Iran is “in the front of everything that is transpiring” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, providing “funds, weapons, religious inspiration, moral support, and international coverage,” says Mordechai Nisan, an Israeli professor and scholar of Middle Eastern studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
“President [Barack] Obama is ignoring the complexity of these issues and the involvement of Iran and Iran’s war-mongering position against Israel, and its commitment to acquire nuclear weapons, all of which can create enormous chaos and a direct, existential threat toward Israel,” Nisan says in an exclusive Newsmax.TV interview.
Regarding the Palestinians’ intention to achieve United Nations recognition in September, “the credibility of the entire Oslo process and international support for it will be scuttled,” something for which the Palestinians will bear responsibility, says Nisan. A unilateral declaration of statehood would “create much tension on the ground” between the Israeli military and the Palestinian Authority, and would lack a “framework of trust . . . between the two sides,” leading to a situation that would be “highly unstable.”
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“Obama’s insistence on the pre-1967 lines as Israel’s borders is really an exercise . . . in political witchcraft,” a position that will prove to be “very irresponsible and unhelpful” and will “create political havoc,” says Nisan. “President Obama has good intentions but the way he’s handling this, it seems, will create much more tension.”
Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, which is the frequent target of pro-Palestinian activists’ efforts, is described by Nisan as an effort to “contain the Hamas government . . . which has used the Gaza Strip . . . for a launching pad to fire missiles at Israeli targets.” Nisan describes Iran’s support of such actions as making the conflict “irresolvable.” Nisan concedes that in fact, a Palestinian state already exists, in that “the Gaza Strip is an independent, autonomous political entity.”
In his book, “Only Israel West of the River,” Nisan argues for a “paradigm shift,” which would entail a rejection of the two-state solution, which has “been a failure and . . . unfeasible.” Nisan makes the case that the only state west of the Jordan River should be Israel, not with a Palestinian state, and that the Jewish state would be the “predominant political and demographic reality.”
What would he do with the Palestinians? “The Palestinians in the [West Bank and Gaza Strip] would have to accepts the condition as a result of their inability to accept Israel’s legitimacy, and because of their ongoing commitment to warfare and terrorism, [they] will finally have to accept the reality of the Jewish state.” They would “choose to remain where they are and live under a kind of regime of autonomy which would allow them religious, cultural self-expression, but no Palestinian state.” Nisan cites Jerusalem, where he has lived for decades, as an example of Palestinians living under Israeli rule being “no less free than the Jewish population,” but without political autonomy.
Palestinian political autonomy “would only be available east of the Jordan River,” where “the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan under King Abdullah II would have to finally do what it should have done historically, which is . . . to be the political repository of Palestinian national aspirations,” says Nisan. “If there will be a Palestinian state, it will be east of the Jordan River, where the Palestinians are a majority today.”
Nisan cites the Palestinian education system and culture as rife with incitement, where Palestinians “continue daily to educate their youth, and their people generally, to demonize Israel and the Jewish people, to hail martyrs as models to emulate, to teach [their] children from the nursery and up that they should want to go out and commit violent terrorist attacks against Jews.” Nisan laments that the Oslo process was meant to create an “atmosphere of trust,” but was not successful, leaving the current situation at “back to zero.” Nisan says, “This is not a time to try and impose a two-state solution which has no feasibility on the ground to work.”
Calling Israel “one of the amazing human narratives in the annals of mankind,” Nisan explains that the Jewish people have “sustained our identity, our faith, our language, our commitment to the land of Israel, our national solidarity and cohesion for close to 4,000 years . . . Having come out of the Holocaust with 6 million Jews dead, the state of Israel is a vibrant and miraculous proof of the vitality of the human spirit, in this case the Jewish spirit, of what is capable among free peoples.”
Editor’s note:
To get Mordechai Nisan’s book, “Only Israel West of the River,” at a good price — Click Here Now.
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