

Keep all this in mind the next time you hear an ill informed commentator pontificating about Israel’s “intransigence” or Israel’s “responsibility” for the Palestinian refugees.

And settlements?

There would not be a single one had the Arabs not tried, in uncontrolled rage, “to push Israel into the Sea” in 1967.

The two-state solution, one Palestinian state and one Jewish state, was declared at the UN 64 years ago.

The Palestinians said no. They still haven’t said yes.

Copyright © 2011 by the Intermountain Jewish News




Leave a Reply