A solution that has already failed

Reader comment on item: Solving the "Palestinian Problem"

Submitted by Michael Greengard (Israel), Jan 7, 2009 at 15:02

Your "solution" constituted the situation up until 1967. It led to wars in 1947-48, 1956, and 1967, punctuated by non-stop terrorism in between those wars. It would inevitably lead to another war with Israel in truncated borders (the late Abba Eban, hardly a devotee of greater Israel, called them "Auschwitz borders").

Nobody is going to sacrifice lives to protect Jews except Israel. It's a proven fact (see Lebanon, the UN in Sinai in 1967, etc.). ... The two alternatives are Israeli cities under rocket fire and Israeli control. Which will it be?

If you really want to end the Arab-Israeli conflict, move the Arabs in Judea and Samaria elsewhere. With their attitudes, it's definitely impossible as long as they are there.

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Daniel Pipes replies:

If one follows your logic, then what good will moving Arabs out of the West Bank do? The rockets will simply come from Jordan.

But your logic is faulty. The historical record shows that when the Israelis show the governments in Egypt, Jordan, and Syria that permitting hostilities from their territories will exact a high cost, those hostilities cease.

That is the key assumption behind my wanting to see the West Bank and Gaza under the control of relatively powerful states.