One Jewish state for all

One Jewish state for all Ruthie Blum Given the number of times the Israeli government has banged its head against brick walls (and security fences), is it any wonder that it has lost its marbles? The latest case in point was Thursday morning’s “goodwill gesture” from Israel to the Palestinian Authority and "Hamastan." This involved exhuming the bodies of 91 terrorists buried in Israel and transferring their remains back to the West Bank and Gaza from whence they hailed. There they were shrouded in Palestinian flags and welcomed home as “martyrs.” Each of these paragons of Palestinian virtue had slaughtered innocent Israelis in restaurants, buses, hotels and shopping malls. Now that they’re back among the people who laud them for their actions, their families will be able to visit their graves, and school children will be taught lessons on their “heroism.” The gaga Israeli government said that it hopes “this humanitarian gesture will serve both as a confidence-building measure and help get the peace process back on track.” Yeah, right. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has been too busy celebrating the return of the mass murderers’ corpses to tell Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to buzz off. Abbas is well aware that the purpose of “peace talks” is to negotiate the “two-state solution” that the Obama administration keeps pressing for — and that Netanyahu has had no choice but to go along with it. This is despite the fact that he knows the Palestinians are not in the least bit interested in establishing a state of their own alongside Israel. In fact, they admit — or rather boast — that their goal is to rid all Jews from their midst. (Christians are second on their list of infidels to conquer, convert or expel.) In this respect, the Palestinians are no different from their radical Muslim-Arab brethren the world over. That they’ve learned from Western apologists how to frame their aim in rhetoric that is palatable to American and European ears and sensibilities is the reason that they are leading in the propaganda war. One key element of this war is the repetition of certain catch phrases in such a way as to lower the bar of the debate, both in Israel and internationally. “Two-state solution” is one such phrase. That the logic behind it is based on a slew of false premises has not made the slightest bit of difference. Once it entered the lexicon, it morphed into a kind of fact on the ground, the details of which merely had to be worked out between the State of Israel and the Palestinian state-in-the-making. No pundit has exposed this as a lie — and articulated the dangers of allowing it to shape and dictate Israeli policy — better than Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick. For years she has dissected the flaws behind the assumption that the only way for Israel to survive as a Jewish and democratic state is to separate from the Palestinians by withdrawing from territory they inhabit. This assumption — put forth originally by the Left, but adopted by the mainstream — was based largely on demographics. Palestinians have lots of children; Jews have Western-style birthrates. If the Palestinians become citizens of Israel, they have to be given equal rights, including the vote. When they become a majority, either the state loses its Jewish identity or it has to enforce the will of the few over the many, which means it loses its democratic character. Not so, according to Glick, whose formula for a “one-state solution” involves not withdrawing from Judea and Samaria, but rather annexing them. Debunking the notion that demography is working against Israel due to declining Palestinian birthrates and increasing Jewish ones, Glick has offered an alternative option. In a recent column on U.S. Congressman Joe Walsh, Glick reiterated this option. And then, out of the blue, two members of the hard Left in the U.S. went berserk. Peter Beinart, who can always be counted on to be disingenuous, penned a piece called “Caroline Glick’s One-State Solution.” In it, the author of the over-publicized, yet thankfully under-purchased book, “The Crisis of Zionism,” accused Glick of — get this — hypocrisy. Why? A few months ago, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (an alma mater of Glick’s, as it happens) held a viciously anti-Israel conference dealing with the “one-state solution.” What Glick and everyone else understood about that event was that the one state it was actually touting was Palestine. Of course, Beinart — though a two-state supporter — didn’t have a problem with that conference, as it was ostensibly presenting another viewpoint. That it was the viewpoint of anti-Semites Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer didn’t make it into Beinart’s column against Glick. What did was the claim that Glick is no different from the Harvard “one-staters,” except that they think the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza should all have equal voting rights, while she excludes Gazans as part of a “de-facto state.” His conclusion: “The best way to dismantle Israel as a Jewish state is through subterfuge. Look how well it’s working for Caroline Glick.” The smear campaign didn’t end here, however. Taking offense at the mere suggestion that being a “one-stater” means having something in common with Glick, Ahmed Moor — a Palestinian-American Soros Fellow at the Kennedy School and co-editor of “After Zionism” — went after Glick and “liberal Zionists” with equal zeal. Angry that Beinart dared talk about Glick in the same sentence as the Kennedy School crowd, Moor turned the tables back on him. “All told it’s easy to see why Glick's brand of firebreathing isn’t so good,” he wrote. “She’s got a particular way of viewing Arabs and Palestinians. I don’t think she’d agree to live in the same apartment building as me. But… would Peter Beinart? That’s the more interesting question.” I love it when Arabs attack the leftist Jews who think that being their apologists will grant them immunity from being thought of as enemies. The irony here is that it’s not Glick or Beinart who wouldn’t agree to live in Moor’s building; it’s Moor who wouldn’t agree to live in theirs. Indeed, it has always been the Palestinians who refuse to exist in peace with Jews, not the other way around. The solution lies either in their altering their worldview or in our asserting our right to our country. No number of dead Jew-killers returned to their dispatchers on a silver platter is going to change that fact. Ruthie Blum, a former senior editor at The Jerusalem Post, is the author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring,’” to be released by RVP Press in the summer. http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1985