“Peace will come when the Arabs … love their children more than they hate us.” 

— Golda Meir, Fourth Prime Minister of the State of Israel

Whenever Israel’s future is discussed, there is always that glib assertion that Israelis have no choice but to implement a “two-state solution” — A “Palestinian” state alongside Israel. For Israel’s welfare, we are told. Alternatively, Israel would have to absorb millions of “Palestinians,” give them the right to vote and change the nature of the Jewish state forever.

Inherent in this argument is the imperative that Israel must give Arabs the right to vote — a right they would not have in any of the 22 Arab countries around them.  But they press on. A “two-state solution,” they say, is far preferable to an absorption of territory by one Jewish state in which “Palestinians” are not fully franchised voters. It’s all about the vote.

One has to wonder why. Voting rights don’t follow when a new Arab state is created. The Arab world without a free press, an open nominating system, and other democratic building blocks, can’t get from here to there readily. Voting in Islamic states, as it is presented, is mostly a phony exercise staged to mollify world opinion and create a domestic fiction. Perfected in the third world, it is all about one vote, once.

The world never has a problem with Arabs not voting except when Israel is perceived to be the keeper of that right. The most recent self-immolating democracy is Gaza which, when forced to hold an election at U.S. insistence, morphed into an aggressive terrorist, missile-firing entity where no elections will be held again soon. Jimmy Carter’s rush to approve notwithstanding, elections don’t make democracies; institutions have to be built, economies freed, and electorates informed before free individuals can produce the foundations that allow for a democratic impulse to materialize. Elections like the one in Gaza are a third world evasion that persuades the naïve. Americans should know better. Israelis do.

As for Israel integrating a population inside her borders, she has always worked to find solutions to these kinds of problems. There are likely answers here too. By first encouraging the growth of democratic institutions and processes like electing local administrations, Israel could help move Arab society away from the tribal proclivities that drive the rest of the Arab world. The cauldrons in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Gaza stand witness to the truism that creating democracy is a process, not an act.

It should be clear to any observer that the implementation of a two-state “solution” would leave “Palestinians” with no automatic right to vote and create no real path to civic rights and citizenship. Anyone caring to dig deep will find that  “Palestinians” overwhelmingly realize this and know that their well-being is derived from things other than a faux process that would accompany a 23rd Arab State. Arabs in Jerusalem, for example, consistently seek Israeli citizenship and in many surveys Arabs indicate a preference for Israeli governance rather than the thugocracy that would ensue after the IDF departed.

Instead of insisting on making Israel enable a dysfunctional route to chaos, we should be encouraging her to find other ways of dealing with the problems that the status quo presents — first and foremost of which is to make the territories in question secure from violence and terror.

Maybe we have an inordinate trust in human nature and believe too strongly in what Golda said (see quote above), but we believe that, like Israelis, Arabs want and need a safe and secure environment for themselves and their children. Only then would those who choose to stay in an Israeli-administered Judea and Samaria be able to develop their own institutions without altering the nature of the Israeli society that thrives around them there today.

Certainly, the worst case is that the democratic values that the residents of Judea and Samaria pursue would provide them with a far better and fairer environment to secure their futures. At best though, the growth of an Arab polity schooled in democracy would begin to fulfill the promise for the Arab world that the acceptance of a Jewish state of Israel in the Middle East has always offered.

Thanks to Professor Steven Plaut for his thoughts on this topic.

— nrg