Dear Israel,
President George W Bush’s road map is the last chance for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We Israelis are faced with the following choices: a two-state solution, enshrined in the road map, whereby a predominantly Jewish state lives alongside a Palestinian state; mass deportation of Palestinians from the occupied territories and Gaza strip; or an apartheid state whereby a minority governs over a majority using brute force.
The law approved [last] week in the Knesset banning Palestinians from marrying is in line with an apartheid state. This is as far a deviation from the intention of the founding fathers of Zionism as I could imagine. Is this the kind of state you long for? — Roman,
Dear Roman,
What you have written is defamatory to Israel as a nation and as a state, and especially to the Knesset of which you are a member. The Knesset did not decide “to ban Palestinians from marrying”. It decided — and only as a temporary provision for one year — not to grant Palestinians that marry Israeli citizens automatic citizenship. This was decided after the police in the past year discovered more than 30 terror cells run by Israeli Arabs, some of whom were Palestinians who married Israelis and consequently received Israeli citizenship.
The road map is a prize for terror. Any concession to terror, say [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair and George Bush, increases the motivation to continue attacks. Palestinian terror, which has taken the lives of about 1 000 Jews since the signing of the Oslo agreements, is ferocious and deadly.
It is particularly unfortunate that Bush and Blair are promoting the road map, the greatest prize ever given to terror. I view this as an act bordering on racist discrimination, as if to say: there is bad terror — terror against the West — while the terror against Jews should be “understood”, met halfway and be granted gestures such as the release of terrorists. — Israel
Dear Israel,
We read the law differently. Perhaps we read different versions. As to it being temporary, we both know too well that some of the most permanent laws are ones that were passed as temporary.
We are still living under “temporary” emergency laws left by the British mandate.
I do not wish to go into this law. I wish to discuss with you solutions for the long run. Do you have additional solutions to the three I mentioned in my first e-mail? Which do you choose? I assume it is not the two-state solution.
Come clean, Israel. Do you envisage 3,5-million people wilfully getting on buses? Or perhaps trains? We had experience with trains in the past. It could come in handy. Or perhaps the third option is your choice. Our children, our children’s children, will be raised in an apartheid state. — Roman
Dear Roman,
How sad to see you use scurrilous insinuations such as apartheid against your own country. Let’s assume that, in accordance with the road map, Israel withdraws tomorrow morning from Judea and Samaria.
The area of the new Palestinian state created there would be about 3 500 miles2 [9 100km2] about the size of a large ranch in Texas or Australia, with about 2,5-million Palestinians already living on it.
In Gaza 1,25-million Palestinians live in an area of only 233 miles2 [606km2].
With the largest population growth in the world, that figure will double, reaching a population density of 11 000 people per mile2 [about 4 230 people a km2]. They will have to live standing up! The result will be a never-ending war of terror against the Jews, who they say stole their land from them.
That is why we need a solution that will give the Palestinians the possibility of establishing a viable country, one in which they will be able to develop and grow.
Perhaps, over time, they will come to accept the existence of a Jewish state next door. But for that they need territory.
And that is something that Israel, with its measly 16 000 miles2 [41 600km2] inside the green line, cannot give them.
It can, however, be provided to them by their neighbours and brothers, Egypt and Jordan, which have vast, sparsely populated territories — the Egyptians in the Sinai, which is almost completely empty of human habitation, and the Jordanians in their vast and empty lands. If that should occur, not a single Palestinian in Judea, Samaria and Gaza would have to move (neither by truck nor train, as you offensively noted). The land for the development of Gaza would come from the northern Sinai, which borders on Gaza to the south, and Jordan would be the home front for Judea and Samaria, on its eastern border. — Israel
Dear Israel,
Though you might find the use of the term apartheid in the context of this debate scurrilous and unpatriotic, the march of folly that you would cheer me on to will either lead to that, or worse. Neither the international community nor the Palestinians will accept Israeli control of their lives and territory without the same basic democratic rights that you and I demand.
As to your suggestion that we create a mini-Palestinian state that will be supplemented by land from our neighbours, I have a mixed response.
On the one hand you show a modicum of long-overdue realism. Recognition that controlling all of the West Bank and Gaza is untenable. Like me, you are prepared to compromise part of your sacred title. We only therefore differ in the proportion of land we are prepared to cede.
On the other hand, you display an unhealthy dose of the right’s quixotic thinking and have ingeniously invented a new reason why a Palestinian state is a bad thing.
Let me make a proposal, first you and the settler leadership agrees to giving up all of the West Bank and Gaza, then together with the international community we can approach our Jordanian and Egyptian neighbours to complement our concessions by making available some more land. That way, we can address your objection to a Palestinian state. — Roman
Dear Roman,
Instead of worrying about the future of your own people, who are in existential danger even in their own land, you continually worry about the Palestinians. As if they do not know how to take care of themselves, and as if there are not hundreds of millions of Arabs surrounding Israel, with sovereignty over 22 countries and who also have some form of obligation to take care of their own brethren.
Not only do they have the largest oil reserves in the world, they also have huge land reserves, vast areas almost devoid of human habitation.
Yet instead of fellow Arabs taking care of a 23rd Arab state, a Palestinian state — helping it with land, economic aid, a solution for the refugee problem — you place this responsibility on Israel, with one of the highest population densities in the world.
As long as the Palestinians feel that the entire world, including the radical left in Israel, is preoccupied with them, they will never feel there is any reason to abandon the path of terror.
It is not additional land that the Arab nation needs, coming from the tiny portion allotted to the Jewish people, but rather the willingness to accept the Jewish nation as a legitimate member state of the Middle East.
By justifying their political claims, you are giving your seal of approval to those that support Palestinian terror against Israel. Let us not repeat the mistakes that led to the long exile. To hell with what the world thinks. — Israel
Roman Bronfman is a member of the Knesset. Israel Harel is founder of the Council of Jewish Settlements of Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Read the full version of this e-mail exchange at
www.guardian.co.uk/comment .