What if, in the current negotiations with Israel — and in the context of the creation of a State of Palestine — the Palestinians were to guarantee that they agree that the State of Israel will remain a Jewish state for as long as the Jewish people want it to be?
What if there were a public Palestinian commitment that Israel will remain a Jewish State regardless of how many Jews or Palestinians are its citizens and residents?
What if the issue of Israel’s being a Jewish state is de-linked from the question of numbers — that is, of how many of its citizens are Jewish?
The idea is to address the most basic and deepest concerns expressed by both Israelis and Palestinians. This could be the win-win scenario that Palestinian Ministers are all now calling for.
At its creation, Israel was proclaimed as a Jewish state (with certain values that are now identified as democratic), but not as a democratic state.
In recent years, the identification of Israel as also being a democracy is now an article of faith. But, the argument that Israeli is a democracy has led to concerns about demography — that is, how to maintain a Jewish majority within Israel so that Israel will remain both a Jewish and democratic state.
But, this open talk about demographics has led to Palestinian concerns about further population transfers under the guise of land swaps, as Israelis blithely and unblushingly discuss proposals to trade this area of East Jerusalem or that area of the Galilee for some of the enormous Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
This apparently unembarrased debate is based, at least in part, on the utterly unproven (if not totally fallacious) notion that all Arabs would prefer to be put together — even if this involves what looks like ethnic cleansing, Balkans-style, and certainly without the democratic consultation or consent of the population concerned.
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