Future Palestine

Wheee! After suffering more pressure than Waffen SS Panzer Division 'Das Reich' in Falaise Gap, the other half of the deadly serious yet amazingly risible intolerant Little Satan Hating Posse - Dr Mearsheimer finally succumbs to repeated pleading by all the cool kids to fantasize about 'Future Palestine"

So, does the Strip become the Riviera of the Med's SE 40? Fully crunk with bookstores, girl schools, churches, gay bars, Xian Youth Groups, Yacht Clubs, Hotels, Casinos, strip clubs and abortion clinics?

Does West Bank become a Mecca for cutting edge biz, manufacturing, shopping malls, education, high finance and fashion?

Nope.

"Future Palestine, and by that I mean the future of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, or what was long ago called Mandatory Palestine. As you all know, that land is now broken into two parts: Israel proper or what is sometime called “Green Line” Israel and the Occupied Territories, which include the West Bank and Gaza.

"In essence, about the future relationship between Israel and the Occupied Territories.

Given present circumstances there are four possible futures for Palestine, including Ye Olde "2 State Illusion."

"To be viable, that Palestine state would have to control 95 percent or more of the West Bank and all of Gaza. There would also have to be territorial swaps to compensate the Palestinians for those small pieces of West Bank territory that Israel got to keep in the final agreement. East Jerusalem would be the capital of the new Palestinian state.

"In the 2nd scenario, Greater Israel would become a democratic bi-national state in which Palestinians and Jews enjoy equal political rights. This solution has been suggested by a handful of Jews and a growing number of Palestinians. However, it would mean abandoning the original Zionist vision of a Jewish state, since the Palestinians would eventually outnumber the Jews in Greater Israel.

Third up?

"Israel could expel most of the Palestinians from Greater Israel, thereby preserving its Jewish character through an overt act of ethnic cleansing. This is what happened in 1948 when the Zionists drove roughly 700,000 Palestinians out of the territory that became the new state of Israel, and then prevented them from returning to their homes.

Following the Six Day War in 1967, Little Satan "...expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly conquered West Bank and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights.

"The scale of the expulsion, however, would have to be even greater this time, because there are about 5.5 million Palestinians living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.

"The final alternative to a two-state solution is some form of apartheid, whereby Israel increases its control over the Occupied Territories, but allows the Palestinians to exercise limited autonomy in a set of disconnected and economically crippled enclaves.

Expulsions are terrible -- no doubt -- all those poor poor people having to flee their homes, refugee camps (estabbed eons ago, aided and abetted by kindred Arab nation states that for some unknown reason could not bear to assimilate their own cuzs -- who share the same dialect, customs, penchant for honor killings and tribalistic kleptocrazy) and leave the past behind.

So what?

Can't be any worse than the millions of refugees who fled before the old school Soviet juggernaut that redrew the face of Ost Europa hard on the heels of Deutschland's 'Drang Nach Osten"

Even better -- sweetly parceling out Palestinians to any of Arab League's kindred despotries (horrid and benign) would be a strategic re alignment of immense proportions!

5 and a half million of the most literate Arabs ever on the face of the earth, with a track record of voting in real, open transparent elections may very be the harbingers of democracy promotion for the Middle East in the New Millennium.

Pic - "Neither track of Palestinian politics — resistance or negotiation — offers hope of achieving independence."