A Fake Palestinian State or a Real One?

A 2 state solution? Ok., fine. Two states, one Israeli and the other palestinian, already exist side by side - on opposite sides of the Jordan River. The country of Jordan is a Palestinian state in every respect: more then 80% of the population is Palestinian, and its 90,000sq. km of territory are part of the original Palestine mandate, which the British partitioned back in the 1920s between Jews and Arabs.

There's no logic or justice in further partition of the 28,000 sq. kms remaining in Israel's hands to create a second Palestinian state, west of Jordan, at the expense of the small territory in which the Jewish people is trying to maintain its state in the midst of a hostile, Muslim Middle East.

Superficially, the internal Israeli debate is between those who agree to creating a Palestinian state west of the Jordan and those who oppose the idea. But the fact is that even the Israeli left doesn't agree to a real Palestinian state, armed and sovereign, a few minutes distance from Israel's main population centers. The most that even the most generous of Israeli leftist are willing to give the Palestinians - and the most that G.W. Bush's America is also willing to give - is nothing but a pseudo-state: two non-contiguous pieces of land, one in the Gaza Strip on the west of Israel and the other in Judea and Samaria in the east, in which a Palestinian entity would exist under constant outside supervision, without the right to sign international agreements and without any army of its own.

Why would the Palestinians agree to such a "state"? Why would they agree to end their 120-year war against Zionism in return for such a farce? Why should they give up their most sacred principle, the "right of return" of refugees from 1948 to their former homes within the Green Line? And where, in the proposed "state", would they be able to rehabilitate the 3 million members of their people who have been rotting for 55 years in refugee camps?

The answer to these question is the practical reason for the struggle of the Israeli right against the Oslo Accords, for its opposition to the Clinton guidelines, and for its current protests against Bush's "road map": The Palestinians, in fact, won't be satisfied with an insulting farce, won't give up on the "right of return", and won't stop the terror attacks after the creation of a pseudo-state that leaves the refugees in camps. And if their leaders accepted the Oslo, Clinton and Bush plans, they did so only as part of the PLO's phased strategy, which combines diplomatic tactics and armed struggle, and only in order to receive, as a first phase, international recognition of some sort of Palestinian sovereignty, fictitious as it might be, west of the Jordan.

The internal Israeli debate is really about how intelligent the Palestinians are and how serious they are. America apparently shares the left's evaluation that the Palestinians are stupid and primitive enough to be calmed by the Western illusion of national self-determination. The right, on the other hand, believes that Palestinians aren't only very smart, but also very Arab. While the West gives great importance to national self-determination, for Palestinians, is only a means toward liberating all the land that belongs to them according to the Koran, and so the "road map" to creating a Palestinian pseudo-state west of the Jordan can't lead to peace, but only to an escalation of terror until the final goal is achieved.

We don't need the United States to invent a destructive, illusory "vision" of a Palestinian state next to Israel. A real Palestinian state already exists next to Israel, on the east bank of the Jordan, and we definitely do need the help of the United States in order to institutionalize the connection of Palestinians living west of the Jordan to their state, whose capital is Amman. We definitely do need massive American involvement to settle the problem of the 1948 refugees, by creating an international program to rehabilitate them and to dismantle the shameful camps that Arab leaders would like to preserve as hothouses for terror and hatred. And there's no doubt we need the determination of the American victor in Iraq to make clear to the Palestinians that terror won't pay.

George W. Bush can make a difference or he can join the list of his predecessors who looked for the lost coin under the lamppost and didn't understand that it was waiting for them to find in another spot entirely.