Teaneck–Caroline Glick, senior contributing editor of the Jerusalem Post, had just finished writing “The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East,” when Secretary of State John Kerry predicted that his efforts to restart negotiations with Israel and the Palestinian Authority would result in a peace deal in nine months. Ms. Glick recalled thinking, ‘if he’s right, I’m wrong,’ but was convinced it wouldn’t happen. Her book has been published. And there is no peace deal. Instead, it is the Palestinian Authority and Hamas that have made peace; negotiations with Israel have been suspended.
Caroline Glick is not clairvoyant. She analyzed the history of the Middle East, the stated positions of the Palestinians and the strategies and tactics they have employed to further their true goal—the destruction of Israel. They have never wanted a state, she said. They want to dismantle Israel and are not concerned about what takes its place.
In a May 11 talk at Teaneck’s B’nai Yeshurun, Glick reviewed the main points in her book which add up to the conclusion that “the two-state solution will only bring the final solution.” It would leave Israel weak, with indefensible borders to a state where millions of terrorists, with different allegiances, would move in. “They are not going to sit quietly at the border,” Glick said. “They would invade Israel and within 15 minutes they would be blowing themselves up.” Instead, Glick says that Israel should declare sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, which would create challenges for Israel, but not the existential threat it would be under with a Palestinian state. Israel would grant permanent residency status to the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria and offer them citizenship with reasonable restrictions, excluding anyone who has been involved in a terrorist or anti-Semitic organization.
A complete discussion of Glick’s thesis requires reading “The Israeli Solution.” In clear, direct and incisive language, Glick begins with the history of the Middle East from the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. She reviews how the European powers were given the mandate to govern the area until separate states could be formed. One of those states was supposed to be a homeland for the Jewish people, and it was rejected outright by the Arabs. She documents how Haj Amin El-Husseini became the leader of the Muslim Arab community and largely invented the Palestinian people. He did not advocate for a state; he saw local Arabs as part of a larger pan-Arab identity. He was an early and ardent supporter of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. He arrived in Berlin in 1941 and began daily broadcasts on a Nazi Arabic station, in which he exhorted “Muslims to rise up against the British and the Jews.” Glick writes, “The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and advisor to Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan.” After the war, Glick writes that his popularity “rendered him immune from prosecution for his war crimes.”
Hussein’s protégé, Yasser Arafat, under the tutelage of the Soviet Union, took up the mantle to destroy Israel. The Soviet Union, as part of its cold war strategy, “sought to co-opt the postwar anticolonialist movement” and brand Israel as “an imperialist, racist enclave.” In fact, Glick writes, “Israel was an anti-colonialist state par excellence. The Zionists had fought against both the Ottoman and British empires to secure an independent Jewish state. On the other hand, the Palestinian Arabs sided with the Nazis and their goal of global conquest.”
In her talk, and with more detail in the book, Glick reviewed how Israel’s neighbors are beset by internal struggles that have nothing to do with Israel. And yet, it has been the false view of both the US and Europe, that the absence of a Palestinian state is at the root of all the problems in the Middle East. President Clinton thought a Palestinian state would end terrorism in the world. Both the Bush and Obama administrations, acting on the same view, have pursued the two-state policy thinking that if they just tried harder than Clinton, they would succeed.
Meanwhile, a fact that gets ignored is that the Israeli government provides a better life to the Israeli Arabs than the PA does to Palestinians. Israeli Arabs, and Christians are looking at Syria and starting to prefer Israel. Glick says that 90 percent of Israeli Arabs and 75 percent of Christian boys are being sent to Hebrew schools. Allegiances are shifting. While Israeli Arabs once threw their lot in with the pan-Arab movement, to move past their dhimmi (second class) status, some are choosing loyalty to Israel, even enlisting in the IDF. The ironic truth is that those who are trying to castigate Israel as a racist state are in fact the perpetrators of a system that deems it a crime to sell land to non-Muslims, and have loudly stated that no Jews would be allowed to live in a Palestinian state.
While the Arab states are in the throes of self-destruction, Glick asserts, Israel is getting stronger. Aliyah–and the Jewish birthrate–is increasing the Jewish population while the Muslim birthrate is declining. Israel’s strategic importance is accelerating. China is building a railway from Eilat to Ashdod and Haifa as an alternative to the Suez Canal. The discovery of natural gas in Israel is expected to turn the country into an exporter. Additionally, in 2009 Israel discovered massive deposits of shale oil and is looking into whether or not fracking will be cost effective.
Internally, Glick maintains that despite what we read and hear, there is more, rather than less integration of Israeli’s religious and secular Jews, and that the varying cultures are getting along.
So what would happen if Israel declared sovereignty over Judea and Samaria? In her book, Glick looks at the probable reactions of the Arab states, Europe and the U.S. The Arab states that would try to harm Israel would do so anyway, Glick says. But if Israel controlled the region, it would be in a better position to deter threats and break up terror cells as they form. Europe’s “unhealthy (anti-Semitic) obsession with the Jewish state,” might have economic repercussions. But as Israel increases trade with Asia, the ramifications would be serious but not fatal.
“Time is on our side, but we must assert our rights,” Glick said. “We have to say to a lot of angry people, this land belongs to the Jews.”
By Bracha Schwartz
