Whatever the outcome of the war of aggression which Israel and the United States are at present waging against Iran, a question remains: what is to be done about the Palestinians? This question has been posed again and again in Western capitals since the rise of Zionism in the late 19th century. During the past two years it has gained new urgency and salience. How many of them are the Israelis permitted to kill? Where are they going to put the rest? How will they control and subdue the survivors of the current genocide? One plan for ethnic cleansing – also known as ‘population transfer’ – succeeds another. Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other places in Africa such as Somaliland have all been mooted. Last year Trump proposed to solve the ‘problem’ of Gaza by deporting its inhabitants to neighbouring countries and redeveloping the strip as a Club Med.
Apologists for Israel often make much of the purported hard-heartedness of the Egyptian, Jordanian and Saudi governments’ refusal to accept the ‘transfer’ of the non-Jewish population of the Occupied Territories into their countries. How can they have so little sympathy for their ‘Arab’ brothers and sisters? Equally, when Western countries criticize Israel, these apologists accuse them of hypocrisy, arguing that they could solve the problems in the Middle East by simply ‘taking’ all the Palestinians themselves. This line of argument makes two key assumptions: first, that all the agency belongs to the Western powers and the Israelis, with the Palestinians wholly passive, like a group of unwanted postal packages that can be shunted hither and yon at the whim of their betters; and second, that the presence of Jewish Israelis in a wholly Jewish state in historical Palestine is non-negotiable, so all that remains is to decide the fate of the Palestinians. Israelis complain that their various proposals fall on deaf ears; but the truth is that the assumptions behind them are widely shared in officialdom and in much of the media in the West.
Many people understandably have principled objections to ethnic cleansing, but whatever moral views one might have, it is Israel and the US who keep raising it; they can hardly object to a thorough discussion of it from all angles. The idea of population transfer opens up intriguing possibilities. I have an alternative suggestion which would solve the problems of the region between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, and which could easily be implemented if the United States showed a willingness to cooperate. Why not move the Israelis to a sovereign territory established specifically for them in the Midwest of the United States? More precisely, I propose Evansville, Indiana, where I was born (and my father before me).
Vanderburgh County, where Evansville is located, together with five adjacent counties – Posey, Warrick, Knox, Pike and Gibson – comprise a sizeable chunk of territory, over 6,000 square kilometres. These six counties currently have a population of less than 400,000. They contain high-quality agricultural land. The Ohio River to the south and the Wabash River in the west provide plenty of water, much more than the Jordan. There is easy access to St Louis, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. A plan for resettling the current inhabitants of the six counties, either across the Ohio River in Western Kentucky or across the Wabash in Southern Illinois (both of which are underpopulated areas), would not be very costly; there is every reason to think that it would be significantly less expensive than the annual US military subsidies to Israel. And, to say nothing of their human toll, it would be a fraction of the total cost of the wars waged on the Palestinians and neighbouring countries in the past decades, and of constantly rebuilding devastated infrastructure in places like Gaza, only to have it all destroyed again by the IDF. Since the founding of the new Israeli homeland – call it ‘New Zion’ – would be an alternative to further underwriting of the State of Israel, every US taxpayer would have a direct incentive to support the scheme. Indiana would barely register the trivial loss of territory (6 of 92 counties).
One might start with the mandatory transfer of all Israelis living in illegal settlements on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. There are somewhere between half a million and a million such settlers, all of them criminals under international law. They would already far outnumber the existing inhabitants of the six Indiana counties, so they would be sure to constitute a large majority in the new fully sovereign state of New Zion – outside US territory although surrounded by it, as Switzerland is by the EU, Monaco by France and San Marino by Italy. Here, then, there could for the first time be a genuine democracy with a real Jewish majority. The natives of the six Indiana counties might, of course, initially object to this new population, but generous offers of financial support, funded by Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and the US Treasury, would allow any Hoosiers (as we natives of Indiana are for some reason called) who wished to resettle elsewhere to do so.
For those Israelis genuinely concerned for their security and unhappy with Netanyahu’s vision of an Israel perpetually at war with its neighbours, the prospect of subsidized immigration to New Zion should be attractive, because they would be surrounded by populations of peaceful agriculturalists in Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky. Given New Zion would be located in the very centre of the US, it need not fear aggression, or only the aggression to which the US itself might eventually be subjected. Obviously, many questions remain to be answered about how this proposal would be implemented; but the specific terms on which an independent New Zion would interact legally, diplomatically and commercially with the US could be negotiated in the usual way by representatives of the two sovereign states in question. If this experiment worked, one might even add two or three adjacent counties in Kentucky (Henderson, Union and Crittenden) – making another 3,000 square kilometres available for resettlement and giving New Zion control of both sides of the Ohio River. This would need to be agreed with the state of Kentucky, but it would, again, entail a negligible loss of territory (3 of 120 counties). Eventually, if all went well, one might add a county or two in Southern Illinois, west of the Wabash, such as White County, where my grandparents were born in 1876 in Carmi.
My proposal would dismantle a political entity, the State of Israel, which has shown itself to be uncontrollably aggressive and a constant source of instability, conflict and destruction in West Asia. To be sure, transfer of the existing Israeli population to Indiana does not address the issue of Palestinian agency, except to the extent that the policies of the State of Israel have been directed at keeping the Palestinians passive, disunited and isolated, so the absence of that state from Palestine would clear away this obstacle. However, the proposal does give the Palestinians what they clearly want above all else: to have their land back and to be able to lead their lives in it, free of Israeli domination. At the same time Israeli Jews would have a new state to live in that would be infinitely more secure than their present arrangement. The chorus of the official state song of the State of Indiana runs:
Oh, the moonlight’s fair tonight along the Wabash,
From the fields there comes the breath of newmown hay.
Through the sycamores the candle lights are gleaming,
On the banks of the Wabash, far away.
In a few years the moon could rise fair on a peaceful, prosperous Israeli Wabash.
Read on: Edward Said, ‘America’s Last Taboo’, NLR 6.