The Two-State Fallacy by Amiel Ungar May 2009 U.S. President Barack Obama has become, pardon the expression, the great white hope of the Israeli left. They expect him to effectively nullify the results of the recent Israeli elections by destabilizing the newly-installed Netanyahu government. The scenario is clear: Obama will pressure Nentanyahu over the settlements and the prime minister will have to chose between a) caving in and weakening his parlimentary base of support, thereby accelerating his government's demise; b) attempting to hang on to power like former prime minister Ariel Sharon by repudiating his election promises and forming a more dovish coalition; and c) risking a rupture with a popular American president Settlements have become the wedge issue, given the demonization of the settlement project and the abysmal ignorance surrounding the underlying historical and geographic realities. For one, the Arab-Israeli conflict has never been about territory, but about legitimacy. The question in historic terms is: Can an entity, other than an Arab and Isamic one, be accepted as part of the Middle East, or will it inevitably prove to be merely another Crusader kingdom, destined to succumb to Muslim implacability and the erosion of external support? Had territorial compromise been the key, peace would have been achieved long ago. The first partition of Palestine occurred back in 1921, when Britain's Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill amputated the bulk if the original League of Nations Palestine Mandate to form what is now the Kingdom of Jordan. Churchill explained to the Jews that this violation would ultimatley be to their benefit, as it would put to rest Arab claims for the smaller portion that remained. But this division of the land failed to resolve the conflict, as did the proposed Peel partion of 1937, the U.N. partion of 1947 and the post Six Day War Israeli partion proposals uner the two Ehuds, Barak and Olmert, encompassing nearly total withdrawal to the June 4, 1967 lines. The best the Arabs will offer is a Palestinian state with no Jews, and an Israeli state (as opposed to a Jewish state) whose Arab minority will be swelled by compelling it to accept hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees, thus eradicating any semblance of Jewish statehood. As for legitimacy, Zionism's strongest claim, recongnized even by secularists such as David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann, rested on the religious-historical Jewish connection to the Land of Israel. That is the reason why in places such as the Temple Mount, the Arabs assiduously attempt to destroy all signs of Jewish roots and falsify history to deny any Jewish connection to Jerusalem, including the Western Wall. Renunciation by Israel of the areas that constitue the cradle of Jewish history would merely reinforce their mendacious narrative. Israel cannot give up Shiloh, Bethel or Tekoa - anymore than Obama could relinquish Valley Forge or Jamestown - without confirming the Arab thesis that the Jews are a foreign, aphemeral and illegitimate presence. The idea that hostilities would end with the establishment of a viable independent Palestinian state is fatuous. Statehood is not a grand prize for the Palestinians, as the state system has never taken hold in the Muslim Middle East and has frequently run a poor third to pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism. Even in a country with a presumed separate national identity such as Egypt, the very term "Egypt" vanished under its pan-Arabist president Gamal Abdel Nasser, when the country's official name was the United Arab Republic. Now that Pan-Islamism is back, who wants to settle for a mere mini-state that constitutes a diversion from the real goal of a global Muslim caliphate? A more parochial rival to the state system has been the network of tribes and clans, which claim greater loyalty than the state. The highly- touted surge in Iraq effectively tapped into tribal local patriotism that survived decades of Ba'ath Party rule. Moreover, the conflict will not end because the Arab side seeks to put an end to the mutual suffering the way Israel does. On the contrary, it revels in it. Yasser Arafat spoke of thousands of martyrs marching to liberate Jerusalem and the cult of the martyr-shahid has become a source of pride and an assurance of victory to the Arabs, who compare their willingness to sacrifice hundreds of thousands, while the Zionist enemy is stressed out by combat losses, or even the abduction of a lone soldier. There is one thing that can concentrate the minds of the Arabs on peace: a permanent loss of land. If they are disabused of the assumption that any deal offered them will always be surpassed in generosity by the succeeding offer, (an assumption that has unfortunately been validated so far), they will know that time is not necessarily on their side and wars exact a tangible and permanent price. Even James Baker, no particular friend of Israel, realized this logic when he persuaded the Palestinians to come to the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference by threatening recognition of the settlements if they proved obdurate. Bottom Line: If Obama wants to achieve peace, he is ore likely to get it by going with the settlements than against them.