Hi Helen,
I know I'm late in replying to this post but the truth is that I prepared a reply and it was lost when the format I use collapsed just as I was finishing the reply. I was really annoyed and decided to start again later on. Well, later on turned out to be today. :)
I agree with much you said and even more so. Let me put it this way. 10 years ago I was totally against a 2 state solution. As times changed and the conflict kept on getting worse rather then better many of us that were opposed to this solution decided to give it a try and so far as we can see there have been no positive result since the PA refuses to sit down and talk peace and the terrorist Hamas is only interested in wiping Israel off the map. So is the PLO/Fatah since they never changed their charter since it's inception either.
Now believe it or not there are other options for a 2 state solution that the world is ignoring and many are beginning to accept as the true solution. Israel on the one hand and Jordan as the Palestinian state. Now this might come as a surprise to you but over 80% of those living in Jordan are Palestinians. I don't want to go into the history of the region but when Trans Jordan now called Jordan was formed it was given to the Abdullah (from the Hashamite family) who was a Bedouin from Saudi Arabia on lands that were supposed to be part of Israel. Since the large majority of Jordanians are Palestinians they already have a state. I could go on and on but the below articles explain it very well.
Shalom,
Peter
Posted by
Mark Tapson Bio ↓ on Sep 30th, 2011
With a petition for Palestinian statehood presented before the United Nations last week, the issue of the disputed right to the land of Israel seems to many to be on the verge of an historic, if unsatisfying and controversial, resolution. But Dr. Arieh Eldad, a Member of Knesset and chairman of the Jewish nationalist Hatikva party, insists that the root of the issue is not territorial, and thus any peace plan based on the concept of dividing the land is destined for failure.
In his pamphlet titled simply “Jordan is Palestine,” Eldad writes
Dividing the land of Israel west of the Jordan into two states – Israel and a Palestinian state – has become the only political plan accepted for international and domestic (Israeli) discourse. This, despite dozens of failures in trying to implement it during the past ninety years. Every failed attempt has been accompanied by bloody conflict and/or war.
Recently Eldad – also chief medical officer and senior commander of the Israel Defense Forces Medical Corps and a Brigadier-General in the IDF (Reserves) – expressed his iconoclastic opinions in a speech at Temple Ner Maarav in Encino, northwest of Los Angeles. Also entitled “Jordan is Palestine,” his presentation put forth what he calls the “simple truth” that the Jews, and not the Arabs, have an historic right to the land of Israel. “I’m all for ending the occupation,” he said. “We must end the occupation. Of course, I’m referring to the Muslim occupation of the land of Israel, starting in the seventh century.”
So yes, there is certainly a territorial component to the problem, Eldad acknowledges. But, he explained, falling back on a medical analogy that reflects his profession, “We have misdiagnosed the conflict. It is a religious war. It’s a clash of ideologies. It’s not a territorial conflict.”
Eldad gives an example of this clash of ideologies in a FrontPage Magazine contribution entitled “A Story of How Deep the Palestinians Have Sunk into the Moral Abyss.” A surgeon specializing in the treatment of burn victims, Eldad was instrumental in establishing the Israeli National Skin Bank in Jerusalem, the largest skin bank in the world, which stores skin for everyday needs as well as for wartime or mass casualty situations. He relates the true story of a Palestinian woman given medical attention there after her own family burned her for some transgression of “honor”:
One day she was caught at a border crossing wearing a suicide belt. She meant to explode herself in the outpatient clinic of the hospital where they saved her life. It seems that her family promised her that if she did that, they would forgive her.
This is only one example of the war between Jews and Muslims in the Land of Israel. It is not a territorial conflict. This is a civilizational conflict, or rather a war between civilization & barbarism.
In his presentation last week he offered another example of the religious root of the conflict. Many thousands of Palestinian teachers, he said, work in the education system of UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees),
and the only thing [the students] learn is to hate the United States, to hate Israel. If you open a math book of the fourth grade of a Palestinian school, you learn that “if a shahid, a martyr, on a bus can kill fifteen Jews, how many Jews can be killed by three martyrs on a train?” This is the kind of mathematics they learn in school.
Eldad’s solution?
Any alternative plan should be based on the fact that the Palestinians have their own state already in Jordan, a kingdom – in which the Palestinians are at least 75% of the residents – created after the British Mandatory land of Israel was divided into two. The plan should focus on resolving the regional solution by settling the Arab refugees in Jordan and other Arab countries that absorbed Palestinian refugees after the War of Independence in 1948…
srael would exercise sovereignty over all territory west of the Jordan, receive exclusive authority over security issues in all areas of sovereignty, since Israel could never accept the existence of an army from another country west of the Jordan, with airspace sovereignty and full control of external borders…
The Plan “Jordan is Palestine” is the only approach that can handle conflict without endangering the very existence of the State of Israel.
There are four major elements of his plan: 1) recognition of Jordan as a Palestinian country; 2) the closure of UNRWA and the creation of a plan for the settlement of Arab refugees in Jordan, under the auspices of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which has a track record of successfully resettling tens of millions of refugees around the world; 3) Israeli and international guarantees of a continued Hashemite rule in Jordan, and 4) the application of Israeli law in Judea and Samaria.
If we remember that the main driving force of the Arabs in this conflict is Islam, the Jordan River border will not solve the conflict. But this plan will create a national state for Palestinians, who will be able to fulfill at least some national desires, and it will be a state whose very existence does not endanger Israel. The Jordan border will establish a clearly defensible border.
In addition to offering these recommendations, Eldad also pulled no punches last week when offering his opinion of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. Eldad says that after Netanyahu’s humiliating treatment at the hands of Obama earlier this year, in which the President simply left the Prime Minister to mull over his demands while Obama abandoned him for dinner, Netanyahu exhibited exactly the same characteristics as a soldier afflicted with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Eldad decried Netanyahu’s willingness to bend under “extreme pressure” from the White House; he challenged him to answer the unilateral Palestinian declaration of statehood with unilateral annexation of Judea and Samaria.
This is typical of Eldad’s bold, politically incorrect assertions. A year ago he called for the assassination of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, comparing him to Hitler. And unlike other politicians, Eldad does not sugarcoat the future. Because the Israeli-Arab conflict is religious and not territorial, he claims, there will not be peace in the Middle East. “I don’t promise peace. I promise containment of the conflict.”
Mark Tapson, a Hollywood-based writer and screenwriter, is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center. He focuses on the politics of popular culture.
Posted by Jamie Glazov Bio ↓ on Sep 22nd, 2011
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Dr. Mordechai Nisan, a retired lecturer in Middle East Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He continues to teach in other educational institutions on topics ranging from the Arab-Israeli conflict, Islam, Israel, Lebanon, and Minorities in the Mideast. He is the author of the new book, Only Israel West of the River.
FP: Dr. Mordechai Nisan, welcome to Frontpage Interview
Thank you for having me.
Congratulations on your new book. What inspired you to write it and why did you write it now in 2011?
Nisan: Thanks Jamie.
There is a significant erosion in the world and in Israel itself of belief in the justice of Zionism and Israel as a legitimate Jewish state. I felt that the charges of racism and illegal occupation had to be met in a reasoned fashion, so I mobilized arguments on behalf of Israel’s cause. In 2011, we witness the Palestinian diplomatic campaign for statehood, and this idea focused on the territories of Judea and Samaria – what the world calls the West Bank. It is a grave threat to Israel’s welfare. My response is a timely and I hope effective defense of Israel’s national rights and explanation of her political and security predicament.
FP: What is the major theme of the book?
Nisan: The predominant theme is that Israel is justifiably in control of all of Jerusalem and the territories as a historical homeland and national space for fulfilling Israel’s development and growth. This converges with my argument against a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River, a state that would destabilize the situation on the ground, catalyze tension and terrorism, radicalize the Arabs in Israel, demoralize Israel’s population, and raise doubts about the country’s stamina to face the Palestinian push to the sea. It is the Palestinian state idea that will excite popular Palestinian passions that Israel is on the way down and that the future is with the Palestinians.
FP: How does this book fit into the range of your other research and writing concerns?
Nisan: I have written on Israel from the start of my research with a focus on the Arab challenge to the Jewish state. So this book is a continuation and application of my thinking given the present circumstances of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But my broader research concerns and writings, like minority peoples and Lebanon, have sensitized me to the fragility of small peoples in the Muslim/Arab dominated Middle East. As a small people in an Arab sea, the Jews of Israel will always face demanding challenges to preserve their identity and cultivate their resourcefulness in pursuing the modern Israel national venture.
FP: What do you make of Abbas? How is he different from the leaders of Hamas?
Nisan: Coming after the passing of flamboyant and legendary Fatah-founder
Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas has to try and make his individual political mark. He has adopted the political discourse of peace-making with Israel, but without ever abandoning the essential Palestinian demands, like refugee return, which are designed to destroy Israel from within. Without any doubt, leading the Fatah movement, the PLO, and the Palestinian Authority, Abbas shares with Hamas the long-term Palestinian goal to destroy Israel. Hamas uses an Islamic idiom and a Sharia-based policy agenda, while the Abbas-run PLO/PA apparatus plays to the Western audience, media outlets, and the Israeli public. The deceiving and pugnacious Abbas is a far greater danger and threat to Israel than Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, a transparent enemy of Israel.
FP: The Palestinians have been offered a state many times — on many generous conditions. Why do they reject all the offers?
Nisan: The Palestinians rejected a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the past because they considered it a capitulation to Israel’s existence and a refutation of getting all of Palestine. The revolutionary campaign in principle sets its political sights on Israel’s elimination more than on Palestinian statehood. Yet, in the 1980′s, Palestinians began to murmur sweet nothings that they would settle for a state alongside Israel rather than in place of Israel. It is all sand in the world’s eyes. The Palestinians believe in a staged-process to get Israel to withdraw and suffer domestic demoralization, while the Palestinian flag will arouse Arab nationalist and Islamic religious arrogance, gushing with visceral contempt for the Jews wherever the Palestinians wander around Israeli society – in the streets, the universities, and shopping malls. This Israeli-Palestinian conflict contains powerful cultural undertones that arm the Palestinians with the indomitable drive toward victory – not compromise or reconciliation at all.
FP: What do you think of the vote for an independent Palestinian state that might be coming up at the U.N.? What are the possibilities?
Nisan: A declaration by the UN General Assembly for an independent Palestinian state is assured; getting a vote through the Security Council is not in the political arithmetic of its composition. But it is important to appreciate the historic occasion when the broad international community is essentially united behind the idea of a Palestinian state – jihadist, Islamic, irredentist – in the heart of the Jewish people’s homeland. This world community – Europeans, Africans, Asians, and others – supports the peace-and-war strategy that the Palestinians conduct against the small state of Israel.
In reality, the world community is knowingly determined to undermine the territorial integrity and national resilience of the besieged Jewish state. The mantra of “Palestinian statehood” should not fool any decent person, government, or country. The world has basically gone sour on Israel, tattered and feathered as illegitimate and criminal in its essence and policy. I only hope Israel will have, beyond the requisite resources, the wisdom to do all that its interests demand, and against anyone who threatens its welfare.
FP: Does this book offer a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
Nisan: It is somewhat presumptuous to confidently offer a solution, so I prefer to talk of a resolution or containment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The locus for some kind of conflict-resolution, perhaps not peace as an idealistic notion, is in Jordan, east of the river. There the majority Palestinian population has the right to affirm their national rights against the alien-origin and minority-based Hashemite monarchy. Kings have fallen in modern Mid-eastern history, like Egypt and Iraq, and the collapse of the regime in Jordan would be part of a historical process. This would not be a national calamity and it would, rather, offer the Palestinians in Jordan and elsewhere the opportunity for statehood. The river should be the border and the two-state solution — Israel west of the river and Palestine east of the river – can be implemented in a strategically sound fashion.
FP: Dr. Mordechai Nisan, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.
I have been studying this issue regarding the Palestinians for years now and have been trying to do my little part to educate people about them and what is going on between them and Israel ...as Evelyn can tell you. She is on my email list.
I don't know why Israel wants so much to sit down and negotiate with the Palestinians. Even if the Palestinians entered into a treaty with Israel, according to their Koran, they are not obligated to keep any promises made to the infidel governments. They can even sit there and lie, the Koran says, and they will break any promises they make with Israel. So it is a waste of Israel's time!!
If I were in charge of the Israeli government, I would be wanting to wipe THEM off the map and get rid of that plague once and for all.
Helen
Quote:
Hello Friends,
Pat Condell discusses in his latest video a subject I've been raising ever since I started this thread. The Israeli/Palestinian issue has nothing to do about land or territory in exchange for peace.
If any of you've noticed the PA in it's bid for statehood at the UN gave maps of the so called PA state and lo and behold it encompasses all of Israel. For those of you who don't understand the implications of that I sure do pity you.
Over the many years of peace talks Israel's made concession after concession to an entity that never existed historically but in order to insure peace for future generations agreed to a two state solution and worked to achieve that goal. Peace in our area. But the Arabs aren't interested in peace and never were else with all the concessions we should have had peace here years ago. The problem is that they don't want peace but the total destruction and eradication of Israel from the map of the world. The Hamas and PLO charters state this "simple desire" of these so called "Palestinians".
In conclusion it's not land for peace but killing all the Jews as they must do if they obey their koran and the big mo. Now the proposed PA map might make more sense to those that didn't get it before.
Shalom,
Peter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1N1zhUm84w&feature=player_embedded