The Jewish state’s choices are to either annex Judea and Samaria or be destroyed by its neighbors.
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.
Either the Palestinians will take control of Judea and Samaria, or Israel will annex them.
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.
Hi
The article by Caroline Glick, with its analysis is excellent. I wonder whether the USA will support Israel at the Security Council level when it is condemned if it takes Judea and Samaria? Without the American support of at least a Veto, the whole operation will be doomed
Steve
Montreal-Canada
From their actios, it seems to me that the vast majority of Israelis, and a substantial number of Arabs, prefer the status quo over alternatives. The real movers seem to be people like Turkey’s Ergodan and America’s Obama. Ergodan is trying to stir up ahornet’s nest in Gaza, and Obama seems intent on alienating just about everyone (his latest target: PR China). The French and British would like to win in Libya, but can’t. Obama has passed the buck in Syria and elsewhere to the Russians. Egypt seems on target for a period of prolonged anarchy. The Israel-protected PA can’t even get along with Hamas for a few months. The Saudis and Egyptians are trying to stir up trouble, at Israel’s expense, at Sharm el Sheikh. The Gaza flotilla is a big flop, Lebanon is in a quagmire that could turn into the old Civil War days at the drop of a hat. Syria is in uproar, Iran and Afghanistan helpless dupes of every foreign devil and local mobster, the Pakistanis could revolt any time now, or, alternatively, end up at war with India. The whole place is a mess, with little hope of change in any meaningful direction.
Annex? Don’t annex? As far as I’m concerned, Israel annexed everything in 1967 and in previous wars. The rest is political fiction. As Yamit correctly pointed out, annexation isn’t the problem: The problem is an Israeli Arab population — to be specific, in my view, the problem is an Arab population in Israel that isn’t loyal to Israel. That problem can be dealt with, with or without so-called “annexation” …or not carried out. As Sam Fistel pointed out, though, most Israelis aren’t concerned about these things: They’re concerned about “What’s in it for me?” And the answer is, “Not very much, not at the moment”.
The past couple of months have been really slow news days. All the pundits are sitting around, AGREEING WITH ONE ANOTHER, waiting for something to happen. How dull! But then, “Thank God for such dull times”.
@ yamit82:
dear yamit,
i must admit your comments pretty much echo my own thoughts.
the late rabbi kahane was 1000% right!
the arabs MUST leave to the land of their choice, judea and samaria must be officially annexed to israel and to hell with world opinion!
unfortunately, and this is a tough one, samuel fistel’s comment is dead on…israel with all its multitude of political parties, super inflated egos, is dangerously fragmented.
i am the epitome of a secular jew, nonetheless, and i do not see a contradiction, i believe feiglin’s jewish leadership ideas to be the real deal.
Silent majority in Jewish Israel?
I don’t live in Israel, but I believe you can successfully analyze it from a distance. From what I can tell, Israel is so fractured and disconnected, that no one even living in Israel has a full picture.
The Israeli left has now become a permanent minority. However, they maintain near complete control of the judiciary, major media, universities, and higher military leaders.
So why, if the right is now the permanent majority, does it not take control?
Because the right is itself too fractured and mutually antagonistic. Netanyahu controls a large coalition of partners who all hate the left, but who also all hate each other.
Ultra-nationalists (religious and non-religious) are a small group who are too far outside the rightist mainstream. The ultra-orthodox (chareidim) are at best lukewarm nationalists, and are primarily concerned with maximizing their state welfare benefits. The Jews from muslim lands (sephardim) are moderate nationalists, and moderately religious, but are also mainly concerned with their own welfare. The Russians are ignorant of Judaism, fairly strong nationalists, but again (guess what?) are mostly concerned with obtaining the most for their own group.
The center-right Likud under Netanyahu are suspicious (if not antagonistic) towards Judaism and “the rabbis”, and are only moderately nationalistic. They try to hold the center and maintain the status-quo, using the left to keep the right in check.
The National Religious have the most traditional and consistent (and rational?) Jewish position: HaShem created the universe, gave the Jews the Torah, and designated Israel as their eternal national homeland. Netanyahu is leery of them and crushed their greatest threat to him (Moshe Feiglin).
So Israel is in transition. Netanyahu and the Likud are transitional. The left is on the wane. Hopefully, the National Religious will take control of the right wing coalition pretty soon, and will finally put the leftist minority in its place.
And Israel will be on its way to becoming truly Jewish. Because, remember the choice HaShem has given us: if life has any true meaning, then the Religious Nationalists are correct; but if life has no meaning, then the survival of Judaism and Jewish Israel are meaningless and irrelevant.
“So choose life, in order that you may live, you and your descendants. To love HaShem your G-d, to listen to His voice, and to cling to Him, for He is your life and the length of your days; in order that you may dwell upon the Land sworn by HaShem to your forefathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give to them.
Fistel stop being concerned over whether the world recognized our annexation. Over time if we hang tough they will de-facto recognize our annexation and if they don’t so what? They key is divesting quickly and cleanly the Arab populations. If there are no Arabs then here is no occupation. I can’t see another nation going to war for the Palis. Especially the Arab countries/ They all have more important things on their individual and collective plates to be too bothered with the Palis. Soon their problems will become even more difficult and then it will be …Palis who?
Never grovel to the Gentile and never show weakness. I would force an intifada and use it to rid ourselves of the Arabs once and for all. It must be meticulously planned and executed. The world must wake up one am and learn the news but by then it will be a fait accompli.
West Bank annexation: what’s that mean?
Annexation is like money: it only has significance if enough powerful people agree to it.
Jordan annexed the West Bank in 1949. No one recognized it, and it faded away. Can Israel now annex the West Bank if, not only no one recognizes it, but all are actively opposed to it?
Serbia tried to evict the muslim albanian Kosovars. America and NATO destroyed the Serbian infrastructure, bombing them back into the stone age, took Kosovo from them, and handed it to the albanian muslim Kosovars. Now, the Serbs (orthodox christians) remaining in Kosovo are herded into its northern border with Serbia. Serbia wants to annex them, but the west refuses to let it happen.
China has annexed Tibet. No one dares challenge them. Russia took South Ossetia from Georgia. No one cared to challenge them over that, or over Chechnya.
Non-muslim South Sudan was allowed to break free from the muslim north. This is amazing, because it involved muslims surrendering territory to non-muslims. In this case, since the South Sudanese are black, the liberal west was able to overcome its love of islam.
Much of the West Bank is dry and hilly, and does not support farming or herding. Israel has claimed these areas, along with the Jordan Valley, as Area C. Few arabs live there. This leaves the Jew-hating arabs concentrated in the isolated fertile enclaves (referred to by liberals as “bantustans”).
The arabs want the UN to declare the entire West Bank as in independent state. Apparently, Obama will veto it (for now).
Israel annexing the West Bank would appear to be meaningless. And a palestinian state would only have meaning if the gentiles were willing to attack or boycott Jewish Israel over it. I don’t see that happening at this time.
If the palestinians declare a state, then Israel should keep control of Area C (without formally annexing it), declare that the palestinians have annulled the Oslo accords, and attempt to limit their supplying the palestinians with electricity and water.
It appears that fairly soon, the palestinians will take control of Jordan, and the west bankers can be given Jordanian citizenship. Similarly, when the Muslim Brotherhood takes control of Egypt, the Gazans can be given Egyptian citizenship.
Even allowing Yamit for your views, it does not answer my question. Do you have a meaningful answer? What about yourself? Given your passionate views, I would have thought by now you would have formed or joined an advocacy/activist organization and do your thing outside the pages of Israpundit as I have often urged you to do.
We must move the Arabs out of Y&S as well as Israel. Not far for most no more than an hours drive, to Jordan . There they can meet up with their relatives who make up the overwhelming majority.
Jews returned to the Land of Israel for the singular reason to have a country of our own not shared with any other nation, culture or religion.
Jews cannot practice authentically their religion so long as the Temple Mount is occupied with Muslim Structures. Judaism is differeent from all other religions, it is all inclusive to the smallest detail in a Jews daily life. Judaism is totally incompatible with Islam and no free jew should have to compromise his beliefs in order to accommodate Muslims in a Jewish country.
In a Jewish country that is not mixed with non Jews we would be free to rekindle our ancient national traditions.
Those traditions that are specifically Jewish, such as: When Moses killed the Egyptian merely for beating another Hebrew.
David conducted aggressive expansionist political wars.
Where The prophets decried even traces of foreign worship in the land of Israel.
Twenty-four thousand of Rabbi Akiva’s students joined Bar Kochba’s revolt. (All were slain)
The Hebrews left Egypt to build a state of their own, not a politically correct mixed state with the Canaanites.
Would they share a state with hostile, disdainful Muslims? I think not!
We want, no demand a real Jewish Country, but for that the Arabs must leave.
To get the Jewish people to do the right thing they first have to exhaust all the wrong choices and also to face destruction. Only then is there a chance to survive and thrive. Perhaps this fateful choice of ‘either or’ will finally force Israel to annex the land now as they should have done long ago. Recall also the in the 1967 war the Arabs in Judea and Samaria were starting to flee to Jordan when Moshe Dayan foolishly urged them to stay. The only thing wrong with Caroline is that the government is not following her wise suggestions.
Bill Narvey wrote, “One would think that with the stakes being so high for Israelis, that the conservative-right Israelis who have broken the strangle hold on national thinking that the left had, would become even more energized, passionate and dedicated in pushing for their government to adopt policies that reflected their views”
The Right is busy raising families, which will permit the relatively safe annexation of the areas about which we are concerned. Raising families consumes enormous energy and financial resources. Only those who receive their sustenance from their pro-Right activities or those so dedicated that they engage in the fight pro bono exist at the moment. The Left are paid prostitutes for the EU and their efforts would dry up without those ill-begotten funds.
Critics of the 2005 Gaza withdrawal, have been proven more correct than they had imagined, with Gaza quickly becoming a Palestinian terrorist state.
It has often been reported that with this fact becoming a daily reality, majority Israeli leftist ideological perspectives and attitudes have largely been undermined as Israeli political views have shifted from liberal-left to conservative-right.
If the Israeli left is, according to the numbers as these reports suggest, but a shadow of its former self, the current minority Israeli leftist voice remains as loud as ever and that voice, still holds sway over the Netanyahu conservative-right government.
One would have thought that with the conservative-right shift in Israeli views, that conservative-right advocacy/activist organizations would have sprung up in Israel to still the voices and further undermine the left, demand that the Netanyahu government take harsh tough measures to deal with the harsh tough realities Israel faces regarding Palestinians, the ongoing Israel vs. Palestinian/Arab war and hardening anti-Israel world opinion.
As Glick implicitly says, that has not happened as the public discourse appears to be 99% left wing and 1% right.
We saw last October, a bill presented to the Knesset to convene an inquiry to determine funding sources for left wing activist organizations. That bill specifically did not include subpoena power, which pretty much undermined the effectiveness of such inquiry before it was even convened. In reaction to the outcry against this initiative, that bill died on the table, pushed off to the floor and swept out with the trash.
A number of Israeli universities continue to be strongholds for leftist views that Israeli youth are being indoctrinated in, perhaps most prominently Ben Gurion University. Some have spoken out against this, but university leadership has responded by largely relying on answering by mouthing principles of freedom of speech or ignoring these critics altogether. These left wing bastions, like B’Tselem, Peace Now, Meretz and NIF just carry on as if nothing has changed.
They carry on because the new majority of Israeli conservative-right thinkers have not organized against them and the Netanyahu government has not capitalized on this new majority support base.
We see a similar phenomena in the States and Canada. Whereas the majority in both nations lean towards being centrist, conservative and right, the left wing are the ones who are the most energized, passionate, dedicated and organized in their sustained advocacy/activism. Those governments appear to be influenced by loud mouthed leftist views and thus try to stike a balance between the minority left and majority right views respectively.
The essential difference between North Americans and Israelis is that only Israel’s very security, future and existence are at manifest risk.
One would think that with the stakes being so high for Israelis, that the conservative-right Israelis who have broken the strangle hold on national thinking that the left had, would become even more energized, passionate and dedicated in pushing for their government to adopt policies that reflected their views and to not only reject the leftist views, but to legislate against those hard core Israeli leftists, both individual voices and organizations whose views and actions hint at, if not border on treason.
That has not happened.
Glick has not addressed and explained this reality.
Perhaps those who live in Israel can explain this, as well as what it will take for the conservative right to get passionate, energized, determined and organized to discredit the minority Israeli left and its leading advocates/activists, but push the Netanyahu government to take advantage of the Israeli majority conservative-right views.
Caroline went whole hog. She opted for annexing it all, come what may. I used to be in favour of just annexing C and probably B. This would involve problems of a different sort. My objective was to acquire as much of the land as possible with as little of the Arabs as possible. But the Arabs in A would continue their propaganda and incitement. The Arabs in Israel would continue to show allegience to them. Better to go all in and deal with the new challenges. Then it would be an internal matter over which the UN would have diminished authority. Israel would spend the next ten years negotiating with the Arabs on matters of autonomy during which she could offer them emigration assistence. The world would have to deal with the refugees once and for all.
@BlandOatmeal –
Too true. Russia is never going to give the kurile islands back to japan. Germany is never going to get back Silesia or the alsace. Mexico is never going to get back California. You start a war and lose it; you lose territory. Its as simple as that. Unless its Israel. Then you give back Sinai and start to haggle over the golan and J&S.
Only in Israel; only among Jews. Who ever heard of a nation having mixed opinions about “annexing” lands it already owns, in its own country?