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The Day After: If Israel Withdrew to the 1967 Lines, What Then?

(Weekly Standard) Aryeh Tepper - The main grievance in the Arab-Muslim world is not that in 1967 Israel occupied the West Bank, but that in 1948 the Jews built a state upon "Palestinian" land. This narrative ignores inconvenient facts like the ancient Jewish connection to the Land of Israel, the Arab refusal to accept the UN partition plan, which the Israelis accepted, the war that the Arab states then initiated in 1948 in order to destroy the incipient Jewish state and throw the Jews into the sea, and the subsequent expulsion of nearly one million Jews from Arab countries. The governing perception in mainstream Arab-Muslim discourse is that the establishment of the State of Israel was a crime, and to accept the existence of the State of Israel is to acquiesce to that crime. Thus, the establishment of a Palestinian state within the 1967 lines would be characterized as a historic betrayal. And the U.S. would be blamed for pushing Palestinian leaders to betray the Palestinians' right to return to their homes in present-day Israel. The writer is a visiting scholar at the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem.
2014-01-15 00:00:00
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