Recently we have been covering former Prime Minister Netanyahu foreign policy advisor and current deputy managing editor at the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick, on her new book "The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East" (reviewed here).
In her book, Glick puts forth a controversial plan that calls for the complete abandonment of the so-called two-state solution, to be replaced by the so-called one-state "Israeli solution," involving Israel asserting its sovereignty over Judea and Samaria and absorbing all citizens therein.
Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post speaks with Glenn Beck on Feb. 5, 2014. (Photo: TheBlaze TV)
Below are ten quotes from our interview with Ms. Glick that provide expert insight into the state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and how it might be solved. All emphasis is ours.
"The United States has been pushing this idea of a two-state solution for over a generation. It was first pushed by the Nixon Administration in 1970 and it’s based on this totally false understanding of the Middle East which places Israel at the center of everything. It says that the size of Israel is really responsible for all the bad things in the Arab world, and if we can make Israel smaller than the problems will be smaller...The problem with this paradigm is that it’s totally false. Israel doesn’t dictate events in the Arab world. Those are dictated by internal issues in each Arab state...They all have to do with the internal dynamics and pathologies of Arab societies. But because the U.S. has been pushing this idea for so long, what has happened is that U.S. policymakers are fundamentally incapable of understanding the Middle East, because they’re basing everything on this false assumption of Israeli culpability."
[sharequote align="center"]The centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy is to push for the establishment of a terrorist state[/sharequote]
"...there’s something fundamentally wrong when the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy is to push for the establishment of a terrorist state that is dedicated to destroying Israel but can’t figure out what to do about it because they’ve been told all of this time that Israel is the problem, or the absence of a Palestinian State is the problem; that if they care about Israel they should support America financing a Palestinian terrorist army and spending upwards of $500 million a year bankrolling Palestinian terrorists. It’s always been crazy, but that’s what people have been told and they’ve come to believe it over time."
"...at base the Palestinian national movement since its inception in 1920 has not been about the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state but rather the destruction of the Jewish state or earlier the prevention of the establishment of a Jewish state and so it remains to this day which is why the PLO has consistently refused statehood every time it has been offered them since 1993."
[instory-book ISBN="9780385348065"]
"The demographic argument that President Obama made most recently in his interview with Jeff Goldberg is based on a complete falsification of demographic data by the PLO in 1997 that inflated the base Palestinian population by 50% and then asserted birth rates that had no equal throughout the world for the Palestinians, when in fact there’d been a collapse of Palestinian fertility rates over the past 15 years along with the rest of the Muslim world, and on the other hand, at the same time, there’s been a steep rise in Jewish fertility rates in Israel. Israeli women moved from 2 to 3 children per woman, and the Palestinians are down to below 3 children per woman, which means that Israel has already outpaced the Palestinians on fertility. The base population of Jews is twice the base population for Arabs to begin with and they’re hemorrhaging immigrants. And Israel has high and rising immigration rights…so demography is actually Israel’s strongest suit and I would just add to that that the concept if you establish a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria that this is going to avert a demographic disaster even based on the false demographic numbers that people like President Obama are pushing is completely wrong because they’re saying that a sovereign Palestinian state in those areas will have the right to absorb millions of foreign-born hostile Arabs who live today in Palestinian and UN-administered refugee camps in places like Lebanon and Syria and Jordan, and these are terrorists. These are camps that are terrorist bases, run by terrorists, and so you’re talking about bringing in up to several million foreign Arabs into the Palestinian state. They will not be at peace with Israel and they will be using that area (even if local Palestinians didn’t want it to happen)…to make war against a shrunken Israel that would lack the basic capacity to defend itself because its borders would be so porous and indefensible. That would be the demographic disaster."
"...they’ve [Palestinians have] been oppressed by Palestinian leaders and they’ve been oppressed by Arab leaders. The people who reside in those camps that I mentioned in places like Syria and Jordan and Lebanon have been denied the basic rights of citizenship that all other refugee populations are supposed to receive. They’ve been shunted from one place to another–in Lebanon they have no civil rights to speak of–they live under an apartheid regime where they’re not allowed entry into almost any profession in Lebanon and are therefore doomed to massive poverty – intergenerational poverty – as a consequence of this discriminatory policy against them. And they live in squalor and that is horrible. Under the PLO jackboot for the past 20 years the Palestinians of these areas have lived in an area ruled by the law of the jungle, by kleptomaniacs who have stolen billions of dollars in international aid funds that were supposed to go to building a state which their leaders of course were not interested in.
[sharequote align="center"]Under the PLO jackboot...the Palestinians...have lived...[under] the law of the jungle[/sharequote]
And they’ve suffered torture and of mass privation. As a result of that the Christians for instance have been targeted. Bethlehem was majority Christian when Israel handed it over to the PLO in 1996 and today I think only 12% of Bethlehem is now Christian. Their property has been stolen, their stores have been taken over by people who have forced them to immigrate to other lands. So they have been oppressed. But just not by Israel. Israel is the only force in the area that has actually provided them with a good life, with rights, with the protections of a liberal legal code, with universal education. Israel built all of the Palestinian universities. During the years they lived under Israeli military rule from 1967 through 1996 the Palestinian growth rate – their economy was consistently one point above Israel’s growth rate. They were fully integrated into Israeli society. The big problem for the Palestinians began with the PLO’s entrée into the areas under the guise of the so-called peace process of 1994.
Palestinians wave national and PFLP flags during a protest in the West Bank city of Ramallah Sunday, July 28, 2013. Some two hundred supporters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine protested against the resuming of the peace talks with Israel. Despite such sentiments, Glick argues that Palestinians oppose Israeli withdrawal. (Credit: AP)
"...the more PLO control over their lives, the less good their lives are, the poorer their lives are. This is why Israeli Arabs for instance when Israel began the negotiations with the PLO, for years they had never wanted to apply for Israeli citizenship....And then suddenly they started lining up by the thousands outside of the Ministry of the Interior to apply for Israeli citizenship. You saw Christian Arabs in Jerusalem increasingly moving into Jewish neighborhoods and away from Arab neighborhoods because they were frightened and they didn’t want to risk living under the control of the PLO. And so the tendency to apply for Israeli citizenship rises with any expectation that Israel may abandon the lands and we’ve seen similar things happen with the Druze of the Golan Heights who were given a similarly permanent residence and status after Israel applied its laws there as well in 1981...It’s also why the Palestinians who live in Judea and Samaria oppose economic boycotts of Israel – and other political isolation of Israel that is being propounded by their leadership at their expense."
[sharequote align="center"]The two-state paradigm is inherently anti-Israel. It places all the blame for everything on the Jews[/sharequote]
"...on a substantive basis, the fact that President Bush embraced the two-state paradigm meant that overall his policy regarding Israel and the Middle East generally was based on and therefore advanced the cause of this pathological view of both Israel and the Middle East that discarded reality and so even at the time when Bush gave his most seemingly pro-Israel speech on June 24, 2002, in the midst of a massive terror campaign by the Palestinians, the points that he set out were substantively difficult to distinguish from the policies that Obama has laid out in some of the most anti-Israel speeches that he has given as president. Because if that’s the model, even if you support Israel on a sort of visceral level like I think Bush did, the policy that you end up advancing is necessarily anti-Israel because the two-state paradigm is inherently anti-Israel. It places all the blame for everything on the Jews."
"Well my column in tomorrow’s Jerusalem Post says that Obama left the door wide open to this in his interview with Jeff Golberg because he said “Nobody’s given us an alternative to this, and so you gotta do this because there’s no alternative.” Well no, that’s not true. I don’t know that Israel can go forward with anything like this with the Obama administration, but it can certainly prepare the ground for it – he’s not going to be president forever – because what Netanyahu I suggest in my article ought to do is say “Well, this is the alternative: applying Israeli law to all of these areas. Now I support a Palestinian state and two-state solution, however, we certainly have a viable alternative to it, so if they don’t want to give us an offer that we’re going to be able to live with then we’re just going to go our own way. It’s fine, don’t worry about us. We’re ok. And by the way your demographic statistics are complete lies.'"
"...a policy that’s based on standing with America’s allies and trying to make them strong is possible and opposing America’s enemies, that’s just, in a way it’s obvious although it has not been the policy of any president in recent times. And so, Israel does not want American forces to be deployed in the Middle East to protect it – Israel has consistently rejected such proposals and I’ve always said “We’ll stand on our own two feet thank you very much for asking.” If America were to adapt this policy, it would save a half a billion dollars a year because it wouldn’t have to finance the Palestinian terrorist army any more – that would be a good thing – it’s a net savings. The United States is actually here required to do less, rather than more. It’s a policy model that the U.S. could easily adopt as well in places like Latin America and Asia. You want to scale back U.S. military involvement? Fine, then help the Japanese and the South Koreans defend themselves. It’s about being a good ally and I think that this is something that speaks to most people in the United States whether Democrats or Republicans. Americans are good and they want to do the right thing and they know that allies are better than enemies. This isn’t rocket science. This is schoolyard rules. If you’re good to your friends and bad to your enemies people will want to be your friends and they won’t want to be your enemies."
"...one of the consequences of Obama’s hostility towards Israel, guarded hostility towards Israel is that for the first time in a generation, Israel has had to think about how to defend herself in the absence of American support. And this has had a liberating impact on the Israeli political discourse because America had sort of in a way…cultivated a welfare mentality among Israelis talking about Israel not as an ally but as Condi Rice used to say patronizingly as a “friend” or a “special relationship” which people said was so important and wonderful, but they didn’t call us an ally as a serious strategic ally – and the U.S. House of Representatives just passed a resolution saying that which was very important. And Israelis are now feeling it more than they had in the past because when you don’t have a very cushy kind of security blanket to hold on to or a safety net underneath you then you have to really think carefully about what your options are or what you can do or what you can’t do, what you can sacrifice or what you have to maintain and so I think that you know from that perspective Israelis are much more independent after six years of Obama or five-and-a-half years of Obama then we were when he took office, and that’s good."
