Two States and Conrad Black

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Has it never occurred to the deadenders that their game has allowed Israela strategy of outright absorption of all the lands of the West Bank.  All Israel needs todo unilaterally is to designate three Palestinian urban enclaves connected by atransportation corridor between them. One such enclave would be the urban portion of Gazato the Egyptian border providing a port of entry on the Sea and into Egypt, A second enclave as part of Jerusalem and a third enclave on the border of Jordan providing access to Jordan and a conduit to the Mediterranean for Jordan.
Once the enclaves are defined,the remaining land can then be outright absorbed into Israel properalong with any Palestinians therein. This leaves the Palestinians with three effective city states which canactually prosper economically.  The Palestiniansoutside the enclaves will have the option of becoming Israeli and join analready thriving community in Israelor moving to the urban centers as their choice.
All three enclaves could quicklybuild upward to create ample housing for the population.  What is more three such urban centers wouldestablish the uniqueness of Palestinian Arab culture under the protection and guaranteesof Israel and clearlyseparate from either Jordanor Egypt.
In time as tensions ultimatelyevaporate since the issue is now settled, the borders will open up and all willthrive.
Curiously, this can be appliedunilaterally now by Israelthrough redefining the new future borders of the three enclaves and the outrightcommencement of the building of the transportation corridor including rail androad.  It is the building of the road andrail that will focus everyone’s mind on the idea that this may just be it.
There will be howls over the landtakeover and the reshaping of any number of internal borders, yet it can bepresented as the new bargaining position and just proceed as if it wereaccepted.
Again do recall Stalin’s solutionto the German, Polish and Russian question. He used mass transportation to simply separate the three communitiesinto viable countries.  The same thingwas done to separate out the Indian Subcontinent.  It is never perfect and not everyone actuallymoved but it does hugely temper further conflict.  Those borders are settled.

If the Palestinians want more,they have to come to the table as honest participants prepared to settle.  It is their failure to do so that has reducedtheir prospects from the beginning.

Conrad Black: A better two-state solution
ConradBlack | Dec 8, 2012
Israeli mountaineer David ''Dudu" Yifrah displays thePalestinian and Israeli flags on the summit of Mount Everest.
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/12/08/conrad-black-a-better-two-state-solution/
According to the CBC, 87% of Canadians approved the elevation of Palestine to observerstatus at the United Nations last week, and disapproved the stance of theCanadian government opposing this move. I assume that the CBC poll isreasonably professional, (unlike these jokey polls the Toronto Star likes to cite, including inmatters related to me, in which recorded telephone conversations are randomlylaunched in small numbers around metropolitan areas, producing whatever resultsthe Star seeks). Presumably, Canadians approve a two-state solution and thinkthat this is just a positive step in that direction. And even the comments ofrespected commentators in the National Post, such as Jonathan Kay and my dearfriend David Frum, tend to strengthen that view.
While I do not fault the CBC’s poll, and know that it’s anchor, PeterMansbridge, is a fair and knowledgeable man, the CBC, like the other leadingmedia outlets in Canada, have allowed Canadians to become drowsy from theinhalation of Palestinian obfuscations.
The Palestinians have ingeniously retreated to a two-track strategy ofmiring the shop-worn, flea-bitten, hacked and torn peace process in suchcomplexities that they can continue in the palsied demand for the destructionof the Jewish state while apparently only seeking to advance an innocuous stepon the road to the two-state solution that almost everyone now purports toespouse. The media should have referred to, but with rare exceptions did not,and it would have required careful and attentive coverage to pierce thecustomary Near Eastern veils of obscurantism to notice them, the PalestinianAuthority’s clarifications of the West Bank president’s comments to the GeneralAssembly on Nov. 29.
On the morning of that day, the West Bank foreign minister, Riad Malki,issued a statement confirming that Israel’s admission to the UnitedNations in 1949 was conditional on the right of Palestinians to return to theirhomes. In his remarks to the General Assembly, Abbas said that Israel had attempted in 1948 “to extinguish [thePalestinians’] being,” and that since then, Israel has conducted “an occupation(that is) an apartheid system … which institutionalizes the plague of racism.”And the Palestinian ambassador to UN, Riyad Mansour, gave an address in New York on the evening of Nov. 29 in which he said ofthe day’s proceedings: “Today we have legislated a Palestinian state with the1967 borders and East Jerusalem as itscapital.”
Of course, they had done nothing of the kind; 87% of Canadians were notapproving any such thing. Nor were the countries of the West apart from theCanada, the U.S. and the Czechs; i.e., Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Westernand Central Europe and all of Latin America, voting for the legitimization ofany such series of changes to the historic and actual facts. If the threeauthoritative assertions of the Palestinian officials cited above (and theseare West Bank spokesmen, who were voted out of office four years ago in favour ofthe much more extreme Hamas faction, but continue to be listened to becauseHamas is too much for all but neo-Nazis to endure, acoustically or otherwise,for very long), are analyzed, they produce a quite different outcome than theassumption by the Palestinian Authority of observer status at the UnitedNations.
It emerges that the founding of Israel in its genocidal assault on thePalestinians, was the moral equivalent of the Nazi Holocaust’s assault on theJews in its genocidal assault on the Palestinians; that Israel is not ademocracy but an apartheid state not morally superior to the former racistregime of South Africa, that all designated former residents of Israel andtheir professed descendants may return to Israel and demographically inundate thatcountry so Jews are again in their accustomed minority role, in which they havebeen mistreated since thousands of years before the birth of Muhhamad (or JesusChrist), as a minority in what the United Nations created 64 years ago as “ahomeland for the Jews;” and that this Muslim-majority Israel will return to the1967 borders, (altered in that year only by the premeditated aggression andunsuccessful war-making of the Arab powers), and Jerusalem will again beseverely divided, with holy Jewish sites such as the Western Wall in the tenderand demonstrably tolerant hands of Muslim clerics. The galleries of the GeneralAssembly had been diligently packed, with the complicity of UN officials, onNov. 29, with organizations selected by the UN Division for Palestinian Rights.
What occurred was another monumental disgrace and a mockery of truth,law and the facts on the ground. To restore these banished ingredients, let usrecall that the British effectively promised a homeland to the Jews in Palestine without compromisingthe rights of the non-Jews there, in 1917, before they had even evicted theTurks as the occupying power. The United Nations created Israel as a Jewishstate and to the extent Israel exceeded the minimalist borders accorded theState of Israel by the UN, it was because the Arab powers defied the unanimousdecision of the permanent members of the Security Council and heavy majoritiesin the Council and General Assembly and attacked the nascent Jewish state,which defeated the Arabs, despite the long numerical odds against them. It isimpossible to discern which Arabs fled the war zone of the former Palestinevoluntarily, which from the Israeli militias, and which on the urgings of theArab leaders, and from which part of the Palestine mandate so the return 64years later, of all of this vastly proliferated group of claimed fugitives tothe Jewish state is nonsense from every angle.
The treatment of Arabs in Israel has been less generous than thetreatment of the state’s official religionists, but it has vastly exceeded inprosperity and civil rights the life Arabs have had in any other country in theregion, except some in the petro-states and the Christian Arabs in Lebanon,when they have not been fighting for their lives against their Muslim fellow-citizens.Israeli Arabs vote and speak freely and the earlier unsubtle efforts of Israel toencourage them to seek residence elsewhere have been abandoned. Israel hasnever operated an apartheid regime, even in territories occupied after thefailed Arab aggression of 1967.
The fact that even reasonable people and countries have been gulled orworn down by this latest campaign of sophistical anti-Semitic trickery leads meto think that Israel should declare a Palestinian state: a narrower West Bank,a deeper Gaza, a clear access between them, the Christian and Muslim sites inIsrael maintained by Americans, Germans, Indonesians and Malaysians, aPalestinian capital in East Jerusalem, as long as the main city is intact asIsrael’s capital; the right of Palestinian return to the new Palestine and nonegotiations about anything with anyone who does not recognize Israel’s rightto exist as a Jewish state.
And there would be a clear understanding that any terrorist attackwould continue to be replied to with an attack on the leadership of theinitiating entity; any war-level combat would bring massive retaliation, and(since Obama is unlikely to do anything to prevent the nuclear arming of Iran),any attack with biological or nuclear weapons on Israel would cause the nuclearcounter-obliteration of the entire population of the aggressor country; twoeyes for an eye, all the teeth for one and no more effete Western snobberyabout disproportionate responses. This isn’t the elk season; it’s the survivalof the Jews.
Of course the Palestinians can have their country, and the Jews mustfinally be secure in theirs, and the process must not be retarded any longerwith Arab exploitation of the distracted and lazy fatigue of Western countriesthat should know better than feebly to equivocate. At least 87% of Canadiansshould be proud of the position Stephen Harper and John Baird have taken onthis issue.