And Never The Twain

"A two-state solution will be clearly underscored as the only real alternative -- because a unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens, or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state."
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry

"His equation of the democratic state of Israel and apartheid South Africa is a new low in American diplomacy and an insult to the people of Israel and South Africa."
"Had Secretary Kerry come to Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], he would have learned about the potential for coexistence without the need for incendiary comments. The time has come for the American administration to quietly exit this failed process."
Dani Dayan, Yesha Council of Jewish settlers, West Bank

"He is using the word in the future tense but [the Israelis] have already created an apartheid system in the West Bank. They don't like it when people use accurate terms to describe what they are doing. When you build roads for settlers that no one else can use, or have two separate legal systems, what else can you call it?"
Hanan Ashrawi, Palestine Liberation Organization executive council

Mr. Kerry is most certainly confused; his frequent trips to the Middle East, that boiling cauldron of sectarian religious suspicion and hatred, where Islam fiercely dominates and oppresses minority-presence Christians and Jews is itself an effective Apartheid regime, its exemplar Saudi Arabia. Israel extends citizenship and equality under the law to all who live within its borders, be they Jews, Arabs, Druze, Kurd, Christian, Judaic or Muslim.



The Palestinian Authority has stated categorically that when it assumes full and total control as a sovereign nation not one Jew will be permitted to live within its boundaries. That is Apartheid. The Arab Palestinians soundly rejected the UN's Partition plan of 1947, while the Jews accepted it and speedily declared themselves prepared to re-create a state of their own, finally; a haven, their historical homeland restored.

Not in its entirety, but in part, the world body permitting it to take possession of a tiny sliver of land. Over the years, in ferociously demanding that the tiny sliver of land be dissolved and return to Arab rule, the PLO mounted one violent atrocity after another, from plane and ship hijackings, to massacres and bombings, then finally suicide bombing. Theirs was not a demand that their right to occupy land adjacent to Israel's be recognized, but that Israel disappear.



As one attempted negotiation to arrive at a peaceful solution to the presence of two ethnic groups, two religions, two ideologies recognize one another's legitimacy failed, the Palestinians had nothing to lose since they enjoyed full material support from the United Nations and the world at large through compassionate 'refugee' financial support courtesy of many sources including the EU, UN, US and Canada.

While Palestinian Arabs bombed and murdered Israelis both in the Middle East and abroad, they took no steps to relinquish their aspirations to destroy the presence of what they termed an intruder nation, and to secure their portion of the land for themselves through the creation of a responsible, peaceful state. One war after another finally led to Israel trouncing the combined Arab armies of the Middle East, and taking Sinai from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria and East Jerusalem from Jordan.



The Palestinians never surrendered their goal of usurping the Israeli presence entirely from the Middle East and restoring to themselves what established Arab countries never permitted them to realize as a nation of their own. Violence became them, even as they lamented their eternal lot as refugees remaining dependent over generations on international largesse rather than make of themselves a functioning nation.

Divisions between the Palestinians with Fatah on one hand and Hamas on the other, intriguing violently against one another while both intending to defeat Israel expressed the tribalism and clannishness and religious sectarian conflict typical of Middle East societies. Where Jews are persona non grata, and Christians are increasingly endangered, their churches demolished, their parishioners attacked by the growing incidence of political Islamism.



Roads for settlers alone has a rationale; Israeli Jews are singled out for violent attacks continuously, in representation of Palestinian rage against their presence. Just as the wall to protect Israelis from the ongoing suicide-bomb slaughter diminished those attacks' frequency, so too do the roads help to protect travelling Israelis from violent Palestinian rancour. When divisions are required they reflect the savagery of exposure to Palestinian rage.