A Two State Solution

In 1947 and 1948, after World War II, Great Britain lost two major lands, one in the Middle East, the other in India.? How did it go? On August 14, 1947, the British left India, dividing it into two states, India and Pakistan, both carved out of British India. Pakistan comprised two areas, one west of India, the other over a thousand miles to the east.? In 1971, this unstable combination split into two countries, Pakistan – primarily made up of Sind and the western Punjab - and Bangladesh – originally east Bengal.

In the Middle East, in September 1922, Jordan became a separate country, representing 77% of the original British Mandate for Palestine. On May 14, 1948, the British left completely, and Prime Minister Ben Gurion announced that the remaining 23% of the Mandate would become the State of Israel.? Since then, Israel has defended itself in at least 9 wars, and it has fought several Intifadas (uprisings), battles within Gaza, along with other hostilities, some of which lasted several years. The number of deaths is unclear, arguably as high as the claimed 30,000 in Gaza now, but surely the numbers are far lower than those in the Indian subcontinent, since the population is much smaller. Now, fatigued with these wars, the international community wants to divide Israel into two states, the State of Israel, and a State of Palestine. But this is an area the size of New Jersey.

The theory seems to be that this will put an end to the squabbling and conflict, but those who favor this solution should look at India-Pakistan. In their war of partition, 15-18 million people were displaced and relocated, and between two and three million were killed. Since partition, Pakistan and India have fought each other in four wars: 1947-48, 1965, 1971, and 1999. The war in 1947-48 also was known as the first Kashmir war, and it was followed by battles between India and Pakistan as well as between India and Kashmir ever since.

The border skirmishes and cross-border attacks have never stopped. In December 2001, nine people were killed when Pakistan affiliated gunmen broke into the Indian Parliament, and this in December 2023, this was memorialized by another breach of security in the Parliament. Some might remember the November 2008 attacks in which ten Pakistani terrorists came to Mumbai by sea and set the Taj Mahal Hotel and the Chabad House, among other landmarks, on fire. A 2022 movie, The Kashmir Files, shows in graphic and searing detail what happened during the 1990 expulsion of Hindus from Kashmir, and that was only the beginning of the Hindu exodus from 1991 to 2015 that cost 1406 lives and turned this beautiful land from multicultural to a Muslim majority.

Moving east, we should not ignore that in 2017 a notorious genocide of Muslim Rohingyas in Myanmar drove 740,000 Rohingyas into Bangladesh and caused 25,000 fatalities. Less well known are the endless tribal conflicts in India’s wild northeast in the states of Manipur and Assam. Some say the solution to that problem is to divide the region into as many as a dozen states.

So, the problems of Israel and the Palestinians will be ended by a two-state solution, as proposed by Biden and Blinken? Then all this nasty fighting will cease?? Like it has stopped in India? Or in Pakistan?

What about Lebanon? This country, once the Paris of the Middle East, was convulsed by a bloody civil war from 1975 to 1990. This killed some 150,000 Lebanese and created at least one million refugees, many of whose children became my surgical patients in Dearborn Michigan. Or how about the Syrian civil war which, since it began in 2011, has internally displaced more than six million, caused the flight of five million people, and killed at least 600,000.

What about the Armenian Genocide in Turkey, from 1915 to 1922? Current estimates are that 1.5 million were killed in 1915-16. If we include Armenians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Greeks – and we should - the numbers increase dramatically. There, the Turks and Kurds wanted to clear the land of Christians, so they could live there undisturbed.? Today incidentally, the Turks are attacking their Kurdish citizens, politically mostly, sometimes physically. But outside of Turkey, the Kurds are seen as a sympathetic group unfairly denied a country of their own, despite promises from the international community. And remember, all these civil wars have happened in countries that were created by dividing up the Ottoman Empire, ultimately spawning Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel. And splitting this empire into a multiplicity of new countries did not stop any of them from civil wars or conflicts with each other. That is a fact. ?

Based on the history does anyone seriously think that dividing tiny Israel into two states will stop them from fighting?

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