I think we’ll end up with a democracy for Jews, with some Arabs as leavening. The Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza will continue to be outside the Israeli political system.

Think about this. You realize that’s an apartheid system when the Palestinians/Israeli Arabs are a majority, right?

However unstable this is, it seems to me to be the most stable configuration.

There are plenty of other Arab states, there are plenty of other multi-cultural democracies. There is no other Jewish state.

Belief in democracy for Arabs and Palestinian nationalism were both built up as a tool against Israel, and are seen that way in most of Israel. Neither belief had much traction among the Arabs before 1948. However, they are effective in cleaving the US and Europe away from Israel, and have become political forces with their own trajectory and energy.

For Israel to give up control of the West Bank and Gaza would simply invite Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria to use those places to launch the war to liberate the rest of “Palestine” from the “Occupation of 1948″.

There is no way to get the Arabs to agree to an end of claims. And if they did, the Israelis would not believe them.

White Europeans and Native Americans.

Ethnic cleansing is the historic answer to the problem, one way or the other.

Complicated by their neighborhood, Israelis have gone native.

But it’s still important to understand that the people with the power TODAY have nothing to gain from peace or from a legitimate Palestinian state. Sure, they have Iran as a fallback enemy, but as long as they can maintain a perpetual state of war they can maintain power. It is, more than anything else, a political calculation. The state of Israel is sustained, for the present, by war, hate and occupation.

The calculation will only change, just as it did in Northern Ireland, when the leadership believes it has more to gain from real peace than it does from eternal war….

mikey