The Binational Delusion

In this post I show why the Binational Solution, also known as the One-State Solution, of one common secular state for Jews and “Palestinians”, is a heart-conceived (meaning not thought out to the full), misguided or malicious, and dangerous delusion.

The natural question to come now is, “Why devote a post to the Binational Solution? It’s a fringe proposal, taken seriously by no official source”. That may be so now, but that is no guarantee for the continuance of the situation in the future. The “Palestinian Right of Return” was once considered to be exactly that—a fringe solution, not taken seriously by any statesman—until suddenly it came out as a serious proposal by former US secretary of state, James Baker (may he go to hell soon, amen), in his Iraq Study Group report. What is now fringe can easily turn mainstream in a few years, or by the lever of circumstance. In addition, our war is a war of minds first, and we must engage any ideological challenge that looks likely to become a threat.

We ignore the fact of the Binational Solution at our peril; it is that proposal which many Leftists say Israel must follow in order to “get right with the international community”, to “atone for its original sin of dispossessing the indigenous Palestinian people”. It is a proposal that gains momentum with each rare, half-hearted and overdue attempt of Israel to do the right thing in defending herself from her would-be annihilators (God forbid), the Muslims. It used to be an unthinkable proposal, but as we saw a year ago, the Second Lebanon War brought out what had been latent. Just as, on Daily Kos, the war instilled boldness in a diarist to openly express agreement with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (may he go to hell soon, amen), that it would be better for the world if Israel were wiped off the map (God forbid), so too I have found a case of a blogger who, up to that war, kept his mouth shut about Israel, but then found out he could hold no longer. Walton Pantland sometimes posts comments on the South African Jewish blog It’s Almost Supernatural, which I regularly read, and that’s how I found his blog, Red Star Coven (coven? Isn’t that a witches’ grouping? Ooooo, scary scary scary! Hocus Pocus! Double Trouble! Avada Kedavra! Cauldron Bubble! But back to the post…). He began his publicization of his anti-Israel feelings with a gala opening on July 13, 2006, and has since gotten quite, quite comfortable with bits like “Pull the plug on the Zionist entity” and “Israel, that blood-thirsty, war-mongering pustule of aggression in the Middle East”. But already on that first anti-Israel post, we can see he went from complete silence to a full-blown proposal of the Binational Solution:

There will be no justice in the world until Israel is destroyed, both physically and as an idea. This will not happen while America continues to bankroll this brutal oppression, and while the Western media are too frightened to speak out against injustice.

[…]

Israel and Zionism must be destroyed, and replaced with a Palestinian territory where Muslims, Jews, Christians, Druze and atheists can live together in peace and harmony, sharing humus recipes and enjoying the sunshine and unique history. Until then, no platform should be given to Israel to put her side of the story. There isn't one - it's just racism and imperialism.

Amazing how that war cut through all the BS and brought the utmost in honesty from the Israel-bashers. There’s a lot more I can bring from that post, including a nod to the Khazaria Hypothesis (saying of the ‘Jews of eastern origin’ that “Culturally, they have far more in common with the Palestinians than they do with Jews from Europe or America”), but I’m going to focus on the Binational Solution here. Lest you think Pantland is advocating Jewish genocide (I’m sure he doesn’t but would, if that happened, God forbid, shrug it off as “you reap what you sow”), he writes the following:

Note that by destruction of Israel, I don't mean the destruction of Israelis, or Jews, or any other people. I mean the destruction of the State and its army. I believe that anyone should have the right to live anywhere they want in the world, and that includes Jews in Palestine.

But that also means that Palestinians have the right to stay in Tel Aviv, and Muslims in New York. No one has exclusive right to any territory.

This is the meat of the post. It’s important, because it’s something I can work with, intellectually address. Leftists say—and they say that’s what the Muslims, including Ahmadinejad in his “mistranslated statement”, want too—they only wish for regime change in Israel. Or a little more than regime change: a re-engineering of entire Jewish thought to reject its exceptionalist (they call it, “racist”) ideas. They propose leaving the wine (the people currently living in the Land of Israel) intact, just changing the wineskin (the political system, the state). “We’re not anti-Semites, we’re just anti-Zionists”, they say (see this old, but ever more relevant, take by Steven Plaut).

Kept together until the strongman was gone, then all hell broke loose. Reminds me of another place, beginning with an I, ending in a Q.

But the question that must be posed, especially when the proposers never tire of reminding us that they’re the reality-based community, is how that solution can be made to work out. As we all know, Communism looked good on paper, and it was supported by an extensive infrastructure of intellectual smoke and mirrors arguments, but ended up failing miserably in all its goals, taking 100,000,000 lives in the process. Millions of lives are at stake here again; people do not buy a car without reasonable guarantees, much less, then, take mortal risks that are not covered by safeguards. And let us remember that the Israeli Jewish public today, all but its youngest, are cognizant of the fruits of the Oslo Accords. They are not in a mood for gambling, and certainly not for betting the farm, which is what the Binational Solution amounts to.

“One secular state where Jews and Palestinians live in peace and equality”. The piping of the human heart (“Imagine no countries… nothing to kill and die for…”) is evident and slightly sympathy-evoking; however, hard-nosed reality demands a probation of those lofty sentiments. Where to begin?

Let me begin with the word, “secular”. This is possibly the gravest mistake of our time, because it underlies not just the errors concerning statesmanship of the Israel/“Palestine” conflict, but also the misconceptions that led President George W. Bush, otherwise a good and capable president (consider who could have been the alternatives: Al “Gaia lo volt” Gore and John “Botched Joke” Kerry), to make so many wrong moves following 9/11 to this day. The myopic Eurocentric eye thinks all the world has undergone the same changes as the West, but the hard facts are that the Islamic world, and especially its Middle Eastern heartlands, are like the Bible Belt squared. The Bible Belt of the USA astounds Europeans in its prevalence of religious feeling among its inhabitants; in the Islamic world, not only does that situation exist, but religion is prevalent even on the political level. Take Saudi Arabia, change all its Islamic elements to Christian ones, and you come pretty close to Medieval Europe.

Apart from assuming the veneer, there has never been any successful secularist movement in the Islamic world—even the Turkish experiment, led by Kemal Atatürk’s forceful hand, is now falling apart. The PLO may have advertised itself as a “secular liberation movement”, but that was no more than smart marketing, just as “Palestinian nationalism” is nothing but the Marxist-friendly wrapper in which the Islamic jihad against Israel is sold. The rulers in the Islamic world tend to be more secular than their subjects, for they wish to keep the flow of US aid, while the people’s hearts are with the jihad against both the Great and the Little Satan. The short of it: there cannot be a secular Binational Solution, because the inhabitants of the Middle East, the Muslims, overwhelmingly take their religion seriously.

Next: following Pantland’s [self-]righteous decree, “But that also means that Palestinians have the right to stay in Tel Aviv”, a Binational Solution would mean, shortly after its application, an influx of Muslims into all the state of Israel, including, as he says, Tel-Aviv. So now the question is: This high-flown dream of “Jews and Palestinians living in peace”—what’s to guarantee it? What do you offer to convince the Jews that the influx would not be followed by a massacre (God forbid)? Words are not enough—we’ve already been through trusting in words without anything concrete to back them up, been there, seen it, done that for at least seven years (1993–2000), thank you very much. The Oslo Accords had no tangible provision to stop the suicide bombers from exploding in Tel-Aviv (beginning in 1994); it was the much-maligned “Apartheid Wall” that did that.

Steven Plaut (HaShem bless him) calls the Binational Solution the “Rwanda Solution”. It is a very apt name, because what happened in Rwanda in 1994 is a case of kal va-chomer—if the binational coexistence of very similar nations like the Tutsis and the Hutus did not stand in the way of genocide, then it is the height of insanity, or criminal negligence, or malicious scheming (pick your poison), to raise seriously a binational coexistence for the people living on the Land of Israel. The members of the Hutu and Tutsi nations look the same or almost so, speak the same languages and share much heritage; the Jews and the “Palestinians” don’t look the same (even the Jews of eastern origin look markedly different from the Arabs, the main reason for this being the prevalence—for cultural reasons—of inbreeding in the latter), they don’t speak the same language (Hebrew and Arabic are not mutually intelligible, even though they’re related), and they don’t share the same heritage and religion (the Biblical and the Koranic narratives and mindsets are very different ballgames; see also my post Desert, but no Manna, from August 21, 2007). Anyone who, in the view of the Rwanda Genocide, believes in a naturally-flowing peace between the Jews and the “Palestinians” cannot honestly keep calling himself reality-based.

This should have relegated any binational solution to the trashcan of failed ideas. Unfortunately, a lot of people haven’t done that even to Communism.

Another point, bringing out yet another of our Leftist ironies, is that their proposal constitutes cultural imperialism, in that they are intent on imposing their vision no matter the dreams of the others. I mean dreams like the ancient Jewish dream of sovereignty in the Land of Israel, maintaining a Jewish state with a Jewish culture and character, observing all the Israel-dependent mitzvot (commandments of God that can be performed only on the Land of Israel), with the promise of renewing them all, including those of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem (may it be rebuilt speedily in our days, amen). Apparently, only two dreams matter to our Leftist enemies: the “Palestinian” dream of “self-determination” (i.e. a state for a nation that was cooked up from scratch 60 years ago), and more importantly their own dream of “righting colonialist wrongs” (of which the very state of Israel is a part, in their view), on the way to their final Messianic vision, the aforementioned refrain, “Imagine no countries”. The Jewish dream is not given a thought, apart from the platitude, “We respect the Jews’ right to a secure life” (why, thank you! And I respect your right to inhale and exhale—ain’t I so, so grand, so worthy of praise, for that?).

I outlined the inseparable connection between Zionism and Judaism in a previous post. For people who like to talk of “respecting the Muslims” (which we all know is really fear—non-Muslims don’t go into a frenzy when you depict the founders of their religions dipped in bodily refuse), the Leftists seem to spare little of it to the Jews. But the Jews, however much 2,000 years of statelessness may have obscured it, have minds of their own, and they’re not going to give up that 2,000-year-old dream easily. Effectively, this means another possible outcome to the Binational Solution: apartheid. Yes, that word that is now bandied about carelessly (recently by an Israeli Jew, no less, choosing world praise without regard to the fact that his words will be used as justification for spilling his brothers’ blood, God forbid), that word which, when applied to present-day Israel, debases what things were in South Africa back in the day, would be able to be rightly applied if the Binational Solution came to pass without being immediately followed by genocide. For, just as there is no chance for any Western country to stay a Western country when Muslims become its majority, so too Israel would be stripped of its Jewishness by democratic vote if the Muslims were to become its majority. Maybe the Europeans could take that lying down (I’d like to think that the upstanding European citizens posting on Gates of Vienna are representatives of a still silent majority, but wishes do not always reality make), but the Jews could not, not after 2,000 of life in the Diaspora, a history which every Jewish child knows by heart. And then the only way of preserving the Jewish character of Israel would be true apartheid, the Leftists thus having made the situation worse than it ever was.

Two possible outcomes of the Binational Solution, both horrible to contemplate: genocide or apartheid. Making the world a worse place either way. I have yet to hear how those outcomes could be averted, how the Binational Solution could really be made, forced, ensured, guaranteed to lead to that utopian dream of “peace and equality between the two nations” that Leftists like Pantland describe it to be. Again: millions of lives are at stake, and we Jews are in no mood for making costly experiments.

The Binational Solution was never conceived with our interests in mind. It runs over us, proposed as “a sacrifice for the greater good”, just as the concession of the Sudetenland was forced on Czechoslovakia in 1938 without asking the Czechs what they thought about the whole matter. The Leftists propose it only as a measure of appeasement, or worse, as part of their perverted philosophy of, “no peace without justice” (best screamed from the rooftops in a shrill tone while wearing a Ché t-shirt), which really means “sticking it to The Man”, The Man being the hated capitalist, Bible-believing West. The Muslims propose it for the same reason they accepted the two-state Oslo Accords: as a first step in their plan of a Middle East free of that non-Muslim encroachment on Dar Al-Islam (any territory Muslims have ever taken root in. That means Spain, too).

If there is any negotiated solution that has a theoretical chance of working, it’s the Two-State Solution. But even that’s theoretical, because in practice, Islamic ideology does not permit a truce (note: a truce, not a peace treaty) with the non-Muslim enemy for more than 10 years. And it’s already been tried two times: 1947 and 1993, with similar results. The Binational Solution can’t work even in theory. Therefore, whereas those who propose the Two-State Solution are usually just missing some critical information (about the nature of the conflict: the fact that the “Palestinian nation” is a fictitious covering for an uncompromising Islamic jihad, the local chapter of Islamic imperialism worldwide), those who propose the Binational Solution are enemies of Israel, of Zionism and of the Jews in general. They must be called, as I have here, to present a realistic, credible way of how the Binational Solution would work; if they do not but still insist on advocating the Binational Solution, they must be dealt with as threats to our lives. May HaShem raise soon our Sanhedrin, in order that we may have the divine judicial basis for striking at our enemies, both the Muslim murderers and their Leftist enablers. Amen.