In today’s Boston Globe the conservative columnist, Jeff Jacoby, writes:  “By almost any yardstick, China’s one-child policy has been a grim failure.” (OK, although what about this “yardstick,” —has the one child policy slowed the country’s population growth, for by this measure it has been a success.)

Jacoby goes on to say, “But the decision to replace the one- by a two- child policy comes far too late to repair the damage the one-child policy caused, or to ease the unimaginable pain left in its wake.”

OK, one and two-child policies are clearly wrong, but not because they were or will not be successful. Success and failure are more business terms, not the proper words to be used here.  The bottom line is that China does not have the right to control or limit a woman’s right to choose for herself the number of her children, nor does Israel have the right to obstruct the peaceful national aspirations of a people.

In both situations, in respect to policies of both Israel and China, there is an absence of moral principles, an ignorance of right and wrong.  Would that Jacoby had turned his anti-China stance to an anti-if not Israel at least anti-Netanyahu stance. For his voice is heard in Israel and he just might be listened to.

Let me say it again, no government has the right to obstruct a people’s natural aspirations to come together and be a people. In particular, the Israeli government does not have the right to impose its own indefensible one-state policy onto pretty much equal numbers of Jews and Arabs now living on the ancient land of Palestine, land that now includes both Israel, the occupied Arab territories, and the disputed capital Jerusalem.

In brief, Israel’s one-state policy is as wrong-headed as China’s one-child policy.  Both policies were meant to be solutions to problems but have instead  created much greater problems for both peoples.  Jacoby while uprighteously writing about the horror of the one-China policy doesn’t seem to have made the connection between what’s happening in China and what’s going on at home.

I’ll give the last word to the former President of Israel, Shimon Peres. Although he doesn’t he might have described the one-state policy of Israel as a no less brutal horror than Jacoby’s depiction of  “the brutal horror of China’s one-child policy.”

‘Israel should implement the two-state solution for her own sake because if we should lose our majority, and today we are almost equal [in population], we cannot remain a Jewish state or a democratic state. That’s the main issue, and to my regret they [the government] do the opposite.’

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