DOOMSDAY SCENARIO

An Old Heresy Haunts Israel: What if Palestinians Reject a State And Ask for Equal Rights Instead? (GUY CHAZAN, July 21, 2003, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL) [Subscription Required, sorry]

What motivates the one-state idea -- and explains why Israelis overwhelmingly reject it -- is demography. Israel already has more than one million Arabs, aside from the 3.1 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. High Arab birth rates mean there will soon be as many Palestinians as Jews living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Arnon Soffer, professor of geography at Haifa University, predicts the proportion of Jews in that area will fall to 39% by 2020. In these circumstances, if Israel annexed the occupied territories and granted all Arabs living there citizenship and voting rights, there would soon be enough of them to elect a Palestinian to run Israel. [...]

"Either we give the Palestinians equal rights, in which case Israel ceases to be Jewish, or we don't, in which case Israel ceases to be democratic," says Uri Dromi, of the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem. "The only way for Israel to remain both Jewish and democratic is for it to pull out of the territories."

The first signs of a shift in high-level Palestinian thinking emerged in October, when a delegation led by Salam Fayyad, Palestinian finance minister, presented the U.S. with a report saying expanding Jewish settlements could make a future Palestinian state unviable. If settlement growth didn't stop, the report read, Palestinian policy makers might be forced to "re-evaluate the plausibility of a two state solution."

Later, Diana Buttu, a legal adviser to the Palestinian Liberation Organization, went a step further. "One cannot unscramble an egg," she said in an online interview published in October. The Palestinian leadership, she said, should give up its quest for an independent state and push instead for equal citizenship in Israel and "an antiapartheid campaign along the same lines as South Africa."

This is the way in which the hardliners who oppose the Road Map are effectively dooming Israel even as they cast themselves as its last defenders. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 21, 2003 6:39 PM