Strict Separation Is Not the Answer for Palestine and Israel | by Yanis Varoufakis - Project Syndicate

may seem ironic that so soon after Israel offered the Palestinians nearly everything they and the international community wanted—a Palestinian state with Arab Jerusalem as its capital, return of the entire Gaza Strip and almost the entire West Bank, a fair and practical resolution of the refugee issue, and an end to Jewish settlements—it is now a p

After all, there had never been a Palestinian state in this area. A Jewish homeland would not be carved out of a preexisting Palestinian state. Instead, a decision would have to be made about how to allocate a 45,000-square-mile area of land that had been captured from the Ottoman Empire and was populated by Arabs, Jews, and others. There were four

majority wanted to see the Palestinians enjoy the right to self-determination, but not at the cost of denying Israelis the most fundamental right: to life. They looked around the Middle East and saw the overthrow of corrupt, nonelected Arab rulers and their replacement by Islamist radicals.

The Peel Commission plan proposed a Jewish home in areas in which there was a clear Jewish majority, divided into two noncontiguous sections. The northern portion extended from Tel Aviv to the current border with Lebanon. It consisted largely of a 10-mile-wide strip of land from the Mediterranean east to the end of the coastal plain, then a somewha