Amid all the talk about Israel's right to exist and to defend itself, a more relevant question has been ignored: is the state of Israel -- the Jewish state created by the UN General Assembly's 1947 Partition Resolution (Resolution 181) -- really necessary?
Whether or not Israel has a moral or legal right to exist, it has unquestionably been necessary for Israel to exist, from the day of its birth, to defend Israelis against the implacable hostility, armed violence and terror of the Palestinian Arabs and the neighboring Arab states. Israel may or may not have the right to defend its existence as a state, but it certainly has the right to defend Israeli citizens against the violence of their enemies.
But what if Israel didn't exist? If Israel is necessary only to defend Israelis against violent enemies, and if the cause of the violence is the existence of Israel, then if Israel could be replaced by a new state providing its Jewish citizens with the basic protections which citizens of any state have the right to expect, there would be no need for Israel.
What could replace Israel is a new state embracing all of a de-partitioned Palestine. This would be simple enough to achieve. The UN General Assembly would pass Resolution 181-A providing that the borders of Israel will be extended to include all of Palestine; that anyone who today lives in or was born in Palestine will have the right of Israeli citizenship; and that a federal system of government will be established along the lines recommended to the General Assembly in the minority report of the UN Special Commission on Palestine in 1947.
There are several bad reasons why Resolution 181-A would not be a good idea. Here are four of them:
1. De-partition would unjustly deny Jews the right to a Jewish state that was granted by the international community in 1947.
To the contrary, de-partition would reverse the injustice that was done by the international community in granting sovereignty over 55% of Palestine to a colony of European immigrants representing 33% of the population. Partition was not, as the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann argued at the time, "the lesser injustice" (compared to the plight of 250,000 displaced central European Jews then living in refugee camps in Germany). It was simply another injustice. The greater justice then, as now, was a single Palestinian state.
2. De-partition would illegally deny Jews the right to a Jewish state that was granted by the international community in 1947.
To the contrary, without debating whether the UN had the right under international law to grant sovereignty over any portion of Palestine to anyone, no party to Resolution 181 has ever fulfilled any of its primary obligations under that or succeeding UN resolutions - obligations relating to borders, the right of citizenship, return of refugees or Jerusalem. If this omni-lateral breach does not make Resolution 181 a dead letter under international law, then the international law is an ass.
3. De-partition would reward the Palestinian and Lebanese Arab militias for terror, and Iran for its assertiveness.
Yes. But de-partition would also be a wise and just way for the international community to resolve the problem it created fifty-nine years ago, and it doesn't become a unwise or unjust simply because it would also appease and reward terror. If Al Quaeda hijacks an airplane and announces it is going to execute passengers one at a time until I stop beating my wife, would it be wise or just for me to keep beating my wife so as to avoid rewarding terror? The behaviour of individuals, nations and the international community must be judged by its own lights, not by whether it satisfies terrorist demands.
4. It would be naive to expect that "this new Israel could provide its Jewish and Arab citizens with the basic protections which citizens of any state have the right to expect," or that it would somehow dissolve the hatred of Jews, the west and modernism that is so deeply ingrained in the Arab psyche, especially on the jihadist fringe. If anything, sectarian violence would be even greater in a de-partitioned Palestine than it is today.
To the contrary, even Bernard Lewis, whose theory of "what went wrong" attributes most Arab antagonism to collective neurosis, admits that the creation of Israel also has something to do with it. Violent communal conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine did not begin with partition - it had been rising more or less steadily from the end of the 19th century in proportion to the Jewish/Arab population ratio. Fatefully, however, partition externalized a conflict that would have remained internal to Palestine had the UN voted for a single state. Five Arab states backed the Palestinian Arabs, while Truman and Stalin vied to win Israel as their client in the region. Today the game is somewhat simplified, with only Iran and Syria actively supporting the Arab side, and the US standing alone as the unequivocal supporter of Israel. But a de-partitioned Palestine - properly supervised by the international community -- would end the game altogether. The US, Iran and Syria could take their grievances elsewhere, while the international community could concentrate on helping the first true democracy - not a gerrymandered one - emerge in the Middle East.