Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived

A subtle change has been made to the comments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the problem about comments not appearing on permalinked posts, readers?

Update: seemingly not

Update: Oh yeah!


Friday, January 09, 2009

 
Genuine question, which might look disingenuous

As we all know, the only position on Israel/Palestine which can possibly be held by reasonable, normal, liberal etc people is the "Two-state solution". This comes in various flavours, depending on how much land you want to end up in each state and how you want it configured, but the underlying idea is the same across the board; some form of statehood for the West Bank and Gaza, that's where the Palestinians live, and that's yer lot.

Could someone who holds this position (I know that there are a lot of you) explain to me what happens to the people in the UNRWA refugee camps under this situation? There are about four million of them, so it's not at all clear that there's room for them in the literal, as opposed to economic/social sense, in the new putative state. And the idea of having them hang around indefinitely in their camps is not really one which I'd regard as consistent with any long term goal of peace.

Presumably, the implicit position of the "two state solution" is that a) with respect to the land that the UNRWA clients believe themselves to own in Israel, they get screwed, and b) we sort of hope that they grow up and get used to this fact, then slink off and become ordinary Jordanians, Syrians, Lebanese etc (which implies c) that Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are cool with this, which is presumably also not the sort of thing that should be taken for granted).

This does rather seem a bit tough on them, doesn't it? I only mention this because God knows, people who take the "one state solution" get it right in the fucking neck from their opponents, rhetorically, because said single secular state would not have a built-in ethnic minority (or "would lead to the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state", which lots of careless people take as having established that anyone who advocates a one state solution is a genocidaire). The 2SS seems to me to have a similar problem built into it, of about 80% of the magnitude in terms of headcount. "Everyone knows" that the eventual outcome is a two state solution, but it looks to me like it might be the ubiquitous proposition which looks too good to be true because it is.

Update: Just to make it clear, I don't have a solution at all.
35 comments this item posted by the management 1/09/2009 01:29:00 AM


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