Throughout the Arab-Israeli conflict, and especially prior to the Six Day War in 1967, Arab leaders have at times pledged to drive the Jews into the sea as part of a victorious jihad to eradicate the Jewish state. Fortunately, Israel’s military victories have made these genocidal threats mere empty boasts. But an illustrator working for France’s Le Monde Diplomatique has finally achieved what Israel’s enemies have always dreamed about: he’s drowned all of the Jews in a Palestinian sea. As Robert Mackey writes in the New York Times news blog the Lede, artist Julien Bousac has created a vision of a Palestinian state on the West Bank in which the Jews are literally under water. Arab areas are depicted as islands while anyplace the Jews live is termed as some part of the sea.
The goal of this imaginary map is to show how fragmented the Arab areas of Judea and Samaria are by the Israeli presence and Bousac has claimed that he is not trying to depict the Jews as being under water. But it is hard to escape the conclusion that even when trying to depict Palestinians as victims of Israeli control, it is more fun for some people to just imagine that Jews have disappeared.
There are those who will see this map as proof that a two-state solution is impossible. But if the Palestinians ever decide that they actually want to live in peace alongside Israel, there is little doubt — and as proven by past Israeli offers of statehood and territorial concessions to the Palestinians — such a state would easily come into existence. The obstacle to such a state is not the Jews who currently live in parts of the West Bank. It is that the Palestinians and the terror groups that lead them are less interested in a Palestinian state — no matter what its borders might be — than they are in continuing their war against Israel. The continued demand that any Palestinian state must be devoid of Jews and that small isolated Jewish communities inside the West Bank must be forcibly uprooted demonstrates their bad faith on the question of peaceful coexistence.
The real map of the Middle East is not composed of tiny Palestinian islands surrounded by an Israeli sea. Rather, it is one tiny Jewish state the size of New Jersey surrounded by an Arab and Islamic world composed of more than 20 sovereign nations, the vast majority of whom still dream of pushing the Jews into the sea.
Meanwhile, for those who bought into the peace talk spouted by Hamas leader Khaled Meshal about his group observing a cease-fire with Israel, here’s a reminder that what Meshal says to Western reporters isn’t what he or anybody else in Hamas tells their own people. Hamas took credit for the firing of five mortar shells into southern Israel yesterday.
