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Settling for Statehood

(Jewish Ideas Daily) Diana Muir Appelbaum - Palestinian spokesmen say they had no choice but to make their end run around serious negotiations with Israel and seek a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood because what Israel is offering in such negotiations is just a fraction of the territory to which the Palestinians are entitled. Yet virtually no nation founded in modern times has been born in possession of all the territory to which it could lay plausible claim. Settling for statehood in a territory significantly smaller than the desired homeland is the price that most national liberation movements have paid for self-determination and international recognition. Garibaldi, the pre-eminent military leader of 19th-century Italian unification, was born in Nice. But French possession of Nice was the price Italy paid for independence, recognition and peace. Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, was born in Salonika, which was ceded to Greece in return for recognition of the Republic of Turkey, with internationally settled borders. In 1919, the Treaty of Versailles created a series of independent states for Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Czechs and Slovaks. None of these states had the borders that their people's leaders wanted. In 1947, Lord Mountbatten drew a line across the map that excluded the Indus Valley, the cradle of Indian civilization and then home to millions of Hindus, from the new nation of India. In 1937, Zionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky asked "merely for a small fraction" of the "vast piece of land" that included modern-day Israel. And in 1948, that is precisely what the UN offered the Jews, reserving the larger part of the land west of the Jordan for Arabs. Yet the Jews accepted the UN's offer. If Palestinian leaders are serious about taking their place in the community of nations, they will need to make the kind of concession that Ataturk and Garibaldi, Greece, Poland, India and Israel made.
2011-09-27 00:00:00
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