One State Not Two

I firmly believe that the geographic precincts of historical Palestine cannot be divided into two states. There can only be one. However, I do not advocate "throwing" anyone "into the sea," all I can hope for is that all Israelis accept that they cannot have an exclusive Jewish state/homeland over the entire territory of what they call Israel. They must learn to share. They should accept Christian and Muslim Palestinian Arabs as full and equal citizens in this state and let the democratic process take its course from there. That means counting all Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza as citizens of this single state, tearing down walls and taking responsibility for all those, living and dead, who were forced to flee their homes in 1948 and 1967. In short, give them a country again.

If that means in ten or twenty years we see an Arab prime minister of Israel, so be it. If, like in South Africa, the colors of the national standard are changed, so be it. If a referendum over the name of the country is held and the name is changed and suddenly the undesirable tenants are the landlords again, so be it. Israelis will still have a place to call home and peace to boot. How high is too high a price for real peace? Such a peace cannot be given as a mere act of charity by the powerful; it is earned, it is hard won, striven for and extracted in a protracted and painful process of compromise.

Creating an impotent, truncated and feeble Palestinian statelet will not solve the problem. And for Israel to think that “Arab” citizens of Israel can somehow be forced or coerced to move to that overpopulated, encircled, and economically stifled statelet would be a mistake on the part of Jewish State. Here in lies the dilemma for “them”: the entire raison d’être of Israel is as homeland for the Jewish people; this implies exclusivity, the exclusion of all none Jews. Can the world in this day and age in good conscience continue to accept the price for granting the Jews of the World a state? The price continues to be paid daily by the millions of displaced Palestinians.

Since 1948, how many of those who piled onto boats and came to Palestinian shores, simply because they were Jewish and afraid, how many are better off today or can say their grandchildren are better off? When I say Israel is a military encampment I am not far from the truth. The guilty never sleep soundly. Truth, justice and right are never forgotten, they never die; they are merely passed on from one grandfather or grandmother to their respective grandchildren, like so many tattered pieces of paper. And just like those papers, maybe tucked away in a rusty old tin box buried in the garden, the evidence of ownership of certain lands may have faded over the years, but the old ink is still legible.

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