Green-Lined: Imagining Palestinian settlers

In a recent Jerusalem Post op-ed piece Imagine Palestinian settlers in Israel, the idea was suggested to Israelis and others who support a Jewish civilian presence in the areas of Judea and Samaria:

to imagine how you would feel if, instead of there being 300,000 Israelis who'd gone to live in the West Bank, there were 300,000 Palestinians from the West Bank who'd come to live in Israel. And imagine if they'd set themselves up over here the way Israelis have done over there."

Of course, did it not occur to the writer that many Israelis have actually not only imagined that but, especially over the past decade, truly feel that that is the situation with Israel's Arab minority. Why do you think Avigdor Lieberman's Israel Beiteinu party achieved 15 seats in the Knesset?  It is no imagination that forests were burned down, that religious fanatics are copying the Mufti of Mandate times and claiming Jews are trying to destroy Al-Aqsa, that illegal construction is in the thousands of units, that aid and assistance to terrorists have been extended and that Arab MKs openly identify with the goals of the most radical Muslim nationalists and have been particularly foul-mouthed in the Knesset.

At the basis of the suggested "imagination," though is a great idea.  Let's start calling all Arab residential locations in Israel "settlements". 

And we say: what goes down for the Jews in Judea & Samaria, goes for the Arabs of Israel.  After all if Jews can't live among Arabs in their state, why should Arabs be permitted the same in a Jewish state.  Or is only an Arab state allowed to act that inhuman and immoral fashion?  Why should the original Mandate area intended to be the reconstituted Jewish national home evolve into three states, two (Jordan & "Palestine") Arab with no Jews and one Jewish state but with a 20% Arab minority? Fair?

It isn’t fair, of course.  But life isn’t fair in general.  Worse, though, is the opposition to my proposed idea is the concept that, in truth, all this area does “belong” to the Arabs and we Jews/Zionists sneaked in and set up a state as colonialists.  We were lucky even to get recognition in 1947, two years after the Holocaust, to borders which represented a third partition of our homeland whereas in 1917, all of Jordan and Israel and the disputed territories, and even a portion of southern Lebanon according to the Versailles 1919 Peace Conference, should have been Jewish land.

Imagine.