I found this interesting article on Ynet News.
Rethinking Palestine
Martin Sherman offers a paradigm shift from the political to the humanitarian
And he makes some excellent points:
It is time for the proponents of the two-state solution to admit that the Palestinians have failed the test of history in staking their claim for statehood.
A dispassionate evaluation of the events of the past two decades inexorably compels one towards an increasing evident conclusion: The Palestinians seem far more focused on annulling Jewish political independence than on attaining Palestinian political independence; far more committed to deconstruction of the Jewish state than to construction of a Palestinian one.
Accordingly, further pursuit of a Palestinian state is likely to prove both futile and detrimental. For as past precedents strongly suggest, it will advance neither peace nor prosperity, but only serve as a platform for further violence against Israel.
Which would be easily explained by the fact that Hamas and the PLO were founded and supported by other Arabs not to found a "Palestinian" state (which they could have done decades ago before they ever lost any wars to Israel) but to destroy Israel and "throw the Jews into the sea".
A brutally condensed tour-de-raison of the substantive elements of the proposal begins with refugee issue and the body responsible for dealing with it, UNRWA (UN Relief & Works Agency), a highly anomalous organization that perpetuates a culture of Palestinian dependency and the unrealistic narrative of "return."
All the refugees on the face of the globe are under the auspices of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) - except for the Palestinians. For them, a separate special institution exists - UNRWA. Yet if the universally accepted UNHCR criteria for refugees were applied to the Palestinian case, the number of "refugees" would shrink from close to 5 million to around 200,000!
Which brings us back to the old liberal demand that "international law" should be applied to this conflict. Yes. It should. Let's apply international law to the "refugees" and see what changes.
This brings us to the third and final element of the proposal: Allowing individual Palestinians under Israeli administration the exercise of free will in determining their destiny.
( a ) Generous monetary compensation to effect the relocation and rehabilitation of the Palestinian residents in territories across the 1967 "Green Line", elsewhere in world, presumably predominantly - but not necessarily exclusively - in the Arab/Muslim countries.
( b ) "Atomization" of the implementation by making the offer of compensation and relocation directly to the heads of families and not through any Palestinian organizational entity that may well have a vested interest in foiling the scheme.
This has been a right long denied to "Palestinians", not by Israel but by the Arab world and the "international community".
Anyway, to this I would only add that when we are talking about compensating refugees, we should also talk about compensating _Jewish_ refugees. 500,000 Arab refugees vs 900,000 Jewish refugees. My proposal was a long time ago that we let the Arab League decide how much compensation the Arab refugees should get from Israel. They can show how much each refugees is worth.
And then we let the Arab League pay the same amount (per refugee, if we are angry) to Israel for the Jewish refugees.
Sounds fair?
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3863043,00.html