What the MKs really think

We can peak into the mindset of the Israeli Knesset members when one of its leading members, Arieh Eldad, muses that "Jordan Is Palestine". All thanks to a misguided revival of the Jordanian Option, which was originally a plan to overlook the PLO twenty years ago and refuse to grant sovereignty for the Palestinians by seeking "moderates" to be the suitable partner for Israel. (Does that sound familiar to anyone?)

Eldad astutely quotes Rabin, "a Palestinian state will rise only on the ruins of Israel". Typically Eldad wants to promote the idea that the Palestinians want the demise of Israel (as some of them would welcome after sixty odd years of oppression), but unintentionally invokes the hardline that no Palestinian state will ever be given unless its 'on the ruins of Israel'. In crude lamen's terms, you'll have an independent state "over my dead body".

The Jordanian Option is demurred, because Eldad wants the world to recognise that:

"Jordan is Palestine. Between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, only one country has a right to exist, the State of Israel. Palestinians have a state across the river. They are 70 percent of its citizens."

Woah. Exchange the word "Israel" for "Palestine", and you would have the typical perception that has conditioned public opinion for decades. But this is taboo, is it not? No. Eldad is just stating openly what every MK (besides the Arab ones) in the Knesset, past and present, have been thinking. They clearly do not want any state resembling viability next to them. ALL of the area between the Mediterranean to the Jordan River is reserved for the Jews. Not exactly a partner for peace, is it?

Eldad gives the statistic that 70 % of Jordan's citizens are Palestinians. Interestingly enough, what was left out is that these citizens are part of the Diaspora that Israel helped create since 1948. According to the Global Exchange website,

"Jordan has received the largest number of Palestinian refugees. An estimated 100,000 of all refugees fled across the Jordan River in 1948. A large majority of Palestinians are Jordanian citizens. Since the return of over 300,000 Palestinians from Kuwait in 1991, between 45% and 70% of all Jordanians are Palestinians from the West Bank. Although Palestinians suffer from discrimination and a large number still live in camps, Jordan has granted full citizenship to the Palestinian refugees and their descendents."

One wonders if a state can conveniently displace the indigenous population to the neighbour states, and then audaciously announce that they had no connection to the land and are really part of the country they inhabit in refugee camps.

Eldad continues:

"The land of Israel was already divided into two countries when Churchill tore what lies across from the Jordan River from our national home and gave it to the Arabs in 1922. And even if this was an historic crime against the Jewish people, it is already an historic fact we failed to change."

Nevermind that Transjordan was created by the British Empire for lovely oil purposes, Israel was founded in 1948, not 1922. Zionism was marked down in the land of Palestine and to this day, they still feel it an injustice that they were not only given 100 % of Palestine, instead of only 55 % (which they then forcefully took the rest from the Palestinians during 47-48), but the true part of Eretz Israel, even east of the Jordanian River. Statistics have shown that the Jewish population represented quite the minority even in 1922, at 11%. Up until the creation of the state, they only represented a third of the total population. And yet it is "an historic crime against the Jewish people". What kind of a crime is it against the Palestinians? Oh right. They are Jordanians, correct? In addition, wasn't all of this part of a sham self-determination policy that aimed to placate the indigenous population while being under the control of empirical satraps?

What Israel wants is expulsion. Whether it is with Eldad's "voluntary transfer", or with Olmert's slow destruction. No Palestinian state is negotiable for Israel: they want them expelled to the east of the River Jordan.