Yesterday, after five years of dormancy of the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, the U.S. revived it thanks mostly to the shuttle diplomacy of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. Two weeks ago in Washington, D.C., Kerry reportedly told Jewish leaders the U.S. would guarantee Israel’s security in a two-state peace agreement by stationing U.S. troops in critical areas throughout the region. Bad idea! The borderlines between the proposed two states that they are talking about is a Swiss-cheese hodge-podge that will prove difficult to secure.
That’s one of the many reasons I say there should be two completely separate states, having no non-contiguous lands, lying side-by-side. This language–“two states lying side-by-side”–was first invoked by George W. Bush while U.S. President. That’s what I say, but none of the leaders and negotiators in this peace process have really ever envisioned such a result. Establishing a Palestinian state in a Swiss-cheese West Bank and a Gaza Strip twenty miles away from it certainly cannot be deemed “two states lying side-by-side. But establishing a Palestinian state only in the Mediterranean coastal plain as a very, enlarged Gaza Strip stretching from just south of Tel Aviv southward to El Arish will indeed result in “two states lying side-by-side.” The security of this arrangement is manageable, but the security of a the solution the world focuses upon is not very manageable.
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