The collapse of a ceasefire plan for Israel and Hamas would be a moment to test the Jewish state’s super-weapon — Caroline Glick. Or, more precisely, her idea of a one-state plan for peace in the Middle East.
Glick laid out the plan in a book called “The Israeli Solution.” Her idea, which I wrote about in March, is to absorb into a single state — Israel — all of the West Bank and the Arab and Jewish populations who live there.
It’s as controversial as an idea can get. She leaves aside Gaza, where there is no Israeli presence and which is ruled by Hamas. Yet her plan for the West Bank fairly begs to be put on the table after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s press conference Friday.
Jeffrey Goldberg, one of the Mideast beat’s savviest columnists, characterized Netanyahu as abandoning his own support for a two-state solution.
It’s not, Goldberg reports, that Netanyahu “renounced his rhetorical support for a two-state solution. He simply described such a [Palestinian] state as an impossibility.”
In this sense, the premier is catching up to Glick. She counted more than a dozen two-state schemes over the past century (including nine that America got behind). All have been foiled by Palestinian Arab rejectionists.
So what — apart from endless war — might be possible? What Glick proposes goes back to the original aspiration of Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl, for Arab and Jewish amity in a Jewish state with a Jewish majority.
Glick’s critics see her plan as a recipe for a bi-national state, that is, an end to Zionism.
Netanyahu, in an interview with Goldberg earlier this year, called opposition to a bi-national state “the first point of consensus in Israel.”
The fear is that Arabs would soon outnumber Jews in the new, larger state — inevitably ending Israel as a Jewish state.