Two States Not Better Than One: Richard Greenfield
http://www.jewishledger.com/
Whenever Israel’s future is discussed, there is always that glib assertion that Israelis have no choice but to implement a “two-state solution” — A “Palestinian” state alongside Israel. For Israel’s welfare, we are told. Alternatively, Israel would have to absorb millions of “Palestinians,” give them the right to vote and change the nature of the Jewish state forever.
Inherent in this argument is the imperative that Israel must give Arabs the right to vote — a right they would not have in any of the 22 Arab countries around them. But they press on. A ‘two state solution’, they say, is far preferable to an absorption of territory by one Jewish state in which “Palestinians” are not fully franchised voters. It’s all about the vote.
One has to wonder why. Voting rights don’t follow when a new Arab state is created. The Arab world without a free press, an open nominating system, and other democratic building blocks, can’t get from here to there readily. Voting in Islamic states, as it is presented, is mostly a phony exercise staged to mollify world opinion and create a domestic fiction. Perfected in the third world, it is all about one vote, once.
The world never has a problem with Arabs not voting except when Israel is perceived to be the keeper of that right. The most recent self-immolating democracy is Gaza which, when forced to hold an election at U.S. insistence, morphed into an aggressive terrorist, missile-firing entity where no elections will be held again soon. Jimmy Carter’s rush to approve notwithstanding, elections don’t make democracies; institutions have to be built, economies freed, and electorates informed before free individuals can produce the foundations that allow for a democratic impulse to materialize. Elections like the one in Gaza are a third world evasion that persuades the naïve. Americans should know better. Israelis do.
