The author displays an amazing capability to overlook the obvious.

Such as, for example, that Palestine does not actually belong to President Bush. So how can he assure Israel that (for example) "Jewish towns and villages in the West Bank would be incorporated into the borders of Israel"

For example, that Palestinians are just as capable of remebering being expelled from their homes 60 years ago, as Jews are capable of remembering being "expelled from there" 2000 years ago.

Or perhaps the author is capable of realising this, but is a person to whom the memories of Palestinians matter less than the memories of Jews.

David Singer wrote: “Jews have accumulated many memories - both pleasant and unpleasant - since losing their State, being expelled from there 2,000 years ago and being dispersed to all corners of the globe. The Jews steeled themselves to ensure they never forgot who they were, where they came from and to where they would one day return.”

The above is an example of selective history. The Jewish dispersion was well on its way before the destruction of the ancient Jewish state. Jews followed the conquests of Alexander four hundred years before the destruction of the Jewish state and settled in the territories he conquered.

We Jews have survived when many peoples like the Burgundians have disappeared from history. One reason that we have survived was that unlike the Burgundians we were not tied to a particular nation state. Bonds of religion, tradition and culture held us together.

At the time of the destruction of the ancient state of Israel there were an estimated one million Jews in Egypt alone and many others dispersed through the Roman Empire and outside the Roman Empire in places like Parthia and Ethiopia.

The fact is we can no longer return to the ancient state of Israel since it no longer exists. The modern state is another entity altogether. Since the destruction of the ancient state of Israel multicultural democracy has evolved where democratic nations no longer make distinctions among its citizens on the basis of ethnicity and religion. David Singer has insisted that the state can be both Jewish and democratic. It cannot be.

If a state makes distinctions among its citizens on the basis of ethnicity or religion it is not democratic. Until the United States allowed black people and American Indians the full rights of citizenship and Australia allowed the Aborigines full rights the US and Australia were not fully democratic. The same goes for Israel.

Two peoples are fighting for the same land. The formation of one democratic state that makes no distinctions among its citizens on the basis of ethnicity and religion will end the conflict.

# Jeremy

You are right - Palestine does not belong to President Bush. 17% now belongs to Israel, 77% now belongs to Jordan whilst the remaining 6% -West Bank and Gaza - presently belongs to no one - either Arabs or Jews.

President Bush's letter was an assurance to Israel that America would not support every square metre of the West Bank being ceded by Israel to the Palestinian Authority. As a statement of American diplomatic support for that position, it was a vital element in Israel's decision to evacuate Gaza. One would expect that President Obama would honour that Presidential assurance.

Of course as you are aware the Arabs occupied 100% of the West Bank and Gaza between 1948-1967 when not one Jew lived there as they were all expelled in 1948. Yet the Arabs did not create the State they now demand when they had the perfect opportunity to do so.

I am afraid time and opportunity has passed them by to claim sovereignty in 100% of the West Bank and Gaza. President Bush recognized this reality. The Arabs still don't.

#davidf

We have discussed the one state option previously and it simply is not going to happen - at least voluntarily. Six million Jews are not going to simply commit national suicide involving the loss of their State as the one and only Jewish National Home in the world.

The division of sovereignty of the West Bank and Gaza between Egypt, Jordan and Israel in direct trilateral negotiations is increasingly becoming the last option for resolving the Jewish-Arab conflict as President Obama slowly sinks into the quicksand that claimed his predecessors - Carter, Clinton and Bush

The plan works in sequence:

First comes economic sanctions: closing borders, destroying farms and and a people's livlihood.

Then comes ghettoisation: limit the right to free movement of peoples. Refuse house extensions and building new homes. Demolish existing ones.

Then comes delegitimasation: deny their right to exist in their very own homes and villages. Suggest they don't really exist at all. They are in fact, someone else.

Now the dehumanisation can begin. Portray them as lesser human beings - immoral beings who will stop at nothing to wipe you off the map - people who kill innocents. In the meantime, the situation has become so dire that the only solution is transportation. Turn the tables. Wipe them off the map themselves. They never existed anyway.

The demolitions never existed. The killings never existed. The expulsion never existed. The suffering never existed.

And who says we never learn from history? David Singer clearly has.

#davidf

We have discussed the one state option previously and it simply is not going to happen - at least voluntarily. Six million Jews are not going to simply commit national suicide involving the loss of their State as the one and only Jewish National Home in the world.

Dear David Singer,

We discussed this before, and you dismissed it before. This time you dismissed it using the evocative words, ‘national suicide’.

I regard it as more important for Jews to live in peace and freedom than to have a Jewish National Home. We Jews have survived for thousands of years without a Jewish National Home.

In the United States and Australia we rule nobody and nobody rules us.

In Iran, Syria and in many places in the past we were and are second-class citizens.

Now we Jews have a state of our own and non-Jews in the state are second-class citizens. They have the right to vote, to representation in parliament and some democratic rights. However, their villages as determined by a Knesset committee have unequal services. They have a national anthem that tells their children that the state belongs to another people. I don’t feel good as a Jew that we are treating people the way we have been treated. Other Jews feel the same way.

I know Australian Irish who sent arms to the IRA. They wanted no compromise with the opposing party. They wanted union with the Irish Free State. In spite of them the Northern Irish are making peace even though there is not union with Erin. You sit here in Australia and put the Jewish National Home above peace and fairness.

In a democratic state where government makes no distinction among its citizens we can live freely as equals. Jews from all over the world can still come there. You can call the replacement of a Jewish National Home where we rule others by a democratic Jewish national home where we live in peace and freedom ‘national suicide’. I call it reason and justice.

The first indication that President Obama and his Secretary of State Clinton will be sinking “into the quicksand,” as Singer graphically puts it, of their own making was their initial out of touch stand in regard to settlements when they both proclaimed in a czarist ukase the cessation of all settlements, including those of natural growth. In this surprisingly ignorant, indeed politically doltish, detachment of Obama and Clinton from the sensitivities of a great majority of Israelis who support the continuation of settlements, the Obama administration revealed its total diplomatic ineptness and incompetence to construct any future “road maps” that could resolve the intractable conflict.

This stupendous diplomatic error of Obama and Clinton completely and sadly disqualifies them from playing any effective role in the resolution of the hostility between Palestinians and Jews. All they have done is to increase the expectations of the Palestinians and provide them the reason to lock themselves in another intransigent position.

http://diplomacydetour.blogspot.com