Break the Palestinian Veto over Israel

Mike L.

{Cross-Posted at Israel Thrives and Geoffff's Joint Bar and Grill.}

It is a commonplace in discussing the Arab-Israel conflict that Israel can be two of three things. It can be:

1) a Jewish state

2) a democratic state

or

3) a state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

What it cannot be, however, is all three. This makes eminent sense, but what tends to go unspoken is the fact that those who promote this view also tend to give the Palestinians a veto on Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. That is, if the Palestinians refuse to negotiate and if they refuse to give up their efforts to kill Jews for the purposes of eventually destroying the Jewish state, then the status quo will continue indefinitely.

If the status quo continues indefinitely, this means that the Palestinians can then condemn Israel as non-democratic. It will have been the Palestinians themselves, through their unwillingness to accept a state in peace next to the Jewish one that will be the cause of the continued status quo, but the western world, and particularly the western left, will tend to blame Israel, nonetheless.

This being the case, what is necessary is not a further round of useless talks with Palestinians who have no interest in ending the conflict short of actual victory over their Jewish victims, but for a unilateral declaration of Israel's final borders.

The Palestinians, as well as much of the larger Arab and Muslim world, is holding the Jews of the Middle East hostage.  For theological reasons they simply cannot accept Jewish sovereignty on Jewish land because that land was previously conquered by Islam and therefore is considered a permanent part of the Umma.  The western left, meanwhile, will continue to hold the Jews of the Middle East responsible for their own persecution and will continue to provide venues for anti-Semitic anti-Zionists to undermine the well-being of Jewish people the world over.

Thus the only thing that Israel can do is to take matters into its own hands and declare its final borders, leaving sufficient space for whatever criminal-terrorist entity that the Palestinians create for themselves.  This will not end the conflict, of course, but it will maintain Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, which is something that all of us, left, right, and center, who care about the Jewish people, want.

Many will argue that the withdrawal from Gaza demonstrates that such withdrawals are counterproductive to Israeli security and they will cite the ten thousand rockets that have fallen on Israeli heads since that withdrawal.  Their point is undeniable, but the truth of it does not mean that we must allow the Palestinians to have a veto over the nature of the state of Israel.  Israel always maintains its rights to self-defense and any violence coming at it from Palestinian areas should be met with sufficient force to put down that violence, no matter how the world community reacts. Much of the world, as recent experience shows, does not consider violence against Jews to actually be violence and thus they consider Jewish self-defense to be Jewish aggression.

This is most common on the progressive-left, sadly.

Nevertheless, it is long past time for Israel to free itself. After 13 centuries of second and third class citizenship under the boot of Arab-Muslim imperialism, followed by one hundred years of war, the Jews of the Middle East have the right to be left the hell alone. Their freedom, however, can only come about through their action.

Israel needs to free itself at last.

{The Palestinians can have Ramallah.}