Israel has no partner for peace because the Palestinian leadership hasn’t prepared their people for peace.  Palestinian society has limited access to ideas and information outside of their society, as they are a totalitarian government that limits free speech and expression.  The vast majority of Palestinians cling to the demand of the full return of Palestinian refugees to Israel proper, as well as believing that the fight against Israel is not only to end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but also to destroy the entire state of Israel, or support a “one-state solution.”

Most people who understand the history of the conflict between these countries will appreciate why Jewish people and Israelis in particular do not rush to embrace solutions that others wish to impose on them. What the final solution sought to impose on the Jews of Europe during World War II, the “one-state solution” advocated will namely be the destruction of Israel as an independent Jewish state.

Here one must look to the past behavior of those proposing the “solution” to discern where the idea, if implemented, is headed. A good place to start would be to become aware of the hate-filled curriculum Palestinian children are indoctrinated with from their earliest age regarding the Israeli state. In 1993, the Oslo Agreements were introduced in Israeli schools.  To promote understanding of the nation’s efforts to achieve peace, the government introduced peace education. Hearts, flowers and doves decorated books about getting along with Arab neighbors. On the Palestinian end, ninth graders study from official textbooks that assert, “Treachery and disloyalty are character traits of the Jews and therefore one should beware of them.” Jews are cast as satanic, violent and cunning, as “thieving conquerors” who have stolen Arab land and must be fought and defeated. How can Israel promote peace when death and violence are being taught to children in Palestinian schools?

At its heart, the principle of a pro-Western, independent, successful, vibrant, democratic, non-Islamic country in the region is what has motivated all the attempts to destroy Israel as a Jewish state. The recent notion (only since 1967) of their being an independent “Palestinian state” is one of its offshoots. The Arab countries surrounding Israel (Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan and Iraq—650,000 Jews against 40 million Arabs) attacked her on her birth as a modern state in 1948 seeking her destruction. Their actions created a refugee crisis, which they exacerbated by their refusal to accommodate their displaced fellow Arabs.  Instead, they allowed them to fester in refugee camps on the West Bank and Gaza. It is for these individuals that the fictionalized term “Palestinian people” now applies and for which a “Palestinian state” is being sought.

At the end of the day, a one-state solution is calling for the annihilation of Israel.  Due to terrorism and incitement, a two-state solution is the only tenuous possibility for peace.  Israel longs for peace, but as long as Hamas and Fatah rule as feuding nations, hatred is being taught to children in schools and rockets continue to be launched into Israel, national security will continue to remain at the heart of Israel’s decision-making.

Where does one begin? How many of these anti-Israel rants does the Sundial intend to print year after year after year,  while your ‘Fact-Checker’ rots away like the crypt-master in Manzanita Hall.  Will anyone awaken the ‘Fact-Checker’ from his nightmarish slumber?  Why must your accidental & abashed readers always do it for you?

Glatzer wants Israel to cease to be a Jewish State, although the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations Mandate insisted that it be such.  Glatzer doesn’t seem to be too concerned that all 22 Arab states are not ‘’secular & democratic’, why isn’t he in Egypt (where 20 percent of the population are persecuted Coptic Christians) shouting for this lovely idea? Glatzer knows full well that every minority; Christian, Hindu or Jewish that has ever lived in a Muslim state is considered ‘Dhimmi’; second class citizens.  He wants the Israelis to become Dhimmi, sorry, but they are not so stupid as to put their lives into permanent jeopardy for the likes of Mr. Glatzer.

Glatzer in his creepy ignorance and historically bizarre statistics, might be shocked to learn that the original Mandate for the re-establishment of the ancient Jewish state included what is now Jordan & the West Bank, but the British reneged on their Mandate and kept slicing the Jewish State down until they only received 20 percent of the original promise. It was that miniscule state that was voted on by the United Nations in the ‘partition’ of 1947.  But it should be understood that it was not the U.N. that gave the Israelis their state…it was won on the battlefield…first against the British, and then against a plethora of Arab states that sought to annihilate the Jews.

Glatzer’s idyllic description of ‘Palestine’ seems to come from his own febrile mind, there are no such records of ‘beautiful civilization’ by any visitors to the region.  It was the return of the Jews (who by the way were always a majority in Jerusalem for the last 1,000 years) who transformed the land , and which incidentally brought in hundreds of thousands of Arab immigrants from Syria & Egypt.

All eyewitnesses (including British & Arab) to the migration of the Arab migration during the war of 1947/48 state that the Jews asked them to stay, in fact in Haifa they drove around with blow horns begging them to stay.  It was the Arab military & governments that demanded they clear out so that the killing of the Jews would be easier to accomplish.  Glatzer’s mentioning of ‘Biological Warfare’ clearly reveals that Mr. Glatzer is a malicious liar par excellence.  He believes in the ‘Big Lie’ as taught to all propagandists by Hitler…that the ‘bigger the lie the more believable it becomes’.

Glatzer weeps for the 600,000 Palestinians who migrated, but refuses to mention the 800,000 Jewish refugees kicked out of Arab lands following the Arab defeat.  Those refugees were settled in Israel.  The Arab refugees were purposefully kept in poverty by Arab states (though their upkeep was paid by the U.N. still to this day) to use as a weapon against Israel.  When India & Pakistan were partitioned there were 13 million refugees. At the end of WWII there were 10 million German refugees kicked out of European lands

The West bank by International Law is not ‘Occupied Land’ it is called ‘Disputed Land’ because at no time was it an actual nation, not under the Turks, or the British, or the Jordanians.  Its Final Status is to be determined by negotiation.  All the borders (including Israel’s) are only Armistice Lines…the spot where armies met & stopped.

The hatred against Israel is never based on facts, it is nearly always in the Realm of the Psychological.  Mr. Glatzer doesn’t really know why he hates Israel and will falsify history to your readers.  He is in the grip of a ‘mania’ which manipulates him, he is ‘Projecting’ a brutality onto the Israelis which he knows to actually be true of the Arabs.  I will gladly debate him in any forum to prove this.

Though your paper did not cover it, I did debate Professor Klein at a  Green Party forum last semester.  I would be happy to forward my speech if you would like to print it to contrast with Mr. Glatzer’s propaganda.

-Wayne Cohen

The flags of Israel and Palestine with photos of an armed Israeli soldier and an angry youth. Photo Illustration by Kurt Strazdins / MCT

The “two-state solution” seems like a fair way to solve the problem in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestine. The Israel Lobby (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), President Obama, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas all back it so what could be the problem?

Israel gets their state and Palestinians get Palestine. Problem solved, right? Unfortunately, a fair “solution” for a Palestinian state has never and will never be offered by Israel. There is only one fair solution at this late stage with Israelis and Palestinians more intertwined than ever. Separation is not an option. The only answer is full human rights for all Israelis and Palestinians in one secular and democratic state.

The first “two-state solution” was United Nations Resolution 181, passed in 1947. Under the diplomatic cover of the UN, White Western Europe and the US decided to carve up indigenous Arab land, which wasn’t theirs to give away. Israel has benefited from being a colonial settler state from the get go.

Fifty-five percent of Palestine was “given” to the Jewish State even though Jews owned only 8 percent of the land at the time. The “Arab State” would get 42 percent even though they owned 92 percent of the land. Jerusalem was to be shared 50/50, as an international city.

Contrary to popular lies, it wasn’t an empty land. Palestine was a historic civilization; here villages are hundreds if not thousands of years old. Many Palestinian towns were in the process of modernizing. Villages were shared by Christians and Muslims, schools added foreign language courses for children, and sophisticated plumbing and irrigation systems were newly added. Tragically, this beautiful civilization was destroyed. Palestine would soon be lost forever.

The injustice of “partitioning” away over half their land was apparent to the Palestinians; they summarily turned down the offer. Can you blame them? Who would willingly give up more than half of their country? David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, organized a secret group called The Consultancy, whose Plan Dalet was the blueprint for Ethnic Cleansing. The founder of the State of Israel foreshadowed what was to come, “We must expel Arabs and take their places.”

This “expelling of Arabs” was the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, and is remembered as the Nakba (Arabic meaning catastrophe or disaster). In all, approximately 800,000 Palestinians were forced from their country by psychological torture, brute military force, random terrorist attacks, biological warfare, and ultimately wanton civilian massacres such as the one seen in Deir Yassin. In what could be seen as the perfect metaphor, the Palestinian village of Khayriyya (Arabic for “The Blessing of the Land) was demolished and in its place, the garbage dump for Tel Aviv was built. Approximately 13 towns and 419 villages were ethnically cleansed so Jewish Zionists could “take their places.”

In response to the refugee crisis, the UN passed Resolution 194 in December 1948. It guaranteed the right of all the refugees of Palestine to return to their homes at the earliest possible date. This “right of return,” for the approximately 800,000 refugees and their descendents is sacred, absolute, and non-negotiable.

The second attempt at a “two-state solution” was in 1949. The UN’s Palestine Conciliation Commission made the unconditional return of all refugees, along with a 50/50 split of Palestine, the conditions for peace. According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe’s book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, everyone accepted this as a fair solution, “The US, the UN, the Arab world, the Palestinians, and Israel’s foreign minister.” So who prevented peace? Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion and King Abdullah of Jordan had other plans to divide Palestine between them.

In 1967, Israel occupied the remaining 22 percent of Palestine they didn’t cleanse the first time around (The West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip). Forty-two years later this now amounts to the longest military occupation in modern human history. Israel almost immediately started building colonies on this occupied land. Currently, there are almost 500,000 Israeli settlers living in illegal colonies in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Every last one of these settlements is a violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which states an occupying power cannot transfer its population into an occupied territory.

The occupation continues, and the Palestinians are barely clinging to life. You may hear a lot of talk on the news about Obama’s demand for an Israeli “settlement freeze.” But this plea for Israel to put an end to the colonization of Palestine is nothing new.

Israel’s participation in 2003’s Road Map for Peace required Israel to “dismantle settlement outposts erected since March 2001” and to “freeze all settlement activity.” Since the occupation began in 1967, and President Lyndon Johnson called settlements “an obstacle to peace,” every US administration has subsequently denounced settlements.

If Israel knows the US offers only empty threats, why would they stop their takeover of Palestine? Are Jim Crow-style, Jewish-only villages and roads, and hundreds of humiliating checkpoints the way to peace?

Isn’t a “two-state solution” nothing more than segregation all over again? It seems like it’s a terribly racist thing to say, “These people can’t possibly live together; they have to be separated (equally).” The two-state solution is nothing more than “separate but equal” on a grand scale.

“Supporters of Israel” advocate a racially and religiously pure state for them and them alone. I hear talk of establishment of a Palestinian state, and a “democratic Jewish state.” Could America be a democracy for an African-American minority if we were officially a “White Christian Nation”? Of course not. So, why is segregation glorified in the Holy Land?

Stay tuned for Part two: Israel and Palestine already live in one state. Let’s make it official (and fair).