· God gave the Promised Land (with the Holy Center in Jerusalem) now called Palestine, to the Jewish people and provided them with the Law, which is described in the Torah, on how to build a better world for all, Jews and non-Jews, in the Promised Land and beyond.· The enemies of the Jews have been expelling the Jews from the Promised Land from the very beginning but the Jews kept returning to the Promised Land (and Jerusalem) in spite of all threats.· After the Holocaust, the Jews were returning to the Promised Land in large numbers to escape a murderous Europe and to build a dream-home for the Jews where the Jews themselves are capable of defending themselves from holocausts, pogroms and anti-Semitism.· The Jews are eager to live in peace with their Arab neighbors if the neighbors agree with the security provisions designed to prevent new attempts to expel the Jews from the Promised Land.
For the Arabs, their Palestinian narrative is clear and Koran-based, and the true Muslims support this narrative:· Allah gave all people the only true religion Islam, and finally the human world have to become Islamic.· Palestine is the first part of the human world that had become Islamic and therefore, as the Koranic Law says, shall stay Islamic forever.· After the Holocaust, the establishment of the Jewish State Israel made a part of Palestine de-Islamized and the true Muslims are obliged to reinstate there the Koranic law.· The true Muslims can accept only a solution to Jewish-Arab conflict in Palestine that makes all Palestine an Islamic one.
An honest assessment of the two narratives makes it clear that there is no way to reconcile them – that is the reason why the “two-state solution” failed in spite of the great and sincere efforts of USA and European governments to find such solution.That is why I have concluded in the post, “Palestinians have outplayed Israel – what Israel may do now” that the unilateral, one-Jewish-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict outlined by Caroline Glick many years ago is the only solution available for Israel. This Israeli one-Jewish-state solution should preserve an opportunity for the Palestinians to decide for themselves with whom to collaborate politically in the framework of Israeli secure borders – to have their own Arab-Palestinian secure future without violating the Israeli secure future.The entire Palestine and Middle East history consists of similar one-sided solutions: a more powerful side defeats a less powerful side and imposes its own one-sided solution where a defeated side is not treated equally. The difference between what have happened in the history and what an Israeli one-sided one-state solution intends to do is that Israel is trying to find a solution where both Israelis and Arabs are treated equally.· Jews and Arabs have lived in Palestine in relative peace until the beginning of the 20th century. Neither Jews or Arabs had their national states – the Jews lived in communities while the Arabs lived in tribes. The ruling Turks of Ottoman Empire allowed Jews, Christians and Muslim to live in accordance with their own, non-Turkish traditions. Both Jews and Arabs owned pieces of the land where they supported their families by farming and animal stock raising. The land used by the Arabs was owned by tradition and transferred from generation to generation while the land used by the Jews was legally purchased either from the Ottoman government or from private Arab owners.· There were disputes and even minor military clashes but they were of the same magnitude than the others tribal disputes and clashes in the area like Persians vs. Arabs, Sunnis vs. Shiites, Kurds vs. Turks, or ISIS vs. Yazidis. The tribal/communal relationships remained the same after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in WWI, when the foreign European powers – UK, France, Germany, and Italy – became the governing powers in the Middle East.· However, in the late 1940th and in the 1950th, the foreign governing powers realized that the cost of the Middle East governing is too high, and began creating local artificial states to transfer the governing power to them. Since those artificial states were created not in a normal historic way when – before creating a state – the people find a common ground for a peaceful coexistence, immediately local wars started to reshape the Middle-East map artificially created by the foreign powers.· Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a part of this general reshaping. The current situation is such that everything is decided by non-peaceful means (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Kurds, ISIS), and Israeli-Palestinian conflict is going to be resolved in the same way with various foreign powers trying to advance their own, not Israeli or Palestinian, interest.· If it is so, and the history of the region confirms that is the case, it is much more beneficial for Israel to go ahead with own unilateral proposal for secure borders of the state of Israel, providing an option for the West-Bank Arabs to define their political future in the framework of Israel secure borders.
The readers who prefer a more emotional presentation over a fact-based one can find it on the topic of this post here in a video-talk by Pat Condell.