The Palestinians and the Arab State

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The map on the left-hand side represents Palestine as it was under the British mandate. The white bit was proposed for the state of Israel and the yellow bit or brown, whichever you like to call it, was proposed to be the Arab state. After the 1948 War of Independence that gave roughly 78 percent of the land to the Israelis and 22 percent to the Palestinians. And the final map on the right-hand side is roughly where we are today in terms of the yellow bits or where the Palestinians live and the white bits are where the Israelis live.

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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