Michael Freund posits an idea in light of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ decision first to retire and then to declare statehood:
For far too long, Israel has been overly vulnerable to such machinations and games. By leaving the status of Judea and Samaria open for discussion, the Jewish state has given the Palestinians too much leeway for mischief-making and malice, which they have only been more than happy to exploit.
In light of Abbas’s latest charade, it is clear that Israel needs to put an end to this farce, once and for all.
We need to send a clear message to our foes, one that will put them on the defensive and strengthen Israel’s hand. And there is no better place to start than with our own unilateral measures, chief among them the annexation of all the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.
As I wrote in a prior post in my Letters from Israel series, this is the central issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
There’s another old joke among Israels: “We want a Jewish state, a democratic state, and a country in all of the ancient land of Israel. But we can only pick two of the three.”
In other words, Israel must eventually choose one of the following options:
1. Democratic and in all of the land — but not Jewish
2. Jewish and in all of the land — but not democratic
3. Jewish and democratic — but not in all of the land
(As I detail in the post, this is the core conflict because of demographic realities in the region encompassing Israel proper, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank.) Israel has yet to decide what it wants to be.
Israel is not going to annex the West Bank anytime soon, and any Palestinian declaration of statehood would go nowhere. Jordan, of course, would never take the territory back. So now I’d like to consider another option that I first heard from an American-Israeli coworker at a high-tech company: Make the West Bank like Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rico is a part of the United States, but it is not an official state. The island can only send a non-voting delgate to Congress, but it has a large degree of autonomous self-rule. I am not an expert on Puerto Rico’s legal status in detail, but I wonder whether something similar might be possible in the West Bank. Readers, what say you?
