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Comment by austin-cheney | Hacker News Reader

I honestly do not think a geographically separated Palestinian state would work exactly for the same reasons it did not work out for east Pakistan, which is now Bangladesh.

Clearly one of two things will ultimately occur:

1. A right wing Israeli government will eject non-citizen Arabs from the land either by settlement, starvation, or ejection. Then Israel will annex that land. This can only occur because everyone else implicitly authorizes it. This is the most likely scenario.

2. An international military coalition will invade and impose a military occupation like NATO did to the Balkans in the 1990s. This is easier than it sounds from a military perspective because Israel is small and simple to isolate. Just like Israel isolates the occupied territories they too can be isolated just the same. It’s only challenging from a political perspective.

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Gaza is a challenge, to be sure. But the West Bank is a largish chunk of contiguous land, and is at least potentially a stable state.

But there are also Jewish settlements on the West Bank land, so it's not exactly the contiguous territory that it might be. Two-state solutions usually require either removing those settlements or putting them under Palestinian control, and the current Israeli government is extremely reluctant to accept either of those outcomes.

One could imagine a future government that is more amenable to that. That would still leave a disconnected Gaza, but it might just tamp down some of the hostilities.

> This is easier than it sounds from a military perspective because Israel is small and simple to isolate.

Does that sort of thing even work against nuclear powers? You could certainly isolate them like North Korea, but no country would be willing to invade for fear of seeing a mushroom cloud over their capital.

Fortunately, not even the crazier dictators have opted for nuclear war. Even Putin shied away from it, he understood the political price is preferable to the material price.

Not challenging, but undoable. All parties capable of it will never do it.

My (quite pessimistic) prediction for Israel is that the moment US is busy somewhere else, neighbors will attack en masse.

Neighbours have always attacked en masse: in 1948 they attacked en masse and lost and a Jewish state was established, in 1967 they attacked en masse and lost and Israel gained Judea and Samaria / West bank, in 1973 they attacked en masse and lost. Plus various combinations of Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah attacking since, and losing.

Dear, past performance does not predict the future one. Israel hasn't done anything to build good will, on the opposite, they are increasingly negatively viewed, at least in Europe.

Some wars you lose.

Sure, they’ve signed peace accords with egypt, saudi arabia and jordan, the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco.

Europe has always disliked Jews, they’re just more open about it now that europe is increasingly Islamified.

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