Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: The Five States solution

http://www.jpost.com/Home/Article.aspx?id=179380
The five-state solution
By DANIEL GORDIS
06/24/2010 11:18
Those who argue that the two-state solution will not work are right. 
It’s more likely that we’ll need five: Hamastan, Fatahland, Palestine, 
Haredia and Israel.
At long last, even if years too late, Israelis woke up this week to the 
realization that we face yet another existential threat. Yes, it took 
100,000 “Men in Black” in downtown Jerusalem to make the point, but 
finally, we get it. As dangerous as are the delegitimization of Israel 
and the specter of a nuclear Iran, Israel is no less threatened by a 
growing population of religious fundamentalists who insist on the right 
to racial discrimination in their schools and who utterly reject the 
legitimacy and authority of the Supreme Court. They reject, in other 
words, the idea of a “Jewish and democratic” state.
There’s more, of course, including their treatment of Sephardim (even 
haredi Sephardim), the often despicable attitude to women in their 
communities, their tendency toward violence (when irked, they attack 
city workers, police officers and even the haredi rabbi who urged the 
Sephardi parents to go to the Supreme Court) and, most obvious, their 
unwillingness to share the burden of defending this country.
This cancer threatens to destroy everything we have built. Yes, that’s a 
harsh metaphor, but it’s apt. As Dan Ben-David of the Taub Center has 
shown, despite its current economic stability, the State of Israel is 
simply economically unsustainable if matters continue this way. Barring 
a dramatic shift in policy, the country will collapse under the weight 
of these haredi “cells” that drain the energy from the best of the body. 
There’s nothing inherently evil about a cancer cell; we dread it only 
because it kills the organism we desperately wish to preserve. Haredim 
have every right to live as they wish, but that does not mean that we 
must allow them to destroy the country that we have built at such great 
cost over the past century.
THE HAND-WRINGING of the past week suggests that most Israelis believe 
that there’s little we can do. I disagree. With apologies to Jonathan 
Swift, I offer the following modest proposal for our collective 
consideration.
Those who argue that the two-state solution will not work are right. We 
need not a two-state solution, but a five-state solution.
1. Hamastan will be created on the territory now known as the Gaza 
Strip, and will be ruled by the same people who already run it. Like 
Iran and North Korea, Hamastan will survive through sheer force and the 
use of terror, until its citizens rebel. Its borders are already 
internationally recognized. It already has a flag, and international 
sympathy in abundance.
Yes, it’s short on many other commodities, so one presumes that even as 
Israel continues to blockade it (for it will remain sworn on Israel’s 
destruction), it will have to continue to let in massive humanitarian 
aid, either by sea or by land. But perhaps Egypt will open its borders 
and let goods flow in from the south. After all, it’s not as if Hamastan 
will be sworn on Egypt’s destruction. In Hamastan, in short, nothing but 
the name changes.
2. Fatahland, on the other hand, will rise from what is today the West 
Bank, or Judea and Samaria. It, too, thankfully already has a flag. It 
could become a democracy, though probably a limping one at best, 
considering the Palestinians’ record of creating transparent, democratic 
institutions. True, we might be pleasantly surprised, and its democracy 
might flourish. Equally possible, though, is that absent Israel’s 
efforts at propping up the scaffolding of its democratically inclined 
leaders, Fatahland could slip into dictatorship. The jury is out, but 
whether Fatahland is democratic or just another version of the brutal 
regime of Hamastan would really not be Israel’s problem.
Fortunately, even if Fatahland begins as a despotic regime, however, 
that could eventually change. For as Americans like John Adams and his 
compatriots knew, as millions of former Soviet citizens learned and 
Zionists before May 1948 understood well, you can earn freedom when you 
want it badly enough and are willing to risk – and sometimes to die – 
for it. Perhaps Fatahlandians will really crave freedom enough to be 
willing to die for it. They’ve proven that there are those of them 
willing to die to kill us; now we’d see if they’re willing to die to 
make themselves free.
3. Palestine will be the country of today’s Israeli Arabs. Increasingly, 
Israeli Arabs are wholly unambiguous about the fact that they reject the 
notion of Israel as a Jewish state. Adalah is only one of the 
Israel-Arab advocacy groups that have openly called for ending the 
Jewish character of the State of Israel. And the citizens of Umm 
el-Fahm, Israeli Arab citizens who rioted after the recent flotilla 
incident, continuously make it clear that they want a different type of 
government. It’s time to give them one. Though its borders would have to 
be negotiated, Palestine would be based in the “Triangle” section of the 
Galilee where such sentiment is strongest. And we’d have to figure out 
how to handle the other pockets of such sentiment, which are not 
geographically contiguous with the Triangle.
Palestine would probably be democratic. It would simply be liberated 
from the oppressive Jewish regime that it can’t bear, and would be free 
to chart its own course. And amazingly, Israel might have a neighboring 
Arab state with which it’s never been at war.
Alas, Palestine does not have a flag. The PA’s flag will be taken by 
Fatahland. And Israel’s flag, based as it is on the image of a tallit, 
would be thoroughly unacceptable. Designing a flag will thus be one of 
the first challenges to which the leaders of the new state will have to 
turn their attention.
4. Haredia will be the ultra-Orthodox state. Based primarily in the 
Jerusalem neighborhoods of Mea She’arim, Geula and Sanhedria, along with 
Bnei Brak and perhaps a few other localities, Haredia would be the 
country that last week’s 100,000 plus protesters clearly desire. It 
would have a Supreme Council of Rabbinic Elders, not the vile secular 
Supreme Court that so offends them. They would be free to do whatever 
they wished with their schools, and with their Sephardim. They could 
impose a halachicly based system of law as other countries have done 
with Shari’a. They could virtually guarantee the exclusion of all the 
nefarious influences they so deeply object to in contemporary Israel. 
They could impose whatever standards for conversion they wished, without 
causing a rift with the rest of the Jewish world, which would actually 
have more in common with Turkey than it will with Haredia.
Today’s haredim already have a political party called Degel Hatorah, the 
flag of Torah. Surely, they’ll have some ideas for a flag.
How Haredia will defend itself against attacks from elements emanating 
from Hamastan and Fatahland is, admittedly, not entirely clear. Defense, 
after all, takes some serious commitment, a willingness to risk and lots 
of training. There is a real possibility, unfortunately, that Haredia 
will be utterly unable to defend itself, and Haredians (some will just 
call them Haredim, probably) will find themselves the most abandoned and 
vulnerable group in the Middle East. What will the world say about that? 
Will there be the same outpouring of concern that there is now for the 
Palestinians of Gaza? We’ll learn a lot about the world from watching 
how many other countries come to the verbal and physical defense of 
Haredia facing its Arab neighbors all alone.
5. Israel will be the region’s Jewish and democratic state. It doesn’t 
have recognized borders, but at least it does have a flag. It will be 
mostly Jewish, though some Israeli Arabs will decide to remain Israelis 
instead of becoming Palestinians, and they should be welcomed. The same 
with Haredim – a few might be willing to recognize the legitimacy of the 
Supreme Court and might decide to live in a Zionist entity. If they want 
to go to the army and are willing to live off their own salaries and not 
off government subsidies, then they, too, should be welcomed.
ISRAEL WILL be a broad tent. It will include religious and secular, 
right wing and left wing, free marketers and those more inclined to 
socialism. It will be home to Im Tirtzu, a right-of-center student 
organization seeking to restore Zionism to Israeli campuses that 
countenances no criticism of Israel whatsoever, and Breaking the 
Silence, former IDF soldiers – and other peaceniks who’ve now glommed on 
to them – who travel across the world telling anyone who’ll listen about 
the excesses of Israeli power. It will be home to Avigdor Lieberman and 
Naomi Chazan.
Eventually, of course, it’s likely that both Palestine and Haredia will 
discover that running a country is a pretty complicated business. You 
need hospitals, and police. You need a functioning court system. You 
need people who can run the power company and the phones, people who can 
fly airplanes and people who can represent you in the international 
community. And, they’ll discover, all that money that Reform and 
Conservative Jews helped steer toward Israel actually did make life much 
better.
So the time may come that they’ll crawl back to us, on their hands and 
knees, begging us to annex them back. Imagine that. Israel annexes 
territory, but because the territory actually asked to be annexed. What 
a breath of fresh air.
Wait, though – not so quick. Maybe we’ll take them, maybe we won’t. 
Because by then, hopefully, we’ll have had a serious national 
conversation about what our country is committed to. We won’t be 
embarrassed by the idea of a Jewish democratic state, and we’ll have 
discussed what preserving it will entail. So we’ll tell them who we are. 
They can join the enterprise called Zionism, or at least live with it 
and respect it, or they can stay independent.
But we ought not to be cavalier about this scenario – it is profoundly 
sad for Israel, too. Most Israelis take great pride in the country’s 
commitment to diversity, even if it is far from perfectly implemented. 
Its commitment to heterogeneity, and to freedom, is both one of its 
great strengths and one of its great weaknesses. Breaking up the region 
into these disparate countries addresses the weakness, but also robs 
Israel of potential strength. It’s an eventuality Israel should want to 
avoid.
What makes Israel different from these other imagined countries is that 
it does not wish to purge from its ranks those who are different. But it 
is slowly being given no choice. The challenge to its leaders now – were 
they only able to extricate themselves from their inability to make any 
decisions about anything at all – is to take sufficient steps to show 
these populations that in an ideal world, we want to live with them. But 
even more than that, we want to survive. Therefore, if surviving means 
living without them, so be it.
The real onus is on those groups who refuse to accept the notion of 
Israel as a Jewish and democratic state to show Israelis how we survive 
with them, and to demonstrate that their continued participation in our 
nation will not lead to its ultimate demise.

 The five-state solution
E' uno dei piu' convincenti articoli a favore dello stato unico
binazionale che abbia mai letto <g>
PP