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By Ira Sharkansky
 JERUSALEM—Javier Solana, a prominent official of the European Union, is proposing that the UN Security Council set a date for the end of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. If there is no agreement it should then recognize the existence of a Palestinian state and declare its boundaries.
Legislating a final solution for Israel and Palestine is like legislating a cure for cancer.
Nothing would be more certain to postpone the creation of a Palestinian state even further into the dim future.
Solana's proposal continues the efforts of decent and not-so-decent folks to assure the Palestinians that help is on the way. Palestinians will not have to do anything but line up at a desk staffed by one or another international organization and receive free food, help with housing, great gobs of sympathy, and an end to their suffering.
What six decades of encouraged and forced dependence has done for Palestinians is enough to make anyone a raving libertarian. There is no better demonstration that caring too much perpetuates futility, ruins whatever capacity a people may have to take care of themselves, and keeps them from dealing the best they can with their problems.
Encouraged dependence comes from countries of the west that consider themselves decent. Forced dependence, along with drum beats of encouragement, comes from Arab countries that have not granted Palestinians, their children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren citizenship or other basic rights.
Perhaps the timing of Solana's proposal is a function of what he expects, or hopes, from the Obama administration: no veto of
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a resolution whose prospect already has Israeli officials sweating.
The Palestinians will applaud. Their savior has mounted his donkey. The UN will give them what they want. Already the leadership is asserting that it has not given up the right of people to return home to what they or their families left in 1948.
What if two or more cousins demand the same property that grandpa described as his?
The Palestinians have tried violence, and it has made their situation worse. They have persisted with their insistence on returning to Israel, despite the wide and intense opposition of Israelis to turning their country into another state dominated by Muslims.
A prominent European declaring intentions is one thing. Getting a formulation through the Security Council will be more difficult. Will it require the Sharkanskys and a half-million other Israelis to leave the homes they have lived in for years? What about the curtains Varda has ordered? And all that property that Jews left in Arab countries when they fled in the 1940s and 1950s?
Will the UN also decree a solution for the violence between Palestinian factions, each concerned to assure jobs for its boys and control over the aid money?
Will Palestine remain peaceful during that time the UN Security Council allows for negotiations, or will one of its groups, for whom nothing is ever enough, provoke something serious from the IDF?
And when the great day comes, will Israel comply and remove its forces from all the checkpoints to the north, south, east and west of the West Bank, and allow a free flow of goods and people in and out, or between the West Bank and Gaza?
And if not?
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