It was April 1^st, 2014, but it was no April Fools’ joke.

Caroline Glick gave her speech “The Case for Israeli Sovereignty in Judea and Samaria” to a crowd that filled the auditorium of the Shaarey Zedek synagogue. I went there as part of a group from Gray Academy as part of an Israel Advocacy course. This was essentially a field trip for us. We were to take notes, and report back with critical thinking and analysis; the usual.

Caroline Glick is a journalist who was embedded with the U.S. forces in Iraq. Ma’ariv named her the “most important woman in Israel” in 2003. She is an American-Israeli, and she graduated from Columbia University in 1991.

In short, the case Glick put forward centred around the idea that the two-state solution was responsible for the woes of the Middle East, and that it was a proposal eternally doomed to failure. She proposed instead, that the West Bank should be brought entirely under Israeli law. She cited statistics claiming that the number of Palestinians in the West Bank was significantly lower than the number given by the Palestinian Authority in their last census: about a million and a half less, to be exact. She also claimed that according to a survey, there is a similar level of anti-Israel sentiment in the Arab-Israeli community as there is in the West Bank, and the only reason they aren’t launching terrorist attacks is that they’re under Israeli law.

Strangely absent from her speech, however, were sources for all of this information.

As the saying goes, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, and Glick failed to provide that completely. It is quite a leap of faith to claim that the P.A. has duped the entire world except the Israeli far-right, and that almost all Arab-Israelis hate Israel to the level that they would suicide-bomb its citizens, all without a scrap of primary sourcing. She also claimed that the two state solution was dangerous for Israel because the new Palestinian state would have control of immigration to the new Palestinian state, and terrorists could slip in to Israel via a divided Jerusalem, which is apparently not going to be one of the most heavily militarily guarded borders in the world.

Her idea is to place the entire West Bank under Israeli law, grant the Palestinians citizenship, and let them go anywhere in the country. Apparently, the Israeli-Arabs in Tzfat are biting at the bit to blow up the state, but if terrorists in Jenin are allowed free passage to anywhere in the country, they’ll put down their guns and sing Kumbaya because they’re under Israeli law now.

Right. Arabs from outside the West Bank are all vying to sneak in by way of Jerusalem, though.

Add this in with a seething mass of ad hominem attacks against Mahmoud Abbas such as calling him a terrorist (a claim with, admittedly, some merit) and comparing him to Hajj Amin al-Husseini (a claim without some merit), blaming the “two-state solution” for everything that has ever gone wrong in the Middle East, such as the lack of American response to insurgencies in the War in Iraq, as well as “Israeli guilt for existing,” and you have the essence of Caroline Glick’s speech. While her time as an embedded reporter during the Gulf War does admittedly lend her a slight authoritative weight, especially when comparing said war to the first Lebanon War, it makes her claims a bit more questionable. Embedded journalists have been derided as being ‘propaganda’ by parties such as Gay Talese and Charles Lynch.

She then went on to bash the two-state solution, which she blamed for the woes of the Middle East. She blamed it for the rising anti-Semitism on-campus, claimed it was merely an appeasement policy. Apparently the idea that the inhabitants of the land before us have a right to the land they currently live on is what’s blowing up the Middle East. Right.

The thing that really surprised me, though, was the sheer lack of opposition to her from the audience. I know for a fact that several people in the audience vehemently disagreed with her, as they expressed to me afterwards, yet essentially nobody stood up and argued with her. One man stood up and talked about how we “can’t trust the Arab-Israelis”.

I suppose we couldn’t trust the native-born Japanese-Canadians during World War II either.

In essence, what Glick called for was the destruction of the Palestinian right to self-determination. This is something that Jews as a whole should be very against, because if one people lose their right to self determination, all supposed rights of that sort are essentially invalid. If the Palestinians don’t have the right to the land where they live and are the majority, why should we have a right to our land? Why should they lose their land, simply because the movement to which Caroline Glick belongs, specifically Likud, wants more?

Though it is only my opinion, I think that the idea put forth by Glick would simply not work, and would endanger all Israelis – Hamas in Tel Aviv is a lovely idea. It’s also fundamentally un-democratic, and operates wholly on the premise that her unsupported statistics are true, and that “Israeli Law” would be any more effective than “Israeli military control”.

I think not.