ON Wednesday, the Arab summit in Kuwait lent its categorical support to the Palestinian Authority by refusing to accept Israel as a Jewish state because doing so in its eyes would be tantamount to reducing Palestine’s sons of the soil to the status of serfs on their own land. That Israel should be a Jewish state was inherent in the Balfour Declaration issued by Britain in 1917, and all Israeli governments have followed this policy by encouraging Jews from all over the world to settle in the country and squeezing the Arabs out of Israel proper and the occupied territories. The hardline government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu has officially adopted this policy and has been pressing the PA to accept it. More pernicious has been the plan to repudiate the 1967 border and draw up a scheme for territorial ‘adjustments’ and ‘transfer’ — nothing less than a euphemism for expulsion — of Palestinians from their ancestral lands. As reported in the Western media, this plan is being studied from the point of view of international law. If Israel succeeds in this scheme, gobbles up more territory and manages to evict a majority of Palestinians from their ancestral land, it would only exacerbate tensions.

Even if Israel was envisaged as a homeland for the Jewish people, does that mean that the state should consider draconian steps to ensure that those who have equal right to the land but are not of the Jewish faith should be forced to leave, losing forever the ‘right of return’? Onwards from the 1990s, after that historic handshake on the grounds of the White House that saw the Israelis and Palestinians seal a deal to implement a two-state formula, the peace process is headed in anything but the right direction, with Israel, and the US policy of going along with the latter’s intransigence, primarily responsible for this faulty trajectory. In an already burning Middle East, Israel’s plan if implemented would be nothing short of a catastrophic blow to the region.