Of course they don’t want to be ruled by the current kleptocracy that rules the West Bank, but if Israel ever makes an agreement to allow a sovereign Arab state in the West Bank, it will be with a more stable, evolved and democratic entity, one would receive boatloads of money and investment from the rest of the world (don’t hold your breath waiting for it to happen).

The other point is, since when does Israel have the luxury of making what Arabs want a central concern? They also doubtlessly want the descendents of their former neighbors who fled in 1948 to be able to return. So what?

Good fences make good neighbors, and carving out as much as possible monoethnic boundaries seems to be the best shot at a sustainable peace in the future. IMO, multiethnic states are usually invitations for further strife. Just look at Lebanon, they haven’t been able to take a census since the 1930′s because they’re afraid (another) civil war will break out if they do.

I can see this ending two ways, one good, one bad.

Good: Egypt annexes Gaza, Jordan annexes the West Bank. Each state vigorously enforces its pre-existing peace treaties with Israel upon its new citizens.

Bad: Gaza, southern Lebanon, and troublesome portions of the West Bank become mildly radioactive glass. No more ‘Palestinians’, no more problems.

Since the ‘Palestinians’ are clearly incapable of governing themselves, a two-state solution is impossible. I’d prefer a resolution that avoids bloodshed, but I don’t see any way to achieve it.

Humorous, so Said is a “sober-minded scholar”? This absurd statement alone reveals your comments and “data” to be no more than revisionist “palestinian” propaganda. In other words, lies.

You may hide your words under a cloak a pseudo-scholarship, but they quickly reveal you to me no more than a smooth talking bigot.

Today I read where Hamas & the PLO intend to bury the hatchet and work as one. Another piece of the puzzle falling into place for the soon to come next Arab Israeli war.

The Russians of course love all of this. A decade ago Russia was a basket case, now they are a power house thanks to the price of oil. It is in their best interest to encourage a middle east war that destroys oil making capacity. And they have worked hard to do this.

Their war on the Ukraine was a test of the west to see what anyone would do if threatened. They have their answer.

They have been the most free Arabs in the Mideast. A great number of these Arabs are Christian, and so have no problem living alongside the Jews. All the nonsense comes from outside agitators. If the Arabs in Israel really wnat to secede, they can use the regular political means. They can assemble. They can form parties. They can vote.

Twain generally gave a good trashing of each country he visited and peppered his book with fabulous lies. It is probably good for SLC’s reputation that he did not put subsaharan Africa on his itinerary, as he was not kindly to most cultures he visited. For example, he wrote that Napolitans were particularly likely to die of diseases like cholera because by the time doctors dug through the dirt that encrusted each resident of Naples, it was too late to save them. Milan was nice enough, Twain “documented” except all the ladies were fat and had full beards and moustaches. And the city crawled with lice.

Zionists citing Twain as a Middle East expert is like citing the Zucker Brothers (Airplane!) as experts on aviation and the “air travel experience”.

His description of Greece mirrored his Holy Land description:

From Athens all through the islands of the Grecian Archipelago, we saw
little but forbidding sea-walls and barren hills, sometimes surmounted by
three or four graceful columns of some ancient temple, lonely and
deserted–a fitting symbol of the desolation that has come upon all
Greece in these latter ages. We saw no ploughed fields, very few
villages, no trees or grass or vegetation of any kind, scarcely, and
hardly ever an isolated house. Greece is a bleak, unsmiling desert,
without agriculture, manufactures or commerce, apparently.

Of course, the Turks have no version of their own AIPAC to claim that after the Great Noted Authority Mark Twain’s visit, it was “Italians from elsewhere” that populated Greece.

The Joan Peters book is more important as it was New Age Zionism, concocted out of past discredited lies and with Peters caught out fabricating her own deceit. It was actively pushed by Zionists to the Right-Wing Christians they were busy trying to win over as Christian Zionists. To a large extent, the Zionists succeeded. THe book had 10 printings. It is thoroughly discredited in academia as evidence of Peter’s fraud emerged. But still believed by the target audience, the guillable Christian Zionists.
It contains many Big Lies, such as the Radio Broadcast lie that non-Jews voluntarily left on their own. But the most significant Big Lie she pushed was of Palestinian non-existance prior to the 20′s.

Peters’ central thesis is that a significant portion of the 700,000 Arabs residing in the part of Palestine that became Israel in 1948 immigrated to the Jewish settled areas of Palestine between 1920 and 1948. Essentially, according to Peters, the Palestinians are a fabrication, like the tooth fairy, for no such people really exist. She implies that during Jewish colonization, Palestine really was a virgin wasteland, “a land without a people for a people without a land.” The Arabs that live there now, says Peters, moved to the area during colonial times, attracted to the region by the prosperity brought by the industrious Ashkenazi settlers from across the sea. Or in other words, the Palestinians are a demographic fabrication who have no historic claim or right to the land.

Peters attempts to prove this thesis by documenting a massive wave of illegal Arab migration to Palestine during the colonial period, and more specifically during the 1920s and 30s. However, as a number of more sober-minded scholars have pointed out (Said being the first who comes to mind), the amazing thing about From Time Immemorial is that its own demographic research contradicts this central thesis. The entire legitimacy of the book revolves around the magic number 2.7, for Peters maintains that between 1893 and 1947, in both the Jewish and Arab areas of Palestine, “natural” (i.e. non-immigrant) population growth was 2.7 percent per year. The funny thing is Peters puts the indigenous Palestinian Arab population at 466,600 in 1893. Unfortunately for her, and for her second grade math teacher, 466,600 times 2.7 percent over the 54-year time span turns out to be 1,146,902. And unfortunately again, Peters confirms that the total Arab Palestinian population in 1947 was 1,303,800. This means that according to Peters’ own research, 1,146,902 of the total 1,303,800 Palestinians living in Palestine during 1947 (88%) were not immigrants, were not the descendants of immigrants, but were purely and simply the result of Peters’ magic natural growth rate of 2.7 percent. In other words, only 156,898 (12%) of the Arabs living in Palestine were immigrants, thus rendering Peters’ book, as even Ha’aretz was forced to concede, “one of the more lamentable propaganda efforts in recent years.”

I don’t buy that Jews should remain stateless, nor that Israel is now a “fact” and there is no way to turn back the clock and argue the that Soviet Oblast or Kenyan high plateau offered was a wiser choice. That is moot, now. But that does not obviate that Jews wanted their ancestral lands back and took them from the inhabitants in a way that Germany (the Ostlands) and Serbia (Bosnia, Kosovo) failed to.
The people they cleansed were never compensated for their losses and as time has passed have not grown to accept their fate, but become more and more radicalized.