Split-State Solution?
Advocates of a split-state solution for the intractable dilemma of suiting Israelis and Palestinians toward an arrangement of living alongside one another in something resembling harmony within one state point to places like Ireland and Switzerland, Belgium and Canada as examples where something approximating what they advocate is realized and practised as a hopeful solution to the accommodation of separate wills.We've yet to see whether or not Belgium splits as some within that country have been recommending. Ireland's experiment in split-administration of a single state has yet to be examined in real time and place. Canada's long-standing accommodation of Quebec's insistence to singular recognition in a confederation of other provinces, all of which claim their own uniqueness has not been without pain on an ongoing basis and Canada's own flitting flirtation with separation-inspired terrorism.
In any event, all situations have their own unique characteristics which auger for success or failure in an enterprise of split jurisdictions within a singular entity-state. At the heart of the matter is whether or not implacable foes between whom nothing seems to approach the potential for laying down of arms toward peaceful co-operation can eventually graduate from hostility to hospitality.
Ireland is a good case in point. In Northern Ireland much blood was spilled and the animosity between Protestant and Catholic factions had its genesis in a long history of primal suspicion and anger. Even with the present-day situation where the furnace-blast heat of chaotic violence that seeped its deadly way into other reaches of the British Isles now is but spent ashes, hatred rears its ugly head.
But Ireland's history of reluctant alignment with England and the island geography of Great Britain do not really reflect that of the Middle East in many ways. Yes, tribal antagonisms have their counterpart both in incidence and horrific violence, but in the end both sides were amenable to bringing a halt to the carnage, and each side brought reason and civility to negotiations, however grudgingly.
It just isn't like that in the dynamite-charged anti-functional atmosphere of the Middle East. In Israel proper there is the situation where democratically-elected Arab-Palestinian Members of the Knesset, citizens of Israel representing their Palestinian-Israeli constituents, behave with little regard for their citizenship apart from its parliamentary enrolment; expressing no loyalty to the State of Israel at all.
To the point where some Palestinian MKs take the extreme road of actively participating in seditious acts inimical to the very existence of the state which has granted them citizenship and given them the opportunity to participate in lawmaking and due representation of that demographic of the electors who placed them in office. If their behaviour is to be taken as a token of the utility and practicality of Israelis and Palestinians ruling side-by-side, it serves as a dim omen of failure.
Some Arab MKs actively conspire to destabilize the Jewish state, including those times when it is at its most vulnerable, during attack, or returning attack for attack as occurred during the Israel-Hezbollah war. Conspiring with the enemy for the purpose of harming the society one represents is clearly not an action designed to bring the malefactor into great esteem in the Israeli Knesset, nor is it particularly helpful to that same Palestinian-Israeli demographic.
Ask an Israeli of Arab derivation if he would prefer to live within the mandate of the Palestinian Authority or indeed anywhere else in the Arab world and his response would likely be an emphatic "no". As is the case with the sister of the leader of Hamas, living in Israel within the Kurdish community and content to do so. Yet some Palestinian MKs align themselves with the deadly aspirations of external terror groups whose reason for existence is the destruction of Israel.
Make common cause with such as these? Whose agenda, after all, do they serve?
Is it at all clear that Palestinians living within Israel as citizens are loyal to the country, or merely content to live with the freedoms and opportunities available to them as citizens of the country? That they are not always treated equally in contrast to the opportunities of Jewish Israelis is another matter; Israel, like most countries, has its failings as a state purporting to extend equality to all its citizens. A matter, under other circumstances that can and should be rectified.
One need only look at the conditions under which Palestinians live in other Arab countries where their presence is grimly accommodated on a strictly temporary but unwelcoming basis. With the exception of Jordan which had its own black past showdowns with refugee Palestinians. Fellow Arabs recognize no obligation to assist the Palestinians among them, whom refuge has been granted on tolerance, with the understanding there is nothing permanent about it.
In many countries, such as Lebanon, Palestinian refugees are despised, denigrated and their presence decried. Rather surprising in a way, since the traditional Arab way of the desert tribe was to welcome strangers and offer them hospitality. Rather surprising in its own way since convention and the sacred written word in Islam was to hold one's brothers dear and offer kindness to others.
Yet, given a choice, Kurds and Arabs, Druse and Christian Palestinians will choose to live in Israel as entitled citizens. Knowing full well that their human rights will be respected however deficient in some areas. The opportunities, business, educational, social, economic are superior and available to all citizens. Yet covert machinations continue unabated, including signal instances of national urgency.
Whose end will a fractionalized, semi-unified state serve? As though there are not sufficient problems in unifying the wishes and aspirations of an already-segmented society in that country. With a split-state solution, a quasi-unification of both populations comes the death knell of the Jewish state. Unstable, low birth rates plague Israel, other than those of the stolidly religious. Emigration from the ancient dispersal of Jewry reached is apogee years ago.
An initial coalescing of 6 million Jews and 6 million Arabs under a single state doesn't equate with an equal partnership. It speaks of an opportunity for the Palestinian diaspora of refugees to return to swell the split-state population. The higher birth rate of rigidly observant Muslims will augment the Palestinian demographic. The single country in the world whose legal establishment was a response for a need to provide refuge for Jews in an historically unfriendly world will be history.
Palestinians will have successfully accomplished, through a back-door solution, what up until now incessantly violent upheavals were not able to produce. Minority status for the tolerated presence of Jews; majority rule for Palestinian Arabs. The Jewish identity of the state destroyed. And the international new-left is given reason to celebrate the nobility of Israel in accepting the inevitable; no longer an intellectual-left pariah.
As it is, while Israel is attempting to bargain in good faith with the Palestinian Authority, now headed solely by Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas, PA negotiators are boldly up-front about their expectations for side-by-side states. Enact the law of return, split Jerusalem, giving the PA the old sector, just incidentally excluding Jewish entry to its most hallowed religious sites. Sites ancient in situ, long over-built by an exultant Islamic occupier less ancient in time.
It is not only fanatical Islamists who wish to refuse entry to Jews, it is the "moderate" PA bargainers. Reasonable accommodation for reasonable people?
Can you take the tribal impulse out of a people rigidly glued to its traditional of violent reaction? Its cultural indifference to placatory compromise, seeing it instead as capitulation to unrealistically shrill demands. Rewarding the alarming violence that engenders the need to reach a reasoned compromise.
Bargain in good faith? Dead in the water. Live in harmony with such intolerance. Unlikely accomplishment.
We have yet to see any indication, however trivial or hesitant, that human life is valued, in reflection of Golda Meir's observation that the Palestinians will be ready for peace when they value their children as much as Jews do. The PA - Fatah, Hamas - demonstrates no compunction at sacrificing the lives of children, as human bombs. Children are taught from their most vulnerable age that it is a duty and a privilege to assist in destroying the Zionist enemy.
These lessons are taught by educators through PA-authorized school textbooks, and parents are complicit, or they would object strenuously enough to make their worried voices heard above the jihadist message of deliverance from occupation. An obviously unwilling, but newly defensive occupation of necessity, born of the first Intifada, after Israel had helped to establish the Palestinian policing authority, helping to fund and to train them.
Here is a culture stuck in the ancient tribal past. Domination remains the prevailing mode of accommodation to a population's aspirations. The very idea of shared geography, of equality of co-operative sharing - co-existence - has no resonance of promise for the future. It is an alien, imposed concept whose purpose is dim and unacceptable to a people whose aggrieved entitlement demands surrender to its will, and nothing less.
To the demands of its inalienable, perceived needs. There is no satisfying an all-or-nothing mentality of unremitting enmity. Who to negotiate with, then? Palestinian demands are entitled items not amenable to reasoned debate and reasonable alternatives. They are non-negotiable rights and entitlements. The veneer of civility is thin, the agenda soon revealed. Even at the cost of peace and stability.
No surrender of perceived rights, and no obligations to accommodate anyone else's needs. Submit or prepare to die. And they do, and they do not hesitate to exact the same sacrifice upon their adversaries.
Split-state solution? They wish.
Labels: Human Fallibility, Middle East, Realities, Traditions
posted by Pieface @ Monday, September 24, 2007
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