Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Well, there could be, and quite easily, it's just that the Arabs don't want it (and never have). Mick Hartley has some good links here: That Two-State Solution. He quotes today's Jacoby, Peace isn't Arab goal:
...International consensus or no, the two-state solution is a chimera. Peace will not be achieved by granting sovereignty to the Palestinians, because Palestinian sovereignty has never been the Arabs' goal. Time and time again, a two-state solution has been proposed. Time and time again, the Arabs have turned it down...
Hartley quotes Tony Blankley, Reality and the Two-State Solution, who offers some very important public opinion polling results (in short, the Arabs envision a satisfactory future without an Israel, while the rest of the world, including a majority of Israelis, would be content with a future that includes a "Palestine"), and concludes thus:
...As long as fewer than 2 in 10 Arabs, both Palestinian and all others, believe in Israel's right to exist as a nation with a Jewish majority, there can be no successful peace based on a two-state solution. That is the reality that no diplomacy can change.
Indeed, and that has ever been the case. The Arabs send out their emissaries who speak in terms acceptable and familiar to Western leftists, but it's not how they speak at home, and it's not what motivates them. How can Arabs possibly be motivated by concepts of Human Rights and Justice recognizable to Westerners when not a single one of their own states supports such things at home?
Visit Mick's post for links, and read the Jacoby and Blankley pieces.
The two-state solution can be held up as a medium to long term goal, as long as a genuine realism is attached to that conception. (And it's representative of the times that a genuine realism needs to be distinguished from the formal, academic "realism" of Walt & Mearsheimer and other, related "realisms.")
But in any other sense, a two-state "solution" is no such thing. To the contrary, it's a prescription for still more entrenched delusional and Carteresque enterprises, it's likewise a proscription against any better and more realistic conceptions. Thus, among other things, it's yet another tell-tale indicator of the present era, the present age, that such a conception can be forwarded continuously and seemingly without much sober reflection at all required of its Carteresque proponents.
Supine forms of wish-full thinking, ruling the roost among the muddled, meandering soft left and harder Left.
Two states is a touchy, feel good statement that ignores reality.
Spengler comments very well indeed concerning a certain, often opined upon subject, the West Bank settlements, South Bend and the West Bank. Because this is such a maligned and widely misunderstood subject, excerpting at length, emphasis added:
"Obama tried to browbeat Netanyahu into accepting a Palestinian state. At present juncture a Palestinian state would be an instant failed state either run by or unable to suppress Hamas and other terrorists who would use the territority the same way Hamas used Gaza: to pepper Israel with rocket fire. That is just what is happening. As Daniel Pipes observes in a Jerusalem Post column today, “many Israelis, including Netanyahu, disbelieve that Palestinians will either construct a state or abandon irredentism. Netanyahu prefers to shelve “two states” and focus instead on institution building, economic development, and quality of-life improvements for Palestinians. To this, the Arab states, Palestinians, European governments, and the Obama administration near-unanimously respond with vociferous hostility.”"
[...]
"First, as Abba Eban said, the 1948 borders are “Auschwitz borders,” that leave Israel virtually indefensible.
"Second, settlement represents the only logical riposte to the so-called Palestinian refugee problem. When Ariel Sharon talked of creating “facts on the ground,” he was responding to the most important fact on the ground, namely the maintenance of the only third-and-fourth generation “refugee” population in the world as a weapon against the Jewish state. In the aftermath of independence a roughly equal number of Jews came to Israel and Arabs left, in one of many 20th-century population exchanges (and one of the least bloody, as a matter of fact). That should have been the end of it, except that the United Nations and the Arab world kept the refugees corralled in “camps” (settlements with much better amenities than their previous homes). The Arab demand for right of return, which has accompanied every so-called Arab peace plan, proposes to liquidate the Jewish state.
"Against this, the setttlements create a countervailing set of facts on the ground: refuse to make peace, they tell the Arabs, and you lose territory. The more settlements, the better. Short of killing people, seizing land is the best way to give the Arab side an incentive to make peace sooner rather than alter."
[...]
"The stance of the liberal Jewish community towards Israel is shameful. It recalls the torpor of the Jewish establishment during Hitler’s rise to power during the 1930s. Their moral indifferentism in the face of a mortal threat to the Jewish State is an outrage."