Palestine in perspective

With a population just over 7 million which includes more than 1.5 million Arab-Israelis, the Jewish state represents about one-thousand of the world’s population, yet has managed to top the planet’s foreign-issue agenda for more than half a century. If we’re looking at the entire Palestine territory including Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, the entire population is about 11 million people almost equally split between Jews and Arabs (about 5.5 million for each group.) Including the Jewish settlements on the West Bank, the Jews enjoy about 80% of the total land mass while the same number of Arabs needs to make do with the remaining 20%. Even more striking is the fact that Israel’s per-capita GDP is $28,900, while that of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank is a paltry one tenth of that at $2,900. This abject poverty is among other reasons the source of its exploding population growth rate at 2.7% vs. 1.7% within the state of Israel. Based on that vital information, it seems to me that a two-state solution is never going to work. Not only the two separate enclaves of Gaza and the West Bank will never be able to operate as a unit, but the Arab population confined to what amounts to concentration camps will keep on exploding, becoming poorer, angrier and will keep on fueling the conflict. This in turn will radicalize the Israeli that will eventually justify a pure and simple eradication of the entire Arab population. Put simply, this is not sustainable and the reason why a one-state solution, where Arabs and Jews must learn tolerance and share the same destiny, is the only viable answer to the region’s future.