Israel's Disastrous Plan

ON Wednesday, the Arab summit in Kuwait lent its categorical support to the Palestinian Authority by refusing to accept Israel as a Jewish state because doing so in its eyes would be tantamount to reducing Palestine’s sons of the soil to the status of serfs on their own land. That Israel should be a Jewish state was inherent in the Balfour Declaration issued by Britain in 1917, and all Israeli governments have followed this policy by encouraging Jews from all over the world to settle in the country and squeezing the Arabs out of Israel proper and the occupied territories. The hardline government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu has officially adopted this policy and has been pressing the PA to accept it. More pernicious has been the plan to repudiate the 1967 border and draw up a scheme for territorial ‘adjustments’ and ‘transfer’ — nothing less than a euphemism for expulsion — of Palestinians from their ancestral lands. As reported in the Western media, this plan is being studied from the point of view of international law. If Israel succeeds in this scheme, gobbles up more territory and manages to evict a majority of Palestinians from their ancestral land, it would only exacerbate tensions.