Karl Sabbagh - A Modest Proposal to solve the Palestine-Israel Conflict

To solve the Palestine-Israel conflict

Karl Sabbagh

Published by Skyscraper Publications Limited 20 Crab Tree Close, Bloxham, Oxon 0X15 4SE www.skyscraperpublications.com

First published 2018

Copyright 2018 Karl Sabbagh

Cover concept and design by Rebecca Lynch

Printed in the United Kingdom by CPI ISBN-13: 978-1-911072-26-3

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

The phrase A Modest Proposal has been used generically to describe what has been called a straight-faced satire. The first modest proposal was Jonathan Swifts suggestion, published anonymously, that poverty could be relieved in Ireland by poor people selling their children as food for rich people.

I am perhaps laying myself open to the charge that this short book is itself a satire, because it may be seen as "using exaggeration to expose and criticize peoples vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics, one definition of satire.

But in fact, there is irony too in Swifts use of the title. Far from being modest in the sense that I might say it will take a modest amount of effort to do something, this book proposes a solution to the Palestine-Israel conflict which is about as immodest as you could get - it will require a huge amount of effort, collaboration, fund-raising and organisation to achieve it. But in my view - and that of an increasing number of informed observers of the Middle East - it may be the only solution that will actually work by bringing peace to the region after a hundred years of mismanagement, cowardice, wishful thinking, and prejudice.

What this book may do is perhaps force people to say Well, if not this, then what? Because the one thing that cannot be denied is the right of people to live in the homeland from which they have been expelled. If that right is not achievable for the Palestinians by my modest proposal for a single state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, combined with the right of return for Palestinians, what other option is there?

Karl Sabbagh

February 2018

time he wrote the book, I wonder if he saw it as a blueprint for what might actually happen, in the face of the overwhelming improbability that a small subset of politically motivated Jews would get rid of most of the majority population who were not Jews and be allowed to call the country their own? I suspect not, just as I have to confess that I dont see the plan outlined in this book being achieved overnight or without huge unforeseeable actions taking place on the world stage to achieve it. But thats what happened with Herzls vision, and perhaps it could happen with mine.

Part 1

The Background

I have visited Palestine and Israel on many occasions over the last fifty years. I think I know quite a lot about the history of the region and the people who live there. But every visit has taught me something new. This book really crystallized on a visit I made in May 2016, to attend the opening of the Palestinian Museum near Ramallah on the West Bank. For some years, I have been a supporter of the One Democratic State idea, for reasons which I will describe in more detail in Chapter 7. This foresees the only just solution of the Palestine-Israel dispute as being a single state between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean, taking in all of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.

For people who have never visited the area, the words Israel and Palestine (these days, the West Bank and Gaza) probably conjure up images of two very different territories: one cosmopolitan, civilised, democratic, a member of the world community of developed states, inhabited by an ancient people who have made a major contribution to world civilisation, and the other rural, poor, peasant-oriented, dusty, uncontrollable, governed

by terrorists or at least by people who are perpetually angry, and with little or no cultural heritage beyond hummus and folk-dancing. To merge the two might seem to present the same problems as combining East and West Germany.

Seen like this, who could possibly disagree that the best solution would be a compete separation between the two territories, rather than any attempt to mix the two, which would be like mixing oil and water. (In passing - and irrelevantly -the Israelis wish they had oil, and keep taking the Palestinians water.)

In fact, the characterisation I have just described is a false one. Israel is becoming the uncontrollable one, with an increasingly racist government whose racism is directed as much against its poor Jewish inhabitants as against Palestinian Arabs. It is a country in the thrall of religious extremism, to the extent that secular Jews face all sorts of illiberal laws, from the trivial - lifts which are switched off on Fridays - to laws governing birth, marriage and death which are an affront to the civil liberties of at least half its inhabitants. Few of its Jewish inhabitants can trace any link with the country going back more than a couple of generations, and it doesnt even have a convenient rail service between its two biggest cities, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Palestine, on the other hand, has the highest proportion of graduates in the Middle East, a thriving society rooted in centuries of continuity of family habitation in the same towns and villages, an intellectual heritage which made possible the development of Western culture, and a cuisine which clearly strikes Jewish Israelis as better than Jewish food since they keep claiming it as their own.

It was two meals during my May visit which brought home what One Democratic State might actually look like, or rather feel like. On the day of the opening of the Museum, a group of us were driven off to a village nearby for lunch. The food was beautifully cooked, the place was full and the conversation animated.Theclientele were unremarkable, middleclass, some formally dressed, others in casual clothes; a range of ages and - as far as I could infer - professions. There was a formality about some of the diners.

Like me, they had been to a celebration, the opening of a new museum, but otherwise they could have been members of any middle class in any country. We sat outside, under awnings, and were served by smartly-dressed waiters. The conversation with Palestinians was wide-ranging, covering the political situation, certainly, but other topics too. And, unlike the situation that might apply in a good restaurant in the West, the food was exactly the range of dishes you might expect to find on a domestic Palestinian dinner table with ingredients all probably from the nearby land - the village was surrounded by an undulating landscape with olive groves, orchards, and fields of sheep.

Twenty-four hours later, after a short untroubled journey of 70 kilometres or so in a taxi, I was having another meal in Israel, in the town of Jaffa, now a suburb of Tel Aviv and formerly one of the leading Arab towns of pre-1948 Palestine. When I say untroubled I should say that it was untroubled for me, when it is likely to have been a very troubled journey - if not impossible - for certain classes of Palestinian.

I had been thinking a lot that week about the idea of a single democratic state in the territory between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean, and one question suddenly arose in my mind. If that single democratic state were to come into being - in the teeth of objections by the current Israeli government - what would be different about these two days and these two social occasions? I could think of nothing. The restaurants would still exist, where they were. The cuisines would still be similar. (That night in Jaffa I had well-prepared mansaf, an Arab dish.) The range of people in the restaurants would be similar. I would have travelled between the two places in a modern taxi or bus, on well-constructed roads, and found my way back to a comfortable hotel. The only difference I could think of was that - in the new One-State, the first restaurant would have Jews among the customers, whereas at the moment Jews - apart from the illegal settlers - are discouraged from travelling into the Occupied Territories. And in the second restaurant there would perhaps have been more Arabs, although since Jaffa