Oh, please. Everybody in Israel knows that Jerusalem is not on the table. It's the rest of the world that has convinced itself that somehow Israel might permit its capital to be split down the middle again. Never gonna happen. Even in the '97 and the '99 border finalization plans (which gave the Palestinians 97.5% of all land they asked for), almost all of J'lem and the Gush Etzion suburbs (because contrary to Western newspapers calling it a "settler bloc," the Gush Etzion neighborhoods are just suburbs of Jerusalem: over 200,000 Jews live there) were Israel's in exchange for land swapped from elsewhere. If I recall right, the Palestinians got part of Abu Tor, an outlying Arab semi-suburban neighborhood of J'lem. If they want to put their capital there, whatever. But Jerusalem is just not gonna be on the table. Never gonna happen. The Orthodox would never allow it, the veterans who fought to regain it in '67 would never stand for it, and anyone with a lick of common sense remembers that before Israel retook the Old City in '67, the Arabs didn't even let Jews into the Old City to pray at the Western Wall, much less to live there. And yet, since Israel reunited Jerusalem, the Arab neighborhoods in the Old City have flourished, and Muslims are free to pray at Al Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock.
As for Israel's right to exist, why is this even a question? Israel was one more state formed out of the ashes of the British Empire and the European Colonial movements. So were most of the states in the Middle East, and likewise in Africa. But nobody ever questions Saudi Arabia's right to exist, or Jordan's right to exist, or Iraq's right to exist-- still less South Africa's or Zimbabwe's or Nigeria's. Pretty much every country that rose from the ashes of colonialism has blood on its hands of some kind: tribal wars in Africa; apartheid; Jordan's Black September massacre of Palestinians; Saudi Arabia's brutal oppression of women and gay people, their medieval justice system enforced at literal swordpoint, their gross exploitation of foreign laborers, and their discrimination against Shiites and non-Wahhabists. And yet nobody would think to question their right to exist as a country. None of those countries have their right to exist questioned. Singling Israel out, among all the nations of the world, to question their right of existence is nothing but anti-Semitism in pseudo-progressive clothing.
Israel has suffered attack from its larger, wealthier neighbors for its first 25 years of existence, and terrorism from Arabs at home and abroad ever since. Despite that, the government of Israel spent more than a decade negotiating fiercely with the Palestinians to try and give them a state of their own. When the deal was at the point of being finalized, the Palestinians walked away from it and began another intifadeh. Since then they've elected terrorists to office, their government has disintigrated, their politicians steal the people's money, and they can't seem to find a leader that more than a dozen people at a time will trust. So why shouldn't Israel just impose the best borders it can, shut the door behind them, and the Palestinians can call them to renegotiate when they give up terrorism-- especially
religious terrorist rhetoric, stop
indoctrinating their kids with anti-Jewish rhetoric, and canpick a trustworthy leader who can peacefully conduct productive diplomacy with Israel?
If that doesn't sit well enough with the Arabs...well, it's not like there's a shortage of
Muslim countries in the world: 48, if you were curious, encompassing over half of Africa (the world's largest continent), the entire Middle East except Israel, and some other countries also). As opposed to how many Jewish countries in the world? Oh yeah. One. Which takes up a dot of land around the size of Delaware.
Oh, yeah. Clearly a case of those relentless Jews and their quest for world domination.
Honestly!!!:no:
