Jerusalem Post: Peres outlines plan for Palestinian state

Foreign Minister Shimon Peres last night released details of a diplomatic plan calling for the almost immediate establishment of a Palestinian state, three days after Labor Party colleagues Binyamin Ben-Eliezer and Haim Ramon each unveiled blueprints for a diplomatic solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Peres said that ending Israel's control over the Palestinians is both a Jewish moral imperative and in the state's best security interests. According to Peres, the Palestinians created serious doubts about whether they are a viable partner for peace when they rejected then US president Bill Clinton's proposals at Camp David.

Sounds practical, sounds fair, sounds simultaneously speedy and incremental, let's do it!

Oh, but it has one little problem:

...the Palestinians would recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

Bzzt! Wrong answer. Won't happen. Read this interview with Arafat and notice how he is happy to talk about Israel, but when Wolf Blitzer presses him and tries to get him to talk about Israel as a Jewish state, he falls all over himself to avoid putting those two words together...

BLITZER: Two states...

ARAFAT: Two states.

BLITZER: One Jewish...

ARAFAT: One Israeli state, because you have Jews and they have Christians and Muslims.

BLITZER: You see, when you refuse to say a Jewish state, the Israelis think...

ARAFAT: No, I'm not...

BLITZER: ... that you're not going to accept a Jewish state.

ARAFAT: I am not -- I am not refusing. They don't call it a Jewish state.

OK, so they have open media, the right to express themselves and some of them don't consider it, or maybe don't want it to be a Jewish state, so it's not. Or how about this: Israel hasn't ethnically-cleansed the non-Jews from its territory ergo, it's not a Jewish state. Unlike Saudi Arabia, which is clearly a Muslim state by that logic. And what kind of state will Palestine be, I wonder? How should the Palestinian Christians be feeling right now?

How about we get the UN to approve a resolution declaring a Palestinian state alongside a Zionist Entity Occupying Historicaly Palestinian Territory? That'll fly, but better in some places than others. But it would pass the General Assembly, that's for sure.   

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