On December 7, 1941 I was in Scout camp in Boonton, NJ.  These were the days before everybody had tiny portable radios much less telephones that were also cameras and GPS tools. We learned about being at war when we got home from playing outdoorsmen while living in sheds, building fires for heating food (a hunters’ stew into which one of our lesser intelligent members dropped into it a whole box of salt) and warmth.  Then we got on to growing older so we could become real soldiers instead of the play kind that the Boy Scouts resembled in their attempts to standardize us.

But this is about Avigdor Lieberman who is a member of the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) and his idea about swapping people and land in order to make two States, Palestine for the Muslims and Israel for the Jews.  By extension, this idea could be used to suggest a possible answer to the chaos that is ongoing in Iraq.  There is no nation or state in this world that is “pure” and unsullied by outsiders who do not share the identity of the majority (thus not having minorities). The 1948 solution in India is an example that might be studied as an exemplar of what NOT to do.

The Hindu majority in India had long had an uneasy relationship with the descendants of Muslim invaders hundreds of years before.  The Muslims did not eat pork but they did love cow.  The Hindus did not eat meat and worshiped the cow. Partition was used to answer the needs of two uneasy peoples living in close proximity.  So, India purged itself of Muslims and Muslims set up two states on the east and west of India.  Pakistan and Bangladesh were purged of Hindus. It was a messy time and there are millions of stories of the hurt and crimes committed in the name of religious purity.  By this time, the two religious peoples were still the same race and shared the same history.  Today there are still the tensions but they are confined by national borders while each “nation” is in a race for the atomic bomb and equality in flying through space.

Now, Avigdor Lieberman wants to move Israeli citizens living mostly in Muslim towns to the north near the West Bank and make them part of Palestine.  Conversely, he wants to move Israeli citizens who are Jewish into empty Palestinian or Muslim areas or, simply, to swap territory and have people join their people.  His is a draconian solution but it might work if the people who live in these two states agree and I don’t think they will.

But, use this solution in Iraq which was a made up country cobbled together from Ottoman States.  How about an independent Kurdish State, one for Sunnis and one for Shiites? Oil ownership might be the answer but why not ask the people?