Given the duration of the conflict and the depth of hostility, I think you'd have to move the Palestinians in the Israeli half out, and the same to the Israelis in the Palestinian half.
Steven, I don't know if you've noticed, but the one million Israeli Arabs have mostly spent the last three years keeping quiet. Protests have been sporadic, peaceful and generally related to Israeli-Arab issues.
One thing Israeli Arabs do NOT want is to move to Palestine. Even when a proposal was floated to move Umm al Fahm, a rather radical Arab town, to the other side of a proposed settlement - not by moving the town, just the border - the reaction of the inhabitants was NO! We want to stay in Israel!
I mean, they are Arabs but they are hardly stupid. Nobody living in the law and order of Israel, even as an Arab, really wants to wind up in the 3rd world ganster-run kleptocracy of Palestine. This is one of those unpolitic truths it's not wise to utter, but it's there.
So the reality is that the Israelis don't have any problem with Arabs remaining inside Israel; nobody is proposing moving them out; it's only the Palestinians who demand that Palestine be rendered Jew-free. Naturally, the rest of the world thinks this is perfectly reasonable.
I agree Bantustans won't work; it will have to be closer to what Clinton & Barak offered, which was 95% of the territories and no Bantustan. But there will only be war while Al Aqsa and Hamas call the shots in the territories.
Of course the Palestinian state would be on the dole for decades (Israel has already been on the dole for decades, of course), but it would be worth it.
A very different quality of "doleness". The Israelis get military aid, which amounts to about 3% of their $100 billion GDP. I read somewhere that 60% of the Palestinian GDP is foreign aid. But then, Palestine doesn't have an economy - Arafat has seen to that. The economic high water mark for the territories was in 1993, Palestinian GDP cratered by almost half even before September 2000. |
