"No democrat can sustain the position ...."

No democrat can sustain the position that the ‘vote’ of a Jewish Israeli in this central matter ought to count more than that of a Palestinian.

Planet Justworld, being intergalactically remote from our humble Terra, naturally makes very short work of terrestrial political philosophy -- so small a mote as that is indistinguishable at the distances involved. Why, one might as well try to see a dime on the surface of the Moon with the naked eye!

However down here where dimes and democracies are visible enough to be getting on with, the position in question could do with some glossing along the lines of "Not so fast!" And one wonders why the alien publicist should festoon the word ‘votes’ with shudder quotes.

To be sure, one would so festoon it oneself, meaning thereby that by the time one could talk about plain vanilla votes with strict legitimacy, "¡Palestine, One and Inseparable, Now and Forever!" would already be in existence. It may seem a shade pedantic to insist that participants in some imagined general plebescite of Arab natives and Jewish Statist locals as to whether ¡POINF! should come to pass at all, would only be "pre-voters," and doubtless this shade, too, is quite indistinguishable from Planet Justworld.

Some of us actually like pedantry, though, at least in moderation. Immoderation in the present case would be to insist that if the hypothetical plebescite were to reject ¡POINF!, then all the inky fingers would not belong even to "pre-voters" but merely to ... (lemme see) ... to "potential but unactualised pre-voters." (I think St. Aristotle would accept that formulation, but do not feel so secure as to be able to offer a money-back guarantee.)

Democracies being at least a little larger than dimes, it appears that the earthgazers of Planet Justworld can make out something to paste the label on. (What’s eighteen billion intellectual light-years between friends, after all?) The extraterrestrial savants even manage to reduce democracy to what I myself consider its single most important trait, namely arithmetical majoritarianism, "one man one vote." Down here, of course, that feature of the product is accompanied by a number of others that are not simply to be dispensed with because they should not come first in a full enumeration.

Whether diluted by sheer disinterested distance or by factious Tendenz, any ‘democracy’ that consists exclusively in arithmetical majoritarianism is not likely to resolve the Palestine Puzzle any century soon. The earthgazers of PJW have evidently been apprised of the Levantine situation through some paratelescopic medium of communication, for they are aware of "around six million Jewish Israelis and more than 10 million ethnic Palestinians." Any schoolboy can work out what sort of a ¡POINF! would arise from that foundation on the dilute-democratic principle. Approximately 5,342,101.6 Jewish Statist locals can work the sum too -- which explains why we find ourselves in beautiful downtown Cloudcuckooland when we talk about it.

(( It is not as if one minds visiting Cloudcuckooland on occasion, of course. How could any tolerator of pedantry rationally object to so similar a product line? ))

"When in Rome, . . .," why not wonder out loud why the Romans, or rather the Cloudcuckoolanders and the best and brightest of Planet Justworld, don’t propose to let twelve or thirteen million non-local Jewish Statists [*] ‘vote’ also.

To be sure, if one were to abandon one's mind in that direction, the (presumably) desired outcome could be restored by allowing all the non-local Arabs to ‘vote’ about ‘their’ Palestine. That card, in turn, would, or might, be trumped by letting the Parahyperzionists of the world (sc., Gentile fellow-travelers with the Tel Avîv statelet) take an effective interest in their Palestine..

But then how if all Muslims were to ‘vote’ about ‘theirs’?

Indeed, why not the whole human race votes the doom of everybody's Palestine?

But all good things must come to an end. That last step looks a bit like a _reductio ad absurdum_, not because of any practical unworkability in the Age of Tweeter, but because a pedant could so easily maintain that the step has already been taken, not directly by a plebescite, perhaps, but representatively under the aegis of the Parliament of Man™ .

Plebescite-mongering about the Palestine Puzzle thus puts one in mind of the familiar trick in which a stage magician creates a humongous knot and then adds one crowning complication, just to make assurance more assured than ever, don't you know? --- and the whole thing falls apart, leaving her no better off than when she started. Oh, well!

Happy days.

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[*] Undoubtedly some subtractions would have to be made from that off-the-cuff guesstimate, because the authority that it relies on was counting extra-Levantine Jews simpliciter and not only the Jewish Statists amongst them.

Nevertheless, it is extremely improbable that any such adjustment would not hand full benefit of the "one man one vote" gimmick over to the other team in a flash.