I would advise Smotrich to read again a song written by the national poet, Natan Alterman, long before he was born. During the "Arab rebellion" in 1937, Alterman praised the units of the illegal Hebrew underground forces: "No people withdraws from the trenches of its life." No chance.
The second choice would be easier. The Arabs, who already constitute even now a slight majority between the river and the sea, will become a pariah people and serve their Israeli masters. The Arab majority will grow rapidly, owing to the much higher Palestinian birthrate. We would deliberately recreate the South African apartheid situation.
History, old and new, shows that such a situation invariably leads to rebellion and eventual liberation.
So there remains the third solution. It suits the Israeli temperament much better: War. Not the interminable wars that we have been engaged in since the beginning of Zionism, but a big, decisive war that puts an end to the whole mess. Inevitably, the Arabs will be vanquished and obliterated. End of story.
WHEN I came to the conclusion in 1949 that the only way to end the conflict was to help the Palestinians to set up a state of their own, side by side with the new State of Israel, my train of thought started from a very original assumption: that there exists a Palestinian people.
To be honest, I was not the first to realize that. Before me, a wise left-wing Zionist scholar, Aharon Cohen, put forward this idea. All other Zionists always furiously denied this fact. Golda Meir once famously declared: "There is no such thing as a Palestinian people!"
So who are all these Arabs we see with our own eyes? Simple: they are riffraff drawn to this country from neighboring areas after we came and made this country bloom. Easy come, easy go.
It was easy to think so as long as the West Bank was under Jordanian rule, and the Gaza Strip was an Egyptian protectorate. "Palestine" had disappeared from the map. Until a man called Yasser Arafat put it there again.
In the 1948 war, half the Palestinian people were driven out of the territory that became Israel. The Arabs call this the "naqba" -- catastrophe. (By the way, they were not driven out of Palestine, as many believe. A large part found refuge in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip).
SINCE 1949, the simple fact is that two peoples live in this small country.
Neither of these two peoples will go away. Each of them believes fervently that this country is their homeland.
This simple fact led me to the logical conclusion that the only solution is peace based on the co-existence of two national states, Israel and Palestine, in close cooperation, perhaps in some kind of federal setup.
Another solution would be a unitary state in which the two peoples live peacefully together. As I have pointed out several times recently, I do not believe that this is possible. Both are fiercely nationalistic peoples. Moreover, the difference between their standards of living is huge. They are as different in character and outlook as two peoples can be.
Now comes Smotrich and proposes the third solution, a solution many believe in secretly: just kill them or drive them out altogether.
This is much worse than Mussolini's program. It reminds one of another recent historical figure. And it may be remembered that Mussolini was shot by his own people, who hung his body upside down from a meat hook.
Smotrich should be taken seriously, not because he is a political genius but because he expresses openly and honestly what many Israelis think secretly.
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