JERUSALEM -- Hillel Halkin makes a not-so-modest proposal for peace in the Middle East:
There is one obvious solution for Israel's West Bank settlements that has been all but completely overlooked: Let the settlers continue living where they are, but in the state of Palestine.
As a conception, it's stunningly simple. Its very obviousness has rendered it invisible, like something in one's field of vision that goes unnoticed because it has been there all the time. If over one million Palestinian Arabs can live as they do in towns and villages all over Israel, why cannot a few hundred thousand Israeli Jews live, symmetrically, in a West Bank Palestinian state?
I once made a similar proposal. After all, the alternatives are either impossible or dangerous. As I observed personally, the major settlements just beyond the Green Line and are too large to evacuate or move. Israel would never agree to a single, bi-national state because such a country would soon cease to be a Jewish state because of higher Palestinian-birthrates or implode into civil war.
Part of the debate has also struck me as discriminatory. Arabs -- Palestinians or not, depending on how each chooses to define himself -- have always lived as full citizens in the State of Israel with voting rights and complete equality under the law. Why, then, is there such a demand that no Jews can live in the West Bank at all? It does not seem fair.
If there is to be a two-state solution, placing all settlements and outposts under the legal jurisdiction and sovereignty of a future State of Palestine would be an equitable solution (as long as Jews there would have as much rights as Arabs in Israel). Still, Jews living in those places may not want to remain under such a scenario. They might leave -- making the entire issue moot.
If this change of jurisdiction will not occur, then the only other possibility would be for Israel to give a future, Palestinian state pieces of land to compensate for those taken by the major settlements.
The politics of the region are very complicated. I remember when I came on Birthright Israel in 2006 before moving to Israel -- everyone had learned a lot about the country, but little was mentioned about the complexities and realities of the region. I just wish we had been better informed.
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“Why, then, is there such a demand that no Jews can live in the West Bank at all? It does not seem fair.”
Nor, I’m sure, does it seem fair to those Palestinians whose parents, grandparents, or greatgrandparents were forced out of their homes by war. (Note: whether they left “voluntarily” or at gunpoint, the fact is that those who left were victims, not prosecutors, of the war.) Jeff Guevin(Quote)