McGrath, I don't see a federal solution as working. It is in realty a single state solution when the Arab/Muslim population of the Jewish part becomes a majority and decides it is better to have a single Palestine with an Arab majority. The force of history is anti-federation: Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the USSR for example.

Jews would then be in the position they were in prior to 1948, subject to anti-Jewish laws, perhaps ghettos and loss of religious freedom in the Arab world...perhaps the world at large.

I can visualize an economic union between Israel (a Jewish country) and Palestine (an Arab Muslim country) if Palestinian leaders would decide to work toward that end. Jews, of course, would have to give up settlements under Israeli protection. Those Jews remaining in Palestine would have to live, as I said above, under Palestine law. In my opinion Palestine should make provision for the citizenship and religious rights of Jews, as the converse is in Israel.

I know many Jews who were born in various Muslim countries, Lebanon, Palestine (they're in their sixties and seventies), Egypt, Iraq, and Turkey. Jews largely flourished in pre-Khomeini Iran. Some would really like to return someday, although they know they won't.