BY LARRY A. ETKIN
While I certainly agree with Ed Felien’s statements that most Palestinians and Israelis want nothing other than peace (commentary in “News” section, December 2023 issue) I’d disagree with his ultimate concluding solution to the problems. The creation of a single nation across the region, whatever it might be called, is not an optimal solution for at least one affected people.
Consider that of 232 recognized countries and territories in the world, about 50 are Islamic-dominant, 157 Christian-majority, three Hindu (including India, the world’s most populous), and seven Buddhist. But one small nation is a Jewish one, and in the last 2,000 years even that one nation has only existed since the end of World War II and the Holocaust.
Is it too extreme for this world to harbor a single small Jewish-majority nation? A single nation where people of the Jewish faith and culture can know, without exception, that they will not be harassed, persecuted, hunted down and killed simply because they are Jewish? The existence of antisemitism continues to be a fact of life in most of the rest of the world, even in much of the U.S.
Asking for there to be just a single nation encompassing the entire region of Israel/Palestine, or Canaan if you want to be biblical, is to say that there cannot be that single Jewish safe haven state simply because of population demographics.
While such a state would start off with close to demographic parity between Jews and Muslims, it would not stay that way very long. Why? Because the Muslim population out-reproduces Jews.
Israeli Jewish families average about three children; Muslim families in that region average four to five. It would not take even the 30 years Felien postulates for there to no longer be that single majority-Jewish nation.
Yes, we outside of the Middle East, along with most of those who live there, DO simply want to be allowed to live their lives in peace. Extremists, however, do not. On both sides.
Hamas has been holding Gaza Palestinians hostage to their agenda of destroying the Israeli state and killing all its Jews for more than 15 years; it’s in their founding documents. On their part, extreme West Bank Israeli settlers are holding Israel’s government hostage to their agenda of driving non-Jews totally out of every place they say God gave the Jews 4,000 years ago.
One can also postulate fault in the surrounding nations of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt for refusing to absorb Palestinian refugees into their populations after 1948. They chose instead to make specifically anti-Jewish political decisions, keeping Palestinians bottled in refugee camps with few prospects, lack of resources, and much anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda. And it should be noted that anti-Jewish propaganda and pogroms in the Middle East paralleled Hitler’s pre-Israel anti-Jewish Holocaust agenda.
(A technical note: Muslims are actually also Semites within the definition of the word, but the term “antisemitism” has become culturally and politically attached solely to anti-Jewish statements and acts.)
So if a single nation is demographically practical for Jews, what’s the alternative? A two-state solution? Probably not. Think Pakistan. It was originally a single country with two separated regions: East Pakistan and West Pakistan, with India in between. Now there are two separate countries: Pakistan and Bangladesh.
A geographically split nation with no ability for its population to freely mingle across its regions cannot endure, and there is no imaginable scenario, at least to my mind, where Israel would allow unfettered transit across its territory for Gaza and West Bank Palestinians. Even Canada and the U.S., perhaps the two most culturally close nations in the world, still insist on passage through border-crossing monitoring stations.
So yes! Average Middle Eastern people do mostly want to just live in peace. The solution will eventually have to be a three-state one: Gaza without Hamas, Israel without a far-right government, and West Bank Palestine that no longer supports terrorists as martyrs. The problem remains on how to get there, and getting there is going to be nowhere near as simple as Felien hopes.
Ed Felien responds:
Larry, thank you for your very thoughtful and serious response to my utopian vision of peace in Israel and Palestine. As I said, I think it may take a generation (30+ years) for the recognition of the nation of Palestine in Gaza, and another generation to legitimize the claims of nationhood for Palestinians on the West Bank, and at least another generation (100 years or more) for Palestinians and Israelis to want to live together in peace.
You ask, but why can’t Jews have their own state—like Hindus in India, or Sunni Arabs in Saudi Arabia? Wouldn’t that guarantee their freedom to be Jewish? I would argue that kind of state with an established religion absolutely guarantees strife and civil war. Once you establish a state with a favored class, you establish an inferior class that must be oppressed and held in check—whether Muslims in India or Houthi Shia Muslims in Saudi Arabia.
No. I agree with the U.S. Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The only guarantee of freedom of religion for one group is freedom of religion for all.
But I agree with your conclusion as to the first steps: “The solution will eventually have to be a three-state one: Gaza without Hamas, Israel without a far-right government, and West Bank Palestine that no longer supports terrorists as martyrs. The problem remains on how to get there, and getting there is going to be nowhere near as simple as Felien hopes.”
Yes, peace, the simple thing so hard to bring about.
Let us continue to discuss.
Let us continue to hope.
