By GIL HOFFMAN, JPOST
Hawkish Likud MK Tzipi Hotovely is surprisingly putting the finishing touches to a plan for “one state for two peoples.”
While Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was in Washington meeting with US President Barack Obama on Wednesday, ahead of Thursday’s summit with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Likud MK Tzipi Hotovely was in Ariel talking to Likud central committee members about her plan to annex the West Bank and give full Israeli citizenship to all its residents, Jewish and Arab.
The fact that Hotovely is starting to make her plan public now is not coincidental. She wants Netanyahu and the world to know that there is a viable alternative to the creation of a Palestinian state, so it will be on the table when – as she and many others expect – yet another effort to reach an agreement with the Palestinians fails.
To that end, Hotovely has spent her summer vacation not relaxing on European beaches like many of her Knesset colleagues but meeting with top experts on demography and security and drafting an in-depth initiative for what she calls “one state for two peoples.”
She intends to complete the draft by the time the Knesset’s extended summer recess ends in October and publish it in hopes of having the same impact on Netanyahu from the Right that the Geneva Initiative did from the Left on former prime minister Ariel Sharon, who, some say, was pressured to withdraw from Gaza by that plan.
She first heard a presentation on the one-state option from Netanyahu’s former bureau chief and current Makor Rishon deputy editor Uri Elitzur at a conference she organized at the Knesset in May 2009 entitled “Alternatives to the two-state solution.”
Hotovely invited many thinkers on the Right to present their plans, and she at first did not like any of them but eventually decided Elitzur’s idea had the most potential, and she endorsed it at the Jerusalem Conference in February.
Former defense minister Moshe Arens, who also spoke at Hotovely’s event, was similarly persuaded by Elitzur’s argument and came out in favor of it in June.
Among current politicians other than Hotovely, only Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin has been quoted as endorsing a one-state solution. But Rivlin only refers to it as the lesser of two evils when compared to dividing the land of Israel, and he does not see it as a practical solution ready to be implemented that is better than the status quo.
Hotovely, by contrast, believes the Right must have a practical plan now that can be presented to the world to alleviate international pressure at a time when Israel’s right to exist and defend itself is being questioned.
Unlike many on the Right, she agrees with Obama’s assessment that the status quo is unsustainable, but for very different reasons than his.
“The world will continue pushing us,” Hotovely said in an interview in Jerusalem. “The Goldstone report and flotilla incident proved that even though Israel left Gaza, we still must defend every step we take there. We are in the worst situation, whereby we are being delegitimized and no matter what we do, we will still be responsible for the Palestinians. Most Israelis are afraid of the demographic threat and want to be away from the Arabs. They don’t realize we can’t pretend that they are not there.”
She says she does not believe a two-state solution can succeed, because past peace processes have proven that the maximum territory that Israel can give is less than the minimum that the Palestinians would accept, and the issues of Jerusalem and refugees similarly cannot be resolved.
She also fears the Palestinian problem will continue even if there would be two states, because the Palestinians would continue provoking Israel to respond to attacks in hopes of additional investigations that could help them defeat it in the international battle for public opinion.
“David beating Goliath is no longer the exception to the rule,” Hotovely said. “The stronger army is not in the best position anymore. Our strength has become a burden. Israel cannot beat the Palestinians, because the world won’t accept inevitable pictures of dead children.
“The Left always said that if we reached an accord and they attacked us over sovereign borders, we would respond with full force, but that view doesn’t take into account Israel’s public relations failures over the past decade.”
AFTER EXPLAINING WHY both the status quo and two states are unacceptable, Hotovely said the onestate solution can be palatable because it would enable Israel to maintain control over all of Judea and Samaria, which is important to her for Jewish and Zionist reasons, and no one would have to move.
“There has been a cloud hanging over Judea and Samaria for far too long,” she said. “We need to stop thinking that they can be given up in one deal or another. Israelis oppose giving up the Golan, because they have been there. They support giving up Judea and Samaria because they haven’t been there. If we annexed it, it would bring them closer.”
Hotovely suggests annexing the West Bank in stages, starting with the settlement blocs and Jordan Valley in which there are few Palestinians. She would annex the rest after building the “infrastructure” for accepting a million and a half Palestinians.
By infrastructure, she means a constitution or bills guaranteeing Israel’s future as a Jewish state. The bills would encourage aliya in a serious way and require all citizens to perform national service, which could be done in their communities. Israel would return to policing Ramallah and Jenin and would control the Palestinian education system to ensure that it encourages coexistence.
Following discussions with demographers, Hotovely believes Israel can maintain a 70 percent to 30% Jewish majority if aliya was encouraged as a national priority.
She bases this on there currently being nearly 6 million Israeli Jews and 1.5 million Israeli Arabs. There is a debate among demographers whether there are 1.5 million or 2.5 million Arabs in the West Bank. She would not annex Gaza, which she would like to see come under Egyptian control.
Hotovely would not call the result a binational state, because that would necessitate equality in symbols, language, education and historical narratives. That’s what separates her from Israelis on the extreme left who want a one-state solution.
“I call it a Jewish state with a large Arab minority,” she said. “I know the one-state solution has problems and I am thinking about how to solve them, but in the Middle East, every solution has a price. I prefer to fight the Palestinians in parliament and not with tanks, and I would rather have speeches by Ahmed Tibi and Saeb Erekat in the Knesset than missiles on Ashkelon.”
Hotovely said her plan has three main challenges: persuading Israelis, convincing the international community and selling it to the Palestinians. She believes the first would be the hardest of the three, but she said that just as support for a Palestinian state went from the fringes of the extreme left to mainstream in a short period, the reverse can also happen quickly.
She has presented the plan to congressmen in the US and politicians in Europe and Australia. She said they were surprisingly open to it, especially those who realize the two-state solution was doomed. She predicted that the world would accept the plan if the Palestinians did.
A poll of 1,010 Palestinians published in The Jerusalem Post this week that was conducted by the Bethlehem-based Palestinian Center for Public Opinion proves that this quest would not be easy.
The poll found that 86% of Palestinians opposed the annexation of the West Bank to Israel and granting its residents Israeli citizenship, while only 10% favored the idea. Nearly 55% favored a two-state solution, while 26% said they preferred a binational state as part of a one-state solution.
But Hotovely is undeterred. She intends to present the plan to Netanyahu in the near future, despite his newly launched negotiations with the Palestinians.
“Israel must have a Plan B after Plan A blows up,” she said. “We have been through Camp David, disengagement, Olmert’s offer and we are on the way to another failure. Netanyahu is making another effort in Washington, but he knows it will fail. Israel doesn’t have a rabbit in its hat, but this could be it.”
Laura: Spent a week in Vancouver Canada. The Canadians are in an absolute panic about the prevalence of Muslim terrorism in the land. Here is a dramatic sample. An editorial from a popular Canadian daily. This will blow your mind.
I do not wish to alarm the public, but I must urgently report the discovery of a disturbing fact: It seems that in 2006 -according to the most recent StatsCan data -two Canadians were killed by lawn mowers.
As I said, disturbing. And there’s more. Also in 2006, nine Canadians were killed in accidents involving kayaks or canoes. Three were killed by dogs. Six by hot tap water. Thirty-two drowned in pools. Fifty-four were killed by falls from ladders, while three more died after falling from trees. One person was killed by contact with a thorny plant. Another died after being stung by an unspecified “nonvenomous insect.” Medical “misadventure” claimed the lives of 18 more.
Four were struck dead by lightning. Forty-one were killed by accidents in bathtubs.
These figures mean the number of Canadians killed in 2006 by sloppy doctors, for example, was a staggering 18 times greater than the number of Canadians killed by terrorists. Well, sort of. The actual number of Canadians killed by terrorists in 2006 was zero. As it is most years. And 18 times zero is zero. But just to keep the math simple, let’s pretend that one Canadian was killed by terrorists. Now think of all the hype about terrorism, all the official hyperventilation, all the media shrieking, all the fear and alarm. And multiply it many times over: That is how frightened we should be about sloppy doctors, bathtubs, ladders, and lawn mowers.
Like I said, terrifying. Or perhaps not. My analysis works only if the hand-wringing about terrorism is reasonable, which is to say that it is proportionate to the actual threat. It might not be. It might be exaggerated. And, if that is the case, it might be that neither lawn mowers nor terrorists are a significant threat to the safety of the average Canadian.
Conservatives like to appeal to a deity they call “common sense” and I wonder which analysis is more appealing to that omniscient being: That ordinary Canadians should fear hot tap water, air pressure, lawn mowers, and terrorists? Or that we should all have a gin and tonic with a chaser of sang froid and calm down?
I’d probably put my money on the latter.
Of course, this conclusion is rather at odds with recent events. Only last week, suspected terrorists were arrested! In Ottawa! They were going to make bombs! Nothing less than “national security” was in danger!
Oh, the wailing and gnashing of teeth! Every day, another talk-radio host bellowing like an elephant as mice scurry over his toes. Another bug-eyed police chief warning citizens to be vigilant. Another politician promising to stand tall against the massed ranks of Evil.
And I dare compare terrorists and lawn mowers? Outrageous! Terrorism might not have taken any lives in 2006. But it could. And it might be a catastrophe. Why, it might be as bad as the London bombings of 2005.
Leaving aside the small matter of probability -why bother with details? -this is not quite the conclusive argument some think it to be. The London bombings were a horrible crime, to be sure, but they killed 52 people. That is less than half the number of Canadians who choked to death on their food in 2006, and I don’t recall any official warning that the continued gagging of the citizenry would imperil the nation.
What about 9/11? Doesn’t that change everything?
Well, terrorism is a very old and widespread phenomenon and one could argue that it is bizarre to use such a singular event -9/11 was the deadliest terrorist attack by an order of magnitude -to judge the threat of terrorism generally. But such finer points of reason aren’t likely to carry the day. So let’s agree to use that yardstick.
The death toll in 9/11 was 2,996 (including the 19 terrorists). In 2006, the total number of Canadians killed in transportation-related accidents was 3,097. Similar losses are suffered each and every year. Yet life goes on.
Of course the people hyping terrorism seldom debate these points directly. Or they erect a straw man and give him a good thrashing.
“Terrorism remains a real threat to the safety and security of Canadians,” the government’s Integrated Threat Assessment Centre says on its website. And voila! Last week, the police arrested alleged terrorists. So it’s case closed. “I do think this incident once again serves to remind us that Canada does face some very real threats in the troubled world in which we live,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper said.
But no sane person has ever suggested that terrorism isn’t a real threat. Or a hideous crime that must be vigorously investigated and punished. And it’s only reasonable that questions of immigration and integration should be explored (although much of the discussion on that score has been about as enlightening as the thoughts of Archie Bunker).
How big is the threat? That is what’s in dispute. For reasons that I discuss at length in my book, Risk, I believe that terrorism is nothing more than one item on a very long list of relatively modest threats we cope with in modern life. Perceptions to the contrary are the product not of evidence and reason, but of flawed media reporting, self-interested hype and unfortunate foibles inherent in human psychology.
What really underscores that point aren’t the stats about death by bathtub. Like terrorism, those are all external causes of death. What really kills people -what we really should worry about – are the internal killers.
In 2006, cancer killed 67,807 people. Heart disease took the lives of 49,893 more. And so it goes down the list. Influenza killed 5,152; Alzheimer’s 5,675; suicide 3,512.
Diabetes killed 7,261 Canadians. That’s 139 people every week.
Number of front-page stories about diabetes during the last week of shrieking hysteria? Zero.
HWSNBN has been using this exact line verbatim, for the past 2 years. Why not try a different phraseology at least?
I like Laura’s and Charles’ view points… Good ideas.
Laura:
Brilliant and oh so original. Why didn’I think of that? Perhaps it isn’t too late for you to fax or email your idea to Bibi and he could propose it in the negotiations. That should break the deadlock and allow the parties to conclude a peace agreement. Perhaps you ought to run it by Narvey before proceding.
Let them have their state in Gaza and the Negev where it can be successfully defended against. Transfer is the only answer; this will ultimately be recognized by all.
Then Israel must push back.
The world certainly accepts dead Israeli children.
I have a much more viable permanent solution. Annex the territories and remove the arabs. Then you will have instant peace and security. None of these other solutions, all of which leave the arab-muslim population in Judea and Samaria will ever be workable. Transference is the only answer.
One other reason: if any Arab does not wish to be an Israeli citizen, he/she could feel free to move to any country of choice.
I believe in the one state plan for the following reasons:
1. Security would be less of a problem,
2. The State would have the ability to reject the citizenship of any terrorist commiting a crime and be deported,
3. Jews and Arabs could set up united police systems,
4. Jews and Arabs could live wherever thay want.
5. The rest of the world could not say that we were occupiers since all have equal rights,
6. Jews will still have the majority population.
Very clever we trade Arab Terrorists outside our borders to citizen terrorists within our borders?k Already most if not all of our current Arab citizen a a Trojan horse and a fifth column. Most of the under 20 group are radicalized and identify with their brothers and cousins currently outside. As citizens they will be free to travel to any part of Israel and free to purchase land in any city town and settlement. You can’t have it all: Democracy and Arabs. Which will it be? Already they have a majority in several Israeli towns and the overwhelming majority in the Galil and have stolen half the Negev. You advocate destroying the country from within, destroying our already fragile social balance? Arabs dating Jewish girls is already a big problem you want to add to it? Crime already high and adding 2 million Arabs will up the crime rate exponentially as was as the drug trade and all that goes with it. The welfare rolls will be inflated unemployment through the roof, they will in short be a drain on our economy and create enough social problems we will never ever get a handle on.
In short you and the wise guy as well as Zippi Hotoveli, don’t know what you are talking about.
Abandon Democracy, Force them to leave or create a strictly controlled autonomy for them but both a two state and a one state resolution look equally suicidal from where I sit.
This the Plan I have been favouring for five years. I got this email from Mike Wise.