Why Israeli Arabs oppose land swaps

Fresnozionism.org
07 March '10

Nothing irritates Israeli Arabs more than talk of land and population swaps, and it’s interesting to see why.

The idea of a swap, promoted by Avigdor Lieberman’s Israel Beiteinu party, seems like a practical solution to a difficult problem.

Implementing a partition of the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean — the so-called two-state solution – by simply returning to the 1949 cease-fire lines would not be acceptable to Israel, and indeed very unfair. Since the Palestinians are not prepared to permit Jews to live in ‘Palestine’, all 350,000 Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria (for the purposes of this article, I’m ignoring the very difficult issue of Jerusalem) would have to be moved. Considering the difficulty and expense of evacuating 8,000 people from Gaza, this kind of population movement is unimaginable.

I am not going to belabor the irony that the Palestinians, who insist that Israel’s policy in the territories constitutes ‘racist apartheid’ find no difficulty themselves in proposing a racist apartheid state!

In any event, UN Security Council resolution 242, generally considered the legal foundation for the two-state solution, does not call for a reversion to the pre-1967 status quo. Rather, it says that in the framework of a peace agreement, Israel will return territories (but not all the territories — see here for interpretations by the original drafters of the resolution) to Arab control in return for an end of the conflict and “secure and recognized boundaries.” Since then many observers have pointed out that the 1949 lines are not at all secure.

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