Israel’s relentless and unrepentant program to exterminate the Palestinians of Gaza, will yield but a single outcome. And it would certainly please the Palestinians, if they live to see it. First, if Palestine is deprived of viability as an independent state, Israel is left with only a single state solution. Second, with Israel convinced that its security from rocket fire depends on every last Arab neighbor being interned or interred, there is no other choice but cloistered Apartheid. Will the international community long tolerate a feudal theocracy constantly inflaming the resentment of its indigenous laborers?

I was being facetious to suggest that Palestinians will not live to see Israel vanquished.

Much as Israel might try, the Palestinians won’t be killed off like North America’s original natives. Neither Gaza nor the West Bank will succumb to genocide, alcoholism or uranium poisoning, nor vanish like an eclipsed civilization. They can be driven off, and dispersed among the neighbors, but the Palestinian diaspora will hang interminable with a much fresher claim to the lands of their fathers than ever had the Zionists.

But on the ground, the captive Palestinians will never reconstitute even a client state, so long as Israel pens them in like Soweto. Lands allotted to Palestinians will be work camps, and prison camps, with every un-free man’s right to rebel against the yoke of occupation. Israel will dodge rockets until the last slave is shackled.

And I guess the world will sit by and let them do that. However blatant they want to be about it.

Knowing that after Lebanon and Gaza, Israel has disciplinary actions aimed at Syria and Iran, what are the prospects for cohabitation in the Middle East? Does Israel expect that its “right to exist” grants it a swath of no-man’s zone, extended beyond the borders of all its neighbors? Israel’s wrathful attack on Gaza, as retaliation for Hamas’ motley rockets, the disproportionality of the air strikes, and the IDF’s disregard for innocent civilian casualties, betrays Israel’s racist ambivalence about the fate of non-Jews. Without a humanitarian regard for others, how can Israel expect to be asked to the adult’s table?

So Israel has sealed its own fate. Obliterate the Palestinians or drive them off, ostracize the neighbors until you are all alone. Israel will be a solitary state, inhabited by the white elite, separated by a state religion forbidden to their darker working castes. The untouchables will live behind apartheid walls until delivered by an Arab Mandela. Then international pressure, hopefully too a domestic conscience, will bring Democracy, and then, as current opponents of a single-state-solution fear, a popular vote will eradicate the oppression of religious rule.

Say goodbye to Israel, the Jewish State. It will “be wiped off the map” of the Middle East, and left for Jews and Palestinians to inhabit with equality. So long as particular Palestinians do not survive who have claims to properties appropriated by the Zionists, or so long as some compensation is offered to buy off the Palestinian’s right of return, the rich Jewish enclaves will coexist with the have-nots, like the gated communities of any other third world nation.

Or Israelis could choose the single state solution right now.