Then he added seriously: "If they compel us to give back all the territories, we shall give back all the territories. If they compel us to give back part of the territories, we shall give back part of the territories. If they don't compel us to give back anything, we shall keep everything."
The incredible happened. President Lyndon Johnson and the entire world did not give a damn. We were left with the entire loot, to this very day.
I CANNOT resist the temptation to repeat again an old joke:
Right after the foundation of the State of Israel, God appeared to David Ben-Gurion and told him: "You have done good by my people. Utter a wish and I shall grant it."
"I wish that Israel shall be a Jewish and a democratic state and encompass all the country between the Mediterranean and the Jordan," Ben-Gurion replied.
"That is too much even for me!" God exclaimed. "But I will grant you two of the three." Since then we can choose between a Jewish and democratic Israel in a part of the country, a democratic state in all of the country that will not be Jewish or a Jewish state in all of the country that will not be democratic.
That is the choice we still face, after all this time.
The Jewish state in all of the country means apartheid. Israel always maintained cordial relations with the racist Afrikaner state in South Africa, until it collapsed. Creating such a state here is sheer lunacy.
The annexationists have a trick up their sleeve: to annex the West Bank, but not the Gaza Strip. This would create a state with only a 40% Palestinian minority. In such a country there would rage a perpetual intifada.
But in reality, even this is a pipe dream. Gaza cannot be separated forever from Palestine. It has been part of the country since time immemorial. It would have to be annexed, too. This would create a state with a slight Arab majority, a majority bereft of national and civil rights. This majority would grow rapidly.
Such a situation would be untenable in the long run. Israel would be compelled to give the vote to the Arabs.
Utopian idealists would welcome such a solution. How wonderful! The One-state solution! Democracy, equality, the end of nationalism. When I was very young, I too hoped for this solution. Life has cured me. Anyone actually living in the country knows that this is totally impossible. The two nations would fight each other. At least for the first one or two hundred years.
I have never seen a detailed plan of how such a state would function. Except once: Vladimir Jabotinsky, the brilliant leader of the Zionist far-right, wrote such a plan for the Allies in 1940. If the President of the state will be Jewish, he decreed, the Prime Minister will be Arab. And so on. Jabotinsky died a few months later, along with his plan.
Zionists came here to live in a Jewish state. That was their dominant motive. They cannot even imagine an existence as another Jewish minority. In such a situation, they would slowly emigrate, as the Afrikaners do. Indeed, such an emigration to the US and Germany is already happening under the radar. Zionism has always been a one-way street -- towards Palestine. After this "solution," it would go the other way.
TRUTH IS that there is no choice at all.
The only real solution is the much-maligned "Two States for Two peoples," the one declared dead many times. It's either that solution or the destruction of both peoples.
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