Sunday, January 30, 2011

When Is A Palestinian State Really Not One?

When its leaders have the responsibilities of sovereignty without having sovereignty. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Hussein Agha and Robert Malley say Israel has options other than allowing an independent Palestine or waiting for Arabs to outnumber and outvote Jews in Israel:
Already, by unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza, former prime minister Ariel Sharon transformed the numbers game, effectively removing 1.5 million Palestinians from the Israeli equation. The current or a future government could unilaterally conduct further territorial withdrawals from the West Bank, allowing, as in the case of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s West Bank government, or compelling, as happened in Gaza, large numbers of Palestinians to rule themselves and mitigating the demographic peril. The options, in other words, are not necessarily limited to a two-state solution, an apartheid regime, or the end of the Jewish state.

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