Fatah
leader Mahmoud Abbas is in Europe this week seeking to convince the
Spanish and Norwegian governments to support the Palestinian bid to
sidestep negotiations with Israel and have the UN General Assembly
recognize Palestinian sovereignty over Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem in
addition to Gaza.
The Palestinians know that
without US support, their initiative will fail to gain Security Council
support and therefore have no legal weight. But they believe that if
they push hard enough, Israel's control over these areas will eventually
unravel and they will gain control over them without ever accepting
Israel's right to exist.
Fatah's UN gambit,
along with its unity deal with Hamas, makes clear that the time has come
for Israel to finally face the facts: There are only two realistic
options for dealing with Judea and Samaria.
If
the Palestinians take control, they will establish a terror state in
the areas, which - like their terror state in Gaza - will use its
territory as a starting point for continued war against Israel.
It
isn't only Israel's experience with post-withdrawal Gaza and South
Lebanon that make it clear that a post-withdrawal Palestinian-controlled
Judea and Samaria will become a terror state. The Palestinians
themselves make no bones about this.
In a
Palestinian public opinion survey released last week by The Israel
Project, 65 percent of Palestinians said they believe that they should
conduct negotiations with Israel. But before we get excited, we need to
read the fine print.
According to the survey,
those two-thirds of Palestinians believe that talks should not lead to
the establishment of the State of Palestine next to Israel and at peace
with the Jewish state. They believe the establishment of "Palestine"
next to Israel should serve as a means for continuing their war against
Israel. The goal of that war is to destroy what's left of Israel after
the "peace" treaty and gobble it into "Palestine."
That is, 66% of Palestinians believe "peace" talks with Israel should be conducted in bad faith.
Moreover,
three-quarters deny Jewish ties to Jerusalem, and 80% support Islamic
jihad against Jews as called for in the Hamas charter; 73% support the
annihilation of the Jewish people as called for in the Hamas charter on
the basis of Islamic scripture.
As bad as
Israel's experience with post-withdrawal Gaza and South Lebanon has
been, Israel's prospects with a post-withdrawal Judea and Samaria will
be far worse. It isn't simply that withdrawal will invite aggression
from Judea and Samaria. It will invite foreign Arab armies to invade the
rump Jewish state.
Unlike the post-withdrawal
situation with Gaza and South Lebanon, without Judea and Samaria, Israel
would not have the territorial depth and topographical advantage to
defend itself from invasion from the east.
Moreover,
the establishment of the second Palestinian terror state after Gaza in
Judea and Samaria would embolden some of Israel's Arab citizens in the
Galilee and the Negev as well as in Jaffa, Lod, Haifa and beyond to
escalate their already declared irredentist plans to demand autonomy or
unification with whatever Palestinian terror state they choose.
Living
under the constant threat of invasion from the east (and the south,
from a Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Egyptian army moving through the
Sinai and Gaza), Israel would likely be deterred from taking concerted
action against its treacherous Arab citizens.
As
then-prime minister Ariel Sharon warned in 2001, the situation would be
analogous to the plight of Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. Just as the
Nazis deterred the Czech government from acting against its traitorous
German minority in the Sudetenland in the 1930s, so Arab states (and a
nuclear Iran), supporting the Palestinian terror states in Judea and
Samaria and in Gaza, would make it impossible for Israel to enforce its
sovereign rights on its remaining territory.
Israel's destruction would be all but preordained.
The second option is for Israel to annex Judea and Samaria, complete with its hostile Arab population.
Absorbing
the Arab population of Judea and Samaria would increase Israel's Arab
minority from 20% to 33% of the overall population. This is true whether
or not Israel grants them full citizenship with voting rights or
permanent residency without them.
Obviously
such a scenario would present Israel with new and complex legal, social
and law enforcement challenges. But it would also provide Israel with
substantial advantages and opportunities.
Israel
would have to consider its electoral laws and weigh the prospect of
moving from a proportional representation system to a direct, district
system. It would have to begin enforcing its laws toward its Arab
citizens in a manner identical to the way it enforces its laws against
its Jewish citizens. This includes everything from administrative laws
concerning building to criminal statutes related to treason. It would
have to ensure that Arab schoolchildren are no longer indoctrinated to
hate Jews, despite the fact that according to the Israel Project survey,
53% of Palestinians support such anti-Semitic indoctrination in the
classroom.
These steps would be difficult to enact.
On
the other side, annexing Judea and Samaria holds unmistakable
advantages for Israel. For instance, Israel would regain complete
military control over the areas. Israel ceded much of this control to
the PLO in 1996.
The Palestinian armies Israel
agreed to allow the PLO to field have played a central role in the
Palestinian terror machine. They have also played a key role in
indoctrinating Palestinian society to seek and work toward Israel's
destruction. By bringing about the disbanding of these terror forces,
Israel would go a long way toward securing its citizens from attack.
Furthermore,
by asserting its sovereign rights to its heartland, for the first time
since 1967, Israel would be adopting an unambiguous position around
which its citizens and supporters could rally. Annexation would also
finally free Israel's politicians and diplomats to tell the truth about
the pathological nature of Palestinian nationalism and about the rank
hypocrisy and anti-Semitism at the heart of much of the international
Left's campaigns on behalf of the Palestinians.
No, annexation won't be easy. But then again, the alternative is national suicide.
And
again, these are the only options. Either the Palestinians form a
terror state from which it will wage war against the shrunken,
indefensible Jewish state, or Israel expands the size of the Jewish
state.
Since 1967, Israel has refused to accept
the fact that these are the only two options available. Instead,
successive governments and the nation as a whole have set their hopes on
imaginary third options. For the Left, this option has been the fantasy
of a two-state solution. This "solution" involves the Palestinians
controlling some or all of the lands Israel took over from Jordan and
Egypt in the Six Day War, establishing a state, and all of us living
happily ever after.
Given the Palestinians'
overwhelming, consistent and violent support for the destruction of
Israel in any size, this leftist fantasy never had a leg to stand on.
And
since 1993, when the Rabin government adopted the Left's fantasy as
state policy, more than 2,000 Israelis have been killed in its pursuit.
Not
only has the Left's third option fantasy facilitated the Palestinian
terror machine's ability to kill Jews, it has empowered their propaganda
war against Israel.
Israel's pursuit of the
nonexistent two-state solution has eroded its own international position
to a degree unprecedented in its history.
Last
week's meeting of the so-called Middle East Quartet ended without a
final statement. It isn't that its members couldn't agree on the need to
establish "Palestine" in Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem. That was a
no-brainer. The Quartet members couldn't agree on the need to accept the
Jewish state. Russia reportedly rejected wording that would have
enjoined the Palestinians to accept the Jewish state's right to exist as
part of a peace treaty.
And this was eminently
foreseeable. The unhinged two-state solution makes Israel's legitimacy
contingent on the establishment of a Palestinian state. And it put the
burden to establish a Palestinian state on Israel.
Since
everyone except Israel and the US always accepted the establishment of a
Palestinian state, and no one except Israel and the US always accepted
the existence of the Jewish state, by making its own legitimacy
dependent on Palestinian statehood, Israel started the clock running on
its own demonization.
The longer Israel allows
its very right to exist to be contingent on the establishment of another
terror state committed to its destruction, the less the nations of the
world will feel obliged to accept its right to exist.
As
for the Right, its leaders have embraced imaginary third options of
their own. Either Jordan would come in and save us, or the Palestinians
would come to like us, or something.
The one
thing that both the Left's fantasy option and the Right's fantasy option
share is their belief that the Palestinians or the Arabs as a whole
will eventually change. Both sides' imaginary third options maintain
that with sufficient inducements or time, the Arabs will change their
behavior and drop their goal of destroying Israel.
Our
44-year dalliance in fantasyland has not simply weakened us militarily
and diplomatically. It has torn us apart internally by surrendering the
debate to the two ideological fringes of the political spectrum.
Actually, to be precise, we have surrendered 99% of our public discourse
to the radical Left and 1% to the radical Right.
The
Left's control over the discourse has caused its ideological opposite's
numbers to increasingly disengage from the state. That would be bad
enough, but the Palestinians' inarguable bad faith and continued
commitment to Israel's destruction have driven the far Left far off the
cliff of reason and rationality.
Unable
to convince their fellow Israelis that their two-state pipe dream will
bring peace, the Israeli Left has joined forces with the international
Left in its increasingly shrill campaigns to delegitimize the country's
right to exist and undermine its ability to defend itself.
This
sorry state of affairs is exemplified today by the radical Left's
hysterical response to the Knesset's passage last week of the
anti-boycott law. The comparatively mild law makes it a civil offense to
solicit boycotts against Israel. It bars people engaged in economic
warfare against Israel from getting government benefits and makes them
liable to punitive damages in civil suits.
The
Left's hysterical public relations campaign to demonize the law and its
supporters as fascists and seek its overthrow through the Supreme Court
makes clear that the Left will wage war against its own country in
pursuit of its delusion.
But aside from driving
the public discourse into the depths of ideological madness, Israel's
embrace of fantasy has made it impossible for us to conduct a
sober-minded discussion of our only real options. The time has come to
debate these two options, choose one, and move forward.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
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