The talk by Jerusalem Post senior contributing editor Caroline B. Glick on March 30 was billed as a discussion of her plan for what Israel should do about the land known variously as Judea-Samaria or the West Bank.
But she started her presentation at the Joseph and Rebecca Peltz Center for Jewish Life by discussing attacks on Israel and on Jewish students occurring at many U.S. college and university campuses — and the two subjects, she argued, are connected.
Glick, a Chicago native, described a recent situation at Vassar College. Jill Schneiderman is a professor of earth sciences there who, in Glick’s description, had all the politically correct credentials, being a lesbian and a gay rights activist and someone concerned about the environment.
But this professor proposed a class trip to Israel in order to study that country’s pioneering water use technologies.
When word of that got out, the college’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine — which Glick called “an anti-Semitic hate group” — “began picketing the class and trying to intimidate the students into dropping it.”
When Schneiderman complained to the college administration, the school’s Committee on Inclusion and Excellence convened a meeting on the topic, which “got very ugly and very anti-Semitic,” Glick said. (According to other reports, the class trip to Israel did take place during March.)
“This is happening at college after college,” said Glick. And a significant reason why, she told the audience of about 150, is because “the Jewish community and Israel have adopted the two-state paradigm.”
Glick defined this “paradigm” as the belief that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the creation of an independent Palestinian state in the territories west of the Jordan River that came under Israel’s control in the 1967 Six Day War — and that Israel alone is preventing this.
“It’s about placing all blame for the absence of peace on the Jews,” Glick said. In fact, Glick contended that people have claimed all problems in the Middle East would be solved, or at least moderated, if a Palestinian Arab state were created.
This idea is “completely delusional,” said Glick. However, the claim is also “incredibly convenient” because world leaders and others therefore “don’t have to think about” the pathologies in the Arab world, like the tyrannical regimes, the doctrine of jihad in radical Islam, poverty, sexism and other problems.
And for Jews and Israelis to accept this claim is self-sabotaging, she said. “This paradigm is based on a lie that denies us the ability to defend ourselves.”
“We’re locked in a strategic paradigm [in which Israel] accepts the blame for everything,” she said. That prevents Israeli representatives and Israel’s defenders from upholding such truths as “this land belongs to us” and “the Palestinian national movement is not about establishing a Palestinian state but about destroying the Jewish state.”
“We can’t point any of this out because we’re not talking about our rights, we’re not talking about truth, we’re not talking about justice,” she said.
In fact, none of the two state proposals made for the past 90 years — even before Israel’s birth in 1948 — have worked because the Arabs have refused to accept them, Glick said.
Therefore what Israel needs to do is extend its law to the territory west of the Jordan River, dissolving both the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli military government, Glick said. The Arab people living there will have the option to apply for Israeli citizenship, and those that receive it will have the rights of all Israelis.
Glick’s recently published book about this is called “The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East” (Crown Forum, 324 pages, $25). Glick said her publisher used the word “solution” in the title over her objection: “I don’t believe in ‘solutions’ at all; I believe in managing things.”
Some of the objections to her plan are based on false information, she contended. For example, many advocates of a Palestinian state say that the Arab population there is huge and growing and could make Jews a minority in the area.
Glick contended that the Palestinian Authority has falsely inflated the population figures, and that the rate of Arab emigration is larger and the birthrate smaller than reported.
She contended that even if all the Arab people in the territory applied for and received Israeli citizenship, Israeli Jews would still constitute two-thirds of the population — and the Israeli Jewish birthrate will maintain that population’s growth.
As for hostile reactions from the rest of the world, Israel is being “demonized and delegitimized throughout the Western world now,” Glick said. “All the worst case scenarios” that could result from rejecting the two-state paradigm “are happening now when we’re doing the opposite.”
“This plan is not utopian,” Glick said. “It is not perfect, it is not without dangers; but it is far safer than where we are today.”
Glick’s appearance in Milwaukee was sponsored and organized by the Committee for Truth and Justice, and co-sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council and the Coalition for Jewish Learning, agencies of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation.
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