The American Muslim (TAM): Hey Monty, Let’s Make a Deal: The Gaza Disengagement a Year Later - by David Shasha

The American Muslim (TAM)

Hey Monty, Let’s Make a Deal: The Gaza Disengagement a Year Later - by David Shasha

"I asked a New York Zionist friend of mine, what is it that Israel really wants? His answer was a variant on the Sharon ethos and he told me “We just want to be left alone.”

I am not sure how nations in this day and age can find a way to be rid of each other. Aside from the facts of globalization that now permeate all aspects of our existence, the prosaic elements of daily life – the distribution of vital strategic resources like water, food, energy and the rest – demand that entities that are linked by territory must find a way to productively interact and engage with one another. What my Zionist friend was actually saying, perhaps without realizing it, was that Israel is not a modern Jewish state, but a medieval Ashkenazi ghetto that cannot live as a part of its region. The Zionist dream has thus been reduced to a temper tantrum that cannot decide how it is to exist in the world. There is little doubt that there remains only two ways of solving the conflict.

The first is the conventional plan to separate Israel and Palestine by creating two states. Palestinians have agreed to this but Israel has yet to decide where these two states should be. The internationally accepted line of demarcation – and this includes US policy as well – is the pre-June 1967 lines. The entire world is in agreement that these are the lines of the two states – the entire world, that is, except Israel. Israel has never defined what the lines of the two states should be and this has caused a great amount of confusion among the Palestinians and the Arabs in general.

The second plan is to annex all the land that was part of Britain’s Palestine Mandate and create one state. Here again the Palestinians have agreed while Israel has not. And while there may be a small percentage of those Jews and Israelis who continue to dream of a complete expulsion of Palestinians from Mandatory Palestine, most reasonable people understand that this will never happen and that it is idiotic to even consider it. The one state solution is very troubling to Israel and the vast majority of its Jewish citizens because it would create a possibility that the Arabs could take the state through democratic means.