Op-Ed: The Only Viable Option

George Orwell: "To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself."

Att'y Steven M. Goldberg

The writer is a member of the Executive Board of the World Likud, member of Ariel University's International Board of Governors and Vice President of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, Los Angeles. He practices law in Los Angeles.

George Orwell: "To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself."

Although it was not his intent, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has done Israel an enormous favor.  Specifically, by obsessively pursuing the "peace process" to its unavoidable dead end, Kerry has demonstrated that the two-state solution is, and has always been, a mirage 

For 90 years the international community's best and brightest, far more capable than Kerry, have attempted to craft a territorial compromise to allow a Jewish state and Arab state to divide the land allocated to the Jews by the League of Nations in its Mandate for Palestine.  The results have always been the same: violent Arab rejection of any formula that would allow a Jewish state to exist in any borders.

The reason, of course, is that the heart of the problem is not a territorial dispute.  Instead, it is religious and existential.  The Arab world considers all of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea to be holy Muslim land, and it would violate Islamic law to allow an infidel Jewish state to exist in any portion of it, no matter how small.

History teaches that this is a zero-sum game.  There will be either a Jewish state or another Arab state on the land; there will not be both. Kerry's desperate, pathetic failure is just further proof of this reality.  

       

With this undeniable truth in mind, what can Israel do to assure that it will be the prevailing party in this life-or-death conflict?  One alternative to the two-state solution, propose by Naftali Bennett, calls for Israel to annex Area C, which would incorporate the most heavily populated Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria into the borders of Israel and the fewest Palestinian Arabs. 

Although this has the practical appeal of being a significant first step, and would effectively prevent the creation of a Palestinian state, this proposal creates a myriad of practical problems, including the defense of a byzantine border and developing a workable relationship with the areas outside of the newly created borders. Further, this half-measure will provoke the opprobrium of the international community as surely as the annexation of all of Judea and Samaria but without the territorial benefit.

Another alternative is to annex all of Judea and Samaria and to offer citizenship to all the Palestinian Arabs who reside there.  This would provide Israel with greater geographic depth and appear to moot the accusation that Israel is an apartheid state that is denying equal rights to the Palestinian Arabs.  It is premised on the notion that the demographic time bomb is overstated and that Israel can successfully absorb more than 1.6 million Arabs without saddling itself with a crushing economic burden and losing its Jewish and democratic character.

     

That premise, however, is rooted more in wishful thinking than in historical evidence.  Even if adding the Palestinian Arabs in Judea and Samaria to Israel's citizenry means that "only" 33% of Israel's population is Arab, such a sizable minority of hostile citizens will likely create problems that will cripple the Jewish state. The Arab war on Israel will take on a new aspect, i.e., a civil war inside Israel itself.  Further, even a relatively small voting bloc of Jewish leftists, when added to the 33% hostile Arab vote, can wreak havoc with Israel's electoral system.

     

So again the same nagging question: what can be done?  

The answer is to react strategically and proportionately to the political escalation being orchestrated by the Palestinian Authority.  If Mahmoud Abbas and his cohorts demand Palestinian independence, the Israelis can give it to them--in spades.  Israel can immediately terminate all aid whatsoever not only to the Palestinian Authority, but also to the Palestinian Arab population.  That would mean no money, no electricity, no water, no food, no medicine, no patronizing of Palestinian Arab business and no employment of Palestinian Arabs.  Let the newly declared Palestinian state provide for its people.

To ameliorate the consequences of these measures, Israel can offer generous financial incentives to individual Palestinian Arab families (and Israeli Arab families) who elect to emigrate. A healthy cash position will make a Palestinian Arab family a welcome addition to another Muslim state. This humanitarian alternative will provide a powerful answer to the howls of outrage that might otherwise come from the international community as a result of Israel's actions.  

The Palestinian Arabs will have a viable option to live in peace and prosperity, just not in the homeland of the hated Jews.

For those who doubt the fairness of responding to the unilateral actions of the Palestinian Authority in such a decisive manner, this one question should serve as a cure.  If the tables were turned, how would the Arabs treat the Jewish minority among them?  

We know the answer to that question.  The Arabs provided it when they massacred the Jews in Jerusalem in 1920, in Jaffa in 1921 and in Hevron in 1929. The Arab world threatened to annihilate the jews before the Six Day War of 1967, and Hamas proudly declares its genocidal intentions towards the Jews in its charter. 

As for the "moderate" Palestinian Authority, its continuing hero-worship of vile terrorists who murder Jews demonstrates convincingly how it would treat a vulnerable Jewish minority.  Indeed, Abbas has made clear that any Palestinian state would be judenrein and all Jews living in Judea and Samaria would be ethnically cleansed.  To the extent the international community would tolerate forcibly expelling Jews from their homes in a Palestinian state,  it has no standing to criticize Israel for taking actions to convince Palestinian Arabs to emigrate voluntarily.

     

Transfer is not a fascist plan.  Winston Churchill advocated it, and the Allies implemented it after World War II, when they sliced off part of Germany, allocated it to Poland, and forcibly expelled millions of Germans west of the Oder-Neisse line.  Turkey and Greece also exchanged populations.  Transfer has eliminated or greatly reduced violence between hostile ethnic groups in the past, and it will do so if Israel adopts such a policy with regard to the Arabs within its borders.  Certainly there is no moral principle that requires Israel to coddle people who yearn for its destruction and who celebrate the murder of Jews.

       

Implementing such a policy is not easy. Severing ties with the Palestinian Arabs will cause hardship and will be condemned by sanctimonious anti-Semites around the world.  Nevertheless, it is a powerful and non-violent response to the increasingly aggressive actions of the Palestinian Authority.  It will provide the Palestinian Arab families with a humanitarian option of relocating in relative prosperity. Transfer has historical precedents, reduces bloodshed and is much more humane than the measures to which the Jews have been subjected when left to the tender mercies of the Arabs.

     

Encouraging voluntary transfer will be messy, but for Israel to survive, it has to fight, which means getting its hands dirty.  Dirty hands are nothing compared to the bloody hands of Israel's enemies.