9.70 Won't a Palestinian State Free the Palestinians and Bring Peace?
The same answer to the above question is given in the
following web page by two people of completely different backgrounds, One
is a Jew who is the son of a
fighter
in the Israeli resistance and the other is an
Arab who was born in
Syria and grew up believing that Jews were the enemy.
The following answer is from an article by Gamaliel Isaac titled Understanding Israeli Society: A Rebuttal
to Menachem Klein.
There are three problems with agreeing to giving up Israeli territory to create a
Palestinian state. The first is that it depends on the assumption that lack of
a state is the cause of the conflict between the Israelis and the Arabs, when the
cause is Islamic religious intolerance and desire for conquest. The second problem is that
Israel would not be able to defend itself
against an armed Palestinian state.
The third is that defacto Palestinian states have been tried and did not result
in peace.
In 1922 the British cut away three quarters of the Jewish National
Home and gave it to Abdullah Hussein. That area became the country of
Trans-Jordan. In 1948 the day after Israel declared independence, Trans-Jordan
along with Egypt, Syria and Iraq attacked Israel. The Jordanian army crossed
the Jordan river and seized Judea and Samaria, drove out or killed all the Jews
living there and occupied the area. There is a very significant lesson here
that promoters of a two-state solution ignore. Possessing a new state 3X the
size of Israel did not make the Palestinians peaceful. Even Jordanian
possession of Judea and Samaria did not bring peace. In 1949 Jordan signed an
armistice agreement with Israel which referred to Judea and Samaria as the West
Bank because it is located on the west bank of the Jordan river. Calling the
area Judea and Samaria would be to implicitly recognize that Israel has a
legitimate claim to the area. In 1967 Egypt and Syria built up an invasion
force on their borders with Israel. Israel struck first and wiped out 2/3s of
Egypt’s air force. Israel then issued a final offer to Jordan: if you stay out
of the war, Israel will not retaliate – even though that meant that the Temple
Mount in Jerusalem and other Jewish holy sites would remain under Jordanian
control. Jordan attacked and Israel won back Judea and Samaria.
The Arabs
living in Judea and Samaria formed the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)
in 1964 which proceded to commit acts of terrorism against Israel, and the
Palestinian Authority in 1994. The Palestinian Authority was given security and
civil control of urban areas (area A) and civil control of rural areas (area B)
as part of the
Oslo accords
but the terrorism continued. During the
negotiations of the Oslo Accords Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin offered Arafat
a state over 96% of
the West Bank and an additional 4% of Israel as well as a capitol in east
Jerusalem and 2 of the 4 quadrants of the old city of Jerusalem, but Arafat and
the PLO rejected the offer and started another Intifada. Bill Clinton who had
acted as a facilitator of discussions between Arafat and Rabin,
said that he
thought that was because they did “not care about a homeland for the
Palestinians they wanted to kill Israelis and make Israel uninhabitable.”
They still do and that’s the primary reason the two-state solution is not a
solution.
Israel took a tremendous risk for peace when it offered 96% of Judea and
Samaria to Arafat A Palestinian state would have meant a Palestinian army in
the hills of Judea and Samaria overlooking a 10 mile wide strip of Israel, a
strip of land that would be
indefensible according to American military
experts. It is the threat of a Palestinian army in Judea and Samaria that is
the primary reason prime minister Netanyahu opposes a Palestinian state there.
The conflict in Gaza is yet more evidence that creation of a Palestinian state
will not bring peace. The Israelis withdrew from Gaza, Gaza became a de facto
state controlled by Hamas and that did not lead to peace. Instead it led to the
buildup of the Hamas terrorist army that
invaded Israeli communities on October
7, 2023.
The following is another answer to the above question of
whether a Palestinian State would free the Palestinians and bring peace by Ravan
(Rawan) Osman, an Arab Zionist who gave it while speaking to the parliament of
the European Union.
