You are here

For a lasting peace

Sep 26,2019 - Last updated at Sep 26,2019

During His Majesty King Abdullah’s interview with NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell for US cable TV news network MSNBC in New York on the eve of the King’s address at the UN General Assembly’s 74th session on Tuesday, the King dealt with many issues and crises affecting the Middle East, including Iran’s threat to regional stability. 

The highlight of the King’s replies was when he addressed the Palestinian crisis and the continuous Israeli provocations and illegal actions against Palestinian lands. 

The King defended the two-state solution as the only fair, practical and sustainable solution to the Palestinian case and excluded the one-state solution as anathema to everybody’s long-term interests. 

“If it’s a one-state solution… then we are talking about an apartheid future for Israel, which I think would be a catastrophe to all of us,” said the King.  

This stance in effect summed up the case against the one-state solution. Given the projected population growth among the Palestinians, an apartheid state of Israel would have to deal with more than four million Palestinians in a matter of a few years. 

If Israel denies the Palestinians their basic political and civil rights, then it will railroad itself into a civil war sooner or later over and above the condemnation of the entire international community. 

But that is not all, said the King. Annexing the West Bank would have a serious and irrevocable impact on the Jordanian-Israeli peace accords as well as on the Egyptian peace pact with Israel. Jordan and Egypt are the only Arab states that have peace accords with Israel. Does Israel really want to jeopardise them and put them at the risk of utter failure? 

Israel must strive to have a peace accords with the other Arab states. How can it ever convince the remaining Arab countries to jump on the bandwagon of peace if it deals a death blow to the existing accords with Jordan and Egypt? 

In other words, the one-state solution poses a mortal danger to Israel itself while the two-state solution offers instead a genuine basis for lasting peace between the two sides. Israel must make a choice, and now!

up
87 users have voted.


Newsletter

Get top stories and blog posts emailed to you each day.

PDF