Death of the Two-State Solution

"The framework for recognizing Palestine that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney set forth on Wednesday attempts to bring us closer to that goal [of two democratic states for two peoples, living in mutual recognition of one another], but suffers from several fatal defects -- with respect to the conditions it includes, the conditions it fails to include and, most importantly the fact that it gets the paradigm backwards, granting recognition before the necessary conditions are met, rather than after."

"If Canada moves forward with this framework, it will almost certainly be complicit -- however inadvertently -- in the creation of another authoritarian terrorist state in the Middle East, rather than a peaceful democratic one, thereby decreasing, rather than increasing, the possibility of securing a lasting peace in the region."

Irwin Cotler, international chair, Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights

Noah Lew, director of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights 

 

 

Originally, when the United Nations offered up their Partition Plan in 1947 the intention was that two democratic countries would result, for two different groups of people living contiguously in peace, security and mutual recognition of the legitimacy of each other. Israel accepted the UN offer and from 1948 onward has represented the only true democracy in the Middle East, amidst an array of kingdoms, sheikdoms, dictatorships and theocracies.

 

As a Jewish state, albeit an inclusive one, giving citizenship and equality to other ethnic/religious group living amongst the majority Jewish population, Israel has been forced by the hostility of its neighbours to maintain a military presence with the intention of forestalling frequent attempts to destroy its presence on its ancestral Judean landmass, now shared by edict of the United Nations with religious/ethnic factions adamant that it has no place amidst majority Islamic states.

 

Assembled armies of the Middle East attempted time and again to extirpate Israel from its heritage land, to no avail. And while at the present time, some of those originally belligerent states now have forged cordial relations -- or at the very least, tolerate Israel's presence -- the Arab contingent naming themselves Palestinians, taking on the mantle of original dwellers on the land, which they are not, has remained violently hostile, losing no opportunity to lethally attack Israeli citizens. 

 

The Palestinians embarked on a decades' long propaganda of victimhood and slander, convincing an empathetic Western audience that Israel was an illegal intruder into the Middle East, oppressing the Palestinians and taking land meant for them. Their unrestrained and violent antipathy toward Israel, the school curricula teaching Palestinian children to hate Jews and to aspire to martyrdom by killing Jews, the program of the ruling authorities to pay financial rewards to killers of Jews and violence-prone imprisoned Palestinians has ensured that no accord between the two solitudes could ever result in two states, side-by-side. 

 

 

 

Israel has attempted to negotiate peace agreements that would lead to the establishment of an internationally legal and recognized Palestinian state was refused time and again by Palestinian leaders who adamantly refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish state. But although the Palestinians' refusal to compromise to make it possible for the two-state solution to arise, nations that are considered allies of Israel, continue to insist that the 'two-state-solution' must be accomplished in justice to Palestinian aspirations, while setting aside the intransigence of the Palestinian insistence on Israel's destruction.

 

The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, represented by the Fatah faction of Palestinian denial of an Israeli presence interacts through their leader and the president of the PA, Mahmoud Abbas, as a 'moderate' whose agenda remains that of challenging Israel's legitimacy as a Jewish State. The leadership of the Hamas contingent, a recognized terrorist group, is proudly overt about their intention to destroy Israel by any means possible. Time and again Israeli governments over the years have attempted to reason with both Hamas and Fatah to accept a peace accord and recognize Israel's right of existence.

 

The response has always been an Intifada, and the ongoing resolve to counter Israel's presence with unmitigated violent savagery. Yet France, Britain and Canada, among other nations of the world, insist that the Palestinians must have their recognized sovereign state bordering that of Israel's. While covertly the Palestinians in whose name the West and other geographic nations support statehood recognition, plot to attack Israel and its citizens endlessly.

 

None of the states that see it as imperative that the Palestinians have their state, are faced with the dilemma themselves of a neighbour dedicated to destroying their presence, yet they support the Palestinian entitlement to secure what they adamantly refused in 1947, and have ever since, when it would mean living in peace alongside Israel. Confoundingly enough, Muslim Arab states themselves have little real empathy at this point in the endless terror attacks against Israel for the Palestinian position. For while the West opens its welcoming arms to the presence of Palestinians, the states in the Middle East evade their presence.

 

Emigration, migration, and refugee status has seen a wide influx of Palestinians in democratic nations of the West. And there they continue their fulminations against Israel, spreading their viperous draughts of slanderous venom, reawakening historical levels of international antisemitism to fever pitch, in the process convincing those who now support their cause that Israel is the oppressor, the Palestinians are pitiable victims, in a reversal of reality, but one that resonates with the uninformed, the oblivious and the Jew-haters.