In Defense of Bantustan...

June 6, 2003

Both President George W. Bush and his Secretary of State, Colin Powell, made the point very clearly at the recent "Roadmap" summits that the emerging 23rd Arab state...and second Arab one to be created within the original borders of mandatory Palestine as Britain received it on April 25, 1920..was to be no "bantustan." The latter was a disconnected entity created for Blacks under the apartheid regime in South Africa and no substitute for a real state.

Before we proceed, let's first look at the above map. Try to find Israel without the aid of a magnifying glass...and this map has left out some of the Arab countries such as the Sudan and Djibouti.

While all people should be able to live in dignity, this applies to Jews also. This, unfortunately, proved often to be impossible both in the Christian West, where Jews were considered to be the deicide people (and treated accordingly), as well as in the Muslim East, where they were considered to be persecutors of prophets and kelbi yahudi--"Jew dogs." Hence the necessity of the rebirth of Israel on less than 1% of the territory of the Middle East and North Africa.

In creating those "Arab" states on over six million square miles of territory, millions of non-Arabs--Berbers, Copts, Kurds, Black Africans, Jews, etc.--were conquered and forcibly Arabized, often having their own native cultures and languages outlawed, suppressed, etc.

While Arabs and their supporters like to use 1947 as the starting point for discussion about the partition of "Palestine," this is dishonest...for reasons already cited above. The land called "Palestine" by then represented only about 20% of the original as it existed in 1920 before the separation and creation of Transjordan, all the land east of the Jordan River, as a reward to Britain's Hashemite Arab allies in 1922. An Arab state has thus existed on some 80% of Palestine since 1922. It is known today as Jordan...regardless of the distaste of this fact by the Israel bashers. Transjordan's ruler, Emir Abdullah, attributed this to an act of Allah in his memoirs.

Despite this, Arabs still rejected the 1947 partition as well...even though the Jews would have wound up with about 10% of the original area. Then, as now, for far too many Arabs, it's not how big Israel is that is the crux of the issue...it's that Israel is that poses the problem.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Powell's statements were largely misdirected. It's not Jews who rejected fair and honorable solutions over the decades. And similar compromise partitions and such between competing national movements elsewhere have not been uncommon, involving population exchanges, etc. The one which created Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan at the same time Arabs rejected the 1947 partition plan for Palestine especially comes to mind.

At the close of hostilities after the invasion by Arab states of a nascent Israel in 1948, the U.N.-imposed armistice lines made Israel a mere nine miles wide at its waist, a constant temptation to its enemies. Most of Israel's population and industry lies in that narrow waistband. In the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War Israel was forced to fight after it was blockaded at the Straits of Tiran and other hostile acts, U.N. Resolution #242 did not demand that Israel return to the status quo ante bellum. It called, instead, for the creation of secure and recognized borders to replace those fragile post-'48 armistice lines. Any such settlement regarding current "Roadmap" discussions must continue to take this into account.

Israelis have no desire to rule over several million Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza. But they also don't want a good cop/bad cop Abbas disguised Arafatian/Hamas state set up in their backyards which only temporarily allows quiet to further its still retained "destruction in stages" goals.

More than lip service is required to grant Israel the security any other nation would demand. So this means Arabs are not going to be able to get all that they want on the West Bank and Gaza. That's what is meant by "compromise." Now this also means that the 23rd Arab state will not be very large and will have some restrictions placed upon it. The contiguity and such of that 23rd Arab state must not come at the expense of the security of the sole, miniscule state of the Jews...one half of whom, in Israel, were refugees themselves from "Arab" lands. And that's the missing half of Mr. Bush and Mr. Powell's statements about "bantustan" that those of us who care about the long-term health of Israel worry about.