THE TRAGEDY OF PARTITION: WHY “TWO-STATE SOLUTIONS” DON’T WORK

King Solomon warned us about the dangers of partition. We didn’t listen. And so, in 1947, India was divided into India and Pakistan and Palestine was divided into Palestine and Israel.

King Solomon might have been nominally Jewish. But he was really Unitarian. As such, he “predicted” that any political solution involving sectarian nationalism would be a tragic blunder.

How do I know? The Bible tells me so.

You all know the story about King Solomon and the competing claims of maternity for a newborn (1 Kings 3:16–28) brought to him by two claimants of the child. You also know how the first mother was willing to renounce her claim so that that the baby would live while the second mother was content with cutting the baby in half. The king ruled in favor of the first mother. Duh! A no-brainer of the highest order and the only practical solution to the dilemma he faced.

Like most parables, the moral of the tale for our times, and probably his, is political: King Solomon was against partition of peoples and homelands.

Had Solomon been living after WW2 and in full possession of his famous faculties, I’m willing to bet he would have kept India and Palestine intact and repudiated creation of needless co-equal twins: Pakistan and Israel. He was for a one-state, not a two-state, solution. Now in partitioned India and Palestine, we see the poisonous fruits of partition as Jews war against Arabs and Hindus war…