"Who are the Palestinians?” Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir exclaimed. “There is no such nation.” Maps in West Bank schoolbooks show “Palestine,” with no distinction drawn between West Bank cities like Nablus and Israeli cities like Haifa. For over fifty years the Jews and the Palestinians have each denied the other’s right to the Land of Canaan. And yet despite all this denial neither the people nor the problems have disappeared. Ask an Israeli for his opinion and you’re likely to hear exactly what’s wrong in the Middle East. Ask twenty, and you’ll hear twenty different, but equally fervent, answers. All will agree, though, that the current situation is untenable, and Something Must Be Done. But what? At present the course favored by many American politicians is for the partition of Greater Israel into two states – the Jewish State of Israel, and, on the West Bank and Gaza, the Arab State of Palestine. This would return Israel to its pre-1967 borders and uproot some 200,000 Israelis who have settled on the West Bank and in Gaza: in exchange, Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations have promised to normalize relations with Israel. (Most of the Arab world is still technically at war with Israel; only Jordan and Egypt have signed peace treaties with the Jewish State and even there relations are frosty at best). Another idea which has been placed on the table are “Transfer” – the mass removal of Israel’s Palestinians to the East Bank of the Jordan River, site of the present Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Still others favor a “post-Zionist” Israel – an Israel which offers citizenship and equal rights to Jews and Palestinian Arabs and which sees itself not as “the Jewish homeland” but as “Lebanon’s next-door neighbor.” No matter which option the Israelis finally choose, it will have a dramatic impact on the Middle East and, by extension, world politics.
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is Palestine: the Transfer of Israel’s Palestinian Population
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