Mick Hartley

Fred Maroun, at the Times of Israel. makes a good point. The West Bank settlements, according to many, including former US Secretary of State John Kerry, are one of the major obstacles to peace. But this is based on the assumption that no Jews could remain in an Arab-run Palestine – just as virtually no Jews now remain throughout the rest of the Arab world. But by what double standards is that acceptable, when Arabs live and work in Israel?

Despite its very rational arguments, the problem with the case against settlements is that it accepts that Jews would be denied the right to live in Judea and Samaria, a land that holds deep historical importance to Jews…

Opponents of the settlements accept very quietly the Arab requirement of a judenrein Judea, as if it is perfectly natural and perfectly acceptable. It is not. In fact, it is a despicable form of bigotry that Jews would be barred from living anywhere in the world, let alone a place like Judea and Samaria that holds huge significance to them.

Judea and Samaria was the home of Jews until 1947/48 when several Arab armies attacked Israel and ethnically cleansed all the lands they conquered, including Judea and Samaria and a large part of Jerusalem, now known as East Jerusalem.

The Arab world has never paid for this crime, and on top of that, it is today supported by the international community in demanding that its crime of ethnic cleansing be allowed to stand indefinitely. At the same time, the international community sees as totally natural that 20% of Israel’s citizens are Arabs with rights equal to Jewish Israelis.

The difference between the high ethical standards that Israel upholds and the low ethical standards that the Arab world is allowed to get away with is truly astounding.

It is because and only because this difference in ethical standards is maintained and never questioned that Israel faces the dilemma that Kerry accepts as indisputable fact: Either Jews give up the right to live on land from which they were forcibly removed and where they should have every right to live, or they end up with a single state where Arabs have equal rights and would destroy the Jewish state from inside.

In other words, in the Israel-Arab conflict, the villain cannot lose and the righteous cannot win, and the whole world says so.