The difficulties that Secretary of State Kerry is discovering in his quest for a peace deal between Israel and the Arabs have everyone looking for alternatives. The most radical is extending the Jewish state to the River Jordan and letting Arabs on the West Bank apply for Israeli citizenship.
This is becoming known as “The Glick Plan,” after Caroline Glick, the one-time Columbia University student who moved to Israel and emerged as one of its most valiant journalists. Her idea is outlined in a new book, “The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East,” and it has a lot of people talking.
On the Amazon list it is now among the top two books on Israel. Even those who blanch at the thought of Israel annexing the West Bank can learn from the points Glick makes along the way.
At the heart of the plan is the idea of a single Jewish state between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan. She rejects the anti-Zionist idea of a bi-national, secular state. She also rejects the idea of two separate states, which is the policy recent American presidents have been plumping for.
The two-state plan, Glick says, is “among the most irrational, unsuccessful policies the United States has ever adopted.”
By her count, there have been more than a dozen efforts to advance a two-state scheme over the past 90 years. Between 1970 and 2013, she reckons, America alone presented nine two-state peace plans. None got anywhere, because the agitators for a Palestinian Arab state don’t want peace with Israel.
How naïve is the notion that they ever did. Glick relates how the movement for Palestinian Arab statehood was poisoned by the collaboration of the early Palestinian Arab leader, Haj Amin el-Husseini, and Hitler. During World War II, El-Husseini, known as the Mufti of Jerusalem, lurked in Berlin, plotting the slaughter of Jews in the Middle East.
One objection to a one-state plan is the fear that Jews would lose their majority. President Obama raised this idea in his interview two weeks ago with journalist Jeffrey Goldberg. The president seems to think that Jews, so ingenious at so many things, cannot compete in going forth and multiplying.
Glick challenges these assumptions. She calls the data in support of this threat “completely fraudulent” — numbers stemming from a Palestinian Authority census of 1997 that “inflated the number of Palestinians by 50 percent” and “lied about demographic trends in birthrates and immigration and so inflated the assessments of future growth.”
“Real demographic data,” Glick reports, show that “even if all the Palestinians living in Judea and Samaria are granted Israeli citizenship, Jews would still remain a two-thirds majority of the citizens of Israel.” She cites an investigation of Palestinian population projections done by the American-Israel Demographic Research Group.
Glick’s vision irks some right-wing critics, who fear her welcoming attitude would create an Arab voting bloc that, even if it is a minority, could skew Israel’s politics to the left. Glick thinks the opposite, that it could move more Jews to the right.
She also takes an optimistic view of what happened on the Golan Heights, where the Druze live under Israeli law that Prime Minister Menachem Begin began applying there in the 1980s.
No one suggests that the Druze or Palestinian Arabs living under Israeli sovereignty are entirely happy. They aren’t, and Glick acknowledges the resentments. But there is a new, pro-Israel, integrationist Arab political party. Glick predicts the idea of full integration would grow if the government of Israel actively encouraged the trend.
What is most important in the Glick book is her willingness to assert Jewish rights in the land of Israel, not only within the 1967 lines but in Judea and Samaria, a k a the West Bank. What a refreshing change from what we’ve so often heard in the generation of dickering since the 1993-1995 Oslo Accords, which handed the West Bank to the PLO.
It may be that Obama and Kerry will, by brute diplomatic force, get a framework together to re-start peace talks. But what if they fail? Caroline Glick has brought out her book at an amazing moment, sketching what many will see as a better route toward peace and in the nick of time.