Palestine: When to lose is to win

Most everybody I meet is currently vexed by the Israel - Palestine conflict. There is endless talk of ceasefires and, more helpfully, solutions. The solutions fall into two broad categories:



1) Hamas must stop launching missiles at Israel from the Gaza strip. Time will pass and the Israeli's will trust the Palestinians enough to ease then end the siege of Gaza.

2) Israel must stop besieging Gaza and let a free flow of goods, services and terrorists into its country. Time will pass and the Palestinians will not be so angry that that they lob incompetent missiles toward Tel-Aviv


There are grander versions of these solutions: Palestinians accept new Israeli borders, Israel mollifies Palestinians but they are essentially variations of the above. Neither is likely to happen.

The Palestinians have a claim on both the occupied territories and Israel itself that they are unlikely to renounce, the Israeli's know this and are not going to facilitate Palestinian retribution in any way. The two state solution continues to fail.

News Bunny's specialist subject is "the bleeding obvious". The bit missing from this story is war.

There was a war and the Palestinian's lost. Someone needs to tell them. When you lose a war, the winning side get to run your country. They can annex your country or they can colonise it. Someone needs to make the Israeli's step up and do this. As Israel and Palestine are adjacent the obvious answer is to annex Palestine. This is consistent with the Greater Israel policy of the Zionists.

Of course, this is where the problems for the Israeli's begin. The country is a democratic ally of the west, particularly America. It will be very difficult for them to run an explicitly apartheid state for any length of time. There is a fine Jewish tradition of tolerance and humanism that would probably give the vote to all adult nationals within its borders voluntarily. Alternatively there would be an extraordinary weight of international pressure and opprobrium if the Israeli's renounced democracy in favour of theocracy.

The Americans don't really believe in theocracy. For all their God fearing bible belt tub thumping, America is as much an idea than a country. The idea is that you cannot be persecuted for your religious beliefs. This is fundamental to American DNA. Most of the rest of the world has eschewed theocracy too, although a perverse alliance with Iran is possible, I suppose!

Let Israel win!



We'll have more of these... List of Arab members of the Knesset