Diane of Letter from Gotham is back. First, she posted a limerick about Saddam Hussain on her substitute blog and now she has a pretty good debunking of the transfer option for Palestinians:
[Transfer] is a fantasy because even if it could be done (which it can’t, but let it pass) moving three million Arabs beyond the borders of Israel would only be moving the problem, and not taking care of it. So three million Palestinian Arabs are transferred to a place somewhere beyond Israel’s new, improved border. So what? They’ll only take up residence there, even more aggrieved, even angrier, to plan and work for the day that they can finally take care of this intrusion into the Arab Middle East. Transfer will turn all of the Arab Middle East irremediably against the United States, Israel’s proxy. It isn’t now, but just give the Alisa’s time, they will be. Who will they turn to? There’s no one on the horizon now, but I could think of two possibilities for the future: Russia, and China. (China, with its rapidly growing economy, insatiable thirst for oil, amoral policies and huge population. Not a bad candidate. Not to mention a trade surplus with the US.)
Why is transfer bad for me?
For those of you who don’t live in a mental ghetto, for those of you who aren’t isolated in the back of a limousine, Israel has marketed itself as a liberal democracy, the only one in the Middle East. Now, anti-Zionists have published reams of stuff “proving” that that’s not true; and I’ll get to all that at some point; it’s a subject that I really should deal with, but not now. The point is, the image has been created, and if three million Arabs get expelled from their homes in a great big Kosovo redux, that image will be destroyed forever, or, as the anti-Zionists would put it, the truth about Israel would finally be on display, for all the world to see. Even Instapundit and James Lileks would disapprove.
That would be very bad for me, because it would then lead to a furious anti-Semitic backlash in the US. The majority of Americans are neither born-agains nor Jewish. They are reasonably neutral, nice nominal white Christians who have satisfying private lives and a certain amount of equity. Detonate a Middle Eastern Armageddon and watch all of that go up in smoke. Then, well, I don’t really care to speculate what would happen, because it’s not going to happen.
