Israel's National Rights and Our Legal Rights to These Areas

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Israel's national rights are very strong and in fact they're incontrovertible under international law. We're talking about civil rights. And it's not simply that it's morally repugnant to tell Jews that we're not allowed to live anywhere we want to. It's also true that this is a failed proposition has been tried twice and it's failed twice. The British said that the Jews have no national rights and we actually didn't mean that we supported the establishment of a Jewish state when we said we did in 1917 in the Balfour Declaration. You know what happened?

Patriacide. Nationcide. Whatever you want to call it, that is what Israel is doing with its settlement policy: it is killing itself. If ever greater numbers of Jewish settlers are installed on land regarded by Palestinians as the basis for a state of their own, the possibility of a two-state solution grows ever more remote. Yet the single state alternative, involving annexation of the West Bank, would result in a country where Arabs vastly outnumber Jews and then you won’t have a one-state or a two-state solution: you’ll have a no-state solution. For those who love Israel and wish to preserve a democratic Jewish homeland, as much as for those who hate it, the settlements must stop. That’s what many left-wing Israelis and their friends say. But defenders of the settlements see things very differently. The two-state solution has long been a dead letter in their view: why stop building settlements in the name of a peace plan that is frankly unattainable? Whatever the eventual solution – it could even be a...

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