It's not "leftist" to want the rule of law .
It's not leftist to want people who's family have lived in the same village for generations to be able to vote for a meaningful authority in charge of them.
In the case of the West Bank, this has been Israel for 60 years. Even when there was the Palestinian authority, the fact that Israel has been imposing new settlements shows that it kept vital parts for itself.
It's not leftist to want Israeli settlers to adhere to Israeli law at least and not instigate violence against innocent Palestinian farmers. The Israeli government has taken actions against this but very minimal.
Leftists (whose strongholds are in the western academy) have happily propaged the fake Palestinian histographical narrative (what i called earlier the Lost Cause of the Levant myth).
There is no easy solution to the Palestinian question. But the least difficult solution is the most obvious one – to create a Palestinian state in those parts of Mandate Palestine which have not since been absorbed, de jure or de facto, into Israel. That means about 80% of the West Bank, plus the Gaza Strip, plus whatever other land can be acquired through negotiations with Israel (and possibly also with Egypt.)
What proportion of the Palestinian diaspora could realistically be settled in such a small state would be a matter for the Palestinians to resolve, but the international community would have to accept an obligation to resettle elsewhere those who could not be accommodated there, and to provide them with appropriate financial compensation. The bill for this should fall mainly on the wealthy Gulf Arab states, who have encouraged the Palestinians in their illusions for so long.
The main obstacle to achieving such a solution is not the Jewish communities now living in Judaea and Samaria (the so-called “settlements”). Most of them are living in fairly compact blocks around Jerusalem and a few other places, and it would not be difficult draw a border that allows for the creation of a viable Palestinian state. Any solution which requires the eviction of 600,000 Jews living in the historic heart of the Jewish homeland, in places such as Hebron where Jews have lived for three thousand years, will be a non-starter.
The main obstacle has been the absolute refusal of the Palestinian leadership, aided and abetted at various times by the Arab states, the Soviet Union and Iran (among many others) to accept any agreement which recognises the right of the Jewish people to exercise sovereignty in any part of the land they choose to identify as Palestine. This attitude goes all the way back to the report of the Peel Royal Commission in 1936, which was the first to recommend the partition of Mandate Palestine into sovereign Arab and Jewish states.
The Palestinians have had several opportunities to achieve statehood, most recently the Clinton-Barak plan offered to Arafat at Camp David in 2000, followed by Olmert’s even more extensive offer to Abbas in 2008. They have rejected them all because acceptance would have involved the recognition of the permanent existence of Israel as a sovereign Jewish state.
The policy of a centre-left party such as British Labour or Australian Labor should therefore be one of support for Palestinian statehood, to be achieved through direct negotiations with Israel (rather than imposed by international fiat), and involving explicit Palestinian acceptance of the legitimate and permanent existence of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people. Any suggestion that such a Palestinian state would be merely an interim step towards the “liberation of Palestine, from the River to the Sea” would have to be renounced. The Palestinians would also have to renounce the “right of return” for the Palestinian diaspora, and accept demilitarisation and whatever other security safeguards Israel chose to insist upon.
These are harsh terms, but harsh terms is what you get when you choose to go to war rather than accept compromise, and then lose the war, which is what the Palestinians have been doing for over a century. The paradox of the Palestinian situation, which they have created for themselves, is that they will have to accept defeat before they can achieve any kind of victory.
Much of the left wing of the parties of the centre left will loudly proclaim the unacceptability of such a policy position. My perhaps intemperate reply will be that the parties will be better off without people who are unable to accept such a policy, and that they can go and join one of the sects of the far left, and see how far they get.
But I think in practice most party members and supporters will sooner or later be reconciled to this policy. The fate of the Palestinians is hardly the most pressing issue facing British Labour, Australian Labor, the US Democratic Party or other centre left parties. Even in the field of foreign policy there are much more important questions to face, such as the hegemonic ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party. Only a small minority would ultimately find it impossible to give up “anti-Zionism”, and we really would be better off without them.
