'Will Palestinian citizens of bi-national state have no right to vote for joint parliament?'
Photo: Gil Yohanan
The bi-national state nightmare
Op-ed: Within a short period of time, will become landlords of millions of Palestinians. We will take care of their sewage, schools and kindergartens, and they will take care of terror.
Here is the list of issues left on my desk after the long Passover holiday:
What will we say to the Palestinian citizens of the bi-national state? That they have no right to vote for the joint parliament? That they will not receive budgets for child care? That our haredim will not serve in the joint army and their Palestinian "Shabab" will be recruited to our counter-terrorism units?
1. A dream: If the current situation goes on, then right before our eyes, perhaps in the very near future, with the absence of a "process" – negotiations, discussions, meetings, clarifications – the dream of Theodor Herzl, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin will come true: One state, a bi-national one.
We will be the landlords of millions of Palestinians, we will take care of their sewage, their schools and their kindergartens, and they will take care of the terror. Within a short period of time, they will become a majority in the population of the one, bi-national state.
Impossible Solution
Yaron London
Op-ed: How can one imagine a bi-national state in a world where even Czechs and Slovaks cannot bind themselves to one authority?
2. On the other hand: To be honest, the other solutions are not promising either. An Israeli state with narrow borders, with a trauma of a mass eviction of settlers, frantic hatred from neighbors dreaming and fighting to destroy it, one or two nuclear bombs in the Arab world's warehouses, chaos and a local leadership suitable for a soccer team of the lowest league. What shall we do? What more will our homeland ask of us?
3. Apology: There may be a need to organize a distinguished delegation of officials, including the heads of the Labor Party, to visit the graves of the leaders of Israel's radical left, shed tears and ask for forgiveness.
It's unbelievable: For a short while during the first days of the State of Israel, the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement praised the idea of a bi-national state, and immediately backed down on this mad idea alarmingly. And now, 66 years later, we are facing it again.
At the time we thought, and many people still think, that those who came up with the idea were hallucinating, insane people with a strange and imaginary unacceptable ideology. Today we appear to be quickly nearing the execution of this mad idea.
A bi-national state? If there is nothing else on the national agenda, this is what will happen. We were as dreamers. Dreaming a nightmare, of course.
4. The victims of peace: A while ago, the State Archives published a series of documents, and apparently failed to notice that the publication ended a heated public dispute from the past: Who was the first person to come up with the phrase "the victims of peace"?
Well, surprise surprise: It was Menachem Begin, when he addressed the Knesset on March 2, 1982. On that same occasion he said (and I quote, ladies and gentlemen, from the protocol): "Today we are fighting for peace. We are blessed to be worthy of this. There are difficulties in peace. There are pains in peace. There are victims for peace. They are all preferable to the victims of war…"
I would like to thank the State Archives for helping, perhaps unknowingly, to end a dispute which was filled with lies, at least on one side.
