What would be your ideal solution to the Israel/Palestine issue?

[Simfan34]

Thanks for starting the thread- I've been wondering about this amidst all the bluster, that people rarely seem to have an end goal in mind.

A one-state solution will not work simply because one side (I will hazard it would be the Palestinians) would harass the other until they were removed from the picture one way or another. No one has wanted a "secular and democratic socialist" Palestine except for maybe George Habash, and he's dead. The thinking behind the one-state solution gave us Iraq. I don't think the world needs more Iraqs. Or, as in MOPs proposal, more Lebanons.

I do agree with Mikado that I really just don't see Palestine working in its current form, and the slightly grating thing is that the whole "Palestinian" identity as we currently know it is a fairly arbitrary concept more or less the product of the League-drawn borders. Before you just had a bunch of Levantine farmers, whose elite mainly looked to Pan-Syrian nationalism. Whereas the Jews have been a discrete group for just about forever. So you're lead to feel that one group has a greater intrinsic attachment to the land than the other, which is fairly tenuous, I'll admit, considering the Palestinians have been in Palestine for just about forever themselves.

My preferred solution would be for one group to simply leave the place. Maybe the Palestinians could relocate to Syria or the Sinai (maybe Israel should have kept it for that purpose). Or perhaps the Israelis could all relocate to the US (except for the weird Russian Nazis and their ilk). For the reasons stated above I'm inclined to say it should be the Palestinians.

Both sides seem intent on claiming the whole territory for their own (again, the Palestinians more so than the Israelis) so I'm challenged to see how, even if Israel was to evacuate the settlements, even if they were to give Palestine the territories bounded by the Green Line, etc, how said Palestinian state would somehow drop the revanchism.

It's funny, how I like to tell people I maintain a concerted apathy towards the whole issue but I very clearly have a rather... uncompromising position.

[Simfan34]

It's strange, considering how very possible an outcome that is (particularly when you consider what proportion of new births the Haredim a few decades from now would account for) and yet only those on the far right ever seem to be bothered enough by the prospect to bring it up.

I will say this frankly: I do not understand why exactly Israel gave some Arabs citizenship in the first place. The whole idea of a "Jewish state" is pretty exclusionary to begin with so I don't see what compelled Israel give citizenship to people who are at best apathetic towards it and at worse openly hostile. Actually, Israeli feeling and self-identification amongst Arab citizens has actually diminished over time, if I recall correctly.

The unfortunate truth is that, barring a sudden and comprehensive change in the attitude of Palestinians towards Israelis (not to mention the rest of the Arab world) towards an attitude of tolerance sometime in the intervening decades, this would more likely than not result in the cessation, through one means or another, of the presence of the Jewish inhabitants of the former Israel in this United Palestine.

This is why I am skeptical of the viability of any proposal; one state, two state, three state, no state, any of them.

[Simfan34]

Possible solution: swap American Haredis for Israeli non-Haredi Jews.

[Simfan34]

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There are worse things that could happen. And what would Bennett do- complain about all the Palestinians in Westchester? At least I doubt he would steal diapers by sticking them in his jacket, as an aunt of mine once observed at a Rockland Walmart.