Mofaz: Give the Palestinians 100% of Yesha

By Gabe Kahn, INN

Opposition leader Shaul Mofaz (Kadima) told the The New York Times that he would “respond to 100% of the territorial demands of the Palestinians” if elected Prime Minister.

“I intend to replace Netanyahu,” Mr. Mofaz, 63, said. “I will not join his government.”

Mofaz said that he believed Israel should keep the main settlement blocs, but that he would give the Palestinian Authority as much land from sovereign Israeli ground as he kept from Judea and Samaria.

He added that he believes it is possible to reach an agreement on the borders and security within one year.

When asked about Israeli residents of Judea and Samaria living in communities he would cede to the Palestinian Authority, Mofaz said, “If they’re given the right incentives they will leave their homes. Those who do not, we would have to evacuate [them].”

“This is a wildly radical program that undermines our security and will lead the State of Israel into one hundred years of conflict rather than one hundred years of peace,” Ariel countered. “Mofaz should find another way of trying to achieve popularity for his [declining] party without undermining Israel’s security.”

Yesha Council Chairman Danny Dayan said, “A man who will give the Palestinians 100% of what they demand in a territorial power play and evict tens of thousands of Israelis is unfit to be prime minister of Israel.”

“But do not worry,” Dayan said. “Kadima will not be chosen to lead the nation again.”

Kadima is currently Israel’s largest party with 28 Knesset mandates. However, recent polls indicate Kadima would only win 12-15 seats if elections were held today. It may be an effort to gain Kadima voters from other left of center parties that is causing Mofaz to voice extremist views, sources have said. He has also made anti hareidi remarks.,

Likud, which has 27 Knesset mandates at present, is currently polling at 32 seats. Other rightist parties are also polling beyond their present numbers.

April 9, 2012 | 109 Comments »

Leave a Reply

9 Comments / 109 Comments

  1. @ Wallace Brand:

    “What sort of poetry would you suggest. Iambic pentameter won’t do it I think. In your reply be succinct.”

    I agree that iambic pentameter wouldn’t make it in the present milieu. Even Shakespeare reserved that strictly for “noble” types (all his other characters’ deliveries were couched strictly in prose).

    Anyway, here’s an example, though I’m sure there’s more out there. [It’s not exactly ‘succinct,’ but it would be counterproductive here to not include it in its entirety.]

    It’s thirty years old. The author set it to his own music sometime during the Lebanon War, I think; some guy named Zimmerman.

    “Well, the neighborhood bully, he’s just one man
    His enemies say he’s on their land
    They got him outnumbered about a million to one
    He got no place to escape to, no place to run
    He’s the neighborhood bully

    “The neighborhood bully just lives to survive
    He’s criticized and condemned for being alive
    He’s not supposed to fight back, he’s supposed to have thick skin
    He’s supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in
    He’s the neighborhood bully

    “The neighborhood bully been driven out of every land
    He’s wandered the earth an exiled man
    Seen his family scattered, his people hounded and torn
    He’s always on trial for just being born
    He’s the neighborhood bully

    “Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized
    Old women condemned him, said he should apologize.
    Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad
    The bombs were meant for him. He was supposed to feel bad
    He’s the neighborhood bully

    “Well, the chances are against it and the odds are slim
    That he’ll live by the rules that the world makes for him
    ’Cause there’s a noose at his neck and a gun at his back
    And a license to kill him is given out to every maniac
    He’s the neighborhood bully

    “He got no allies to really speak of
    What he gets he must pay for, he don’t get it out of love
    He buys obsolete weapons and he won’t be denied
    But no one sends flesh and blood to fight by his side
    He’s the neighborhood bully

    “Well, he’s surrounded by pacifists who all want peace
    They pray for it nightly that the bloodshed must cease
    Now, they wouldn’t hurt a fly. To hurt one they would weep
    They lay and they wait for this bully to fall asleep
    He’s the neighborhood bully

    “Every empire that’s enslaved him is gone
    Egypt and Rome, even the great Babylon
    He’s made a garden of paradise in the desert sand
    In bed with nobody, under no one’s command
    He’s the neighborhood bully

    “Now his holiest books have been trampled upon
    No contract he signed was worth what it was written on
    He took the crumbs of the world and he turned it into wealth
    Took sickness and disease and he turned it into health
    He’s the neighborhood bully

    “What’s anybody indebted to him for?
    Nothin’, they say. He just likes to cause war
    Pride and prejudice and superstition indeed
    They wait for this bully like a dog waits to feed
    He’s the neighborhood bully

    “What has he done to wear so many scars?
    Does he change the course of rivers? Does he pollute the moon and stars?
    Neighborhood bully, standing on the hill
    Running out the clock, time standing still
    Neighborhood bully”

    Copyright © 1983 by Special Rider Music

  2. @ Wallace Brand:Yes, sir, you hit the nail on the head. Anytime we believe a lie, we call one who tells truth a liar, but to a bigger lie we say, “Oh, what a marvelous revelation!”

  3. @ Shem:”….why don’t we just be up front and call it lies, obfuscations, prevarications and duplicity? ” You can, to those who are not already in the grasp of the poetic truth. Your’s is an OBJECTIVE description. Poetic truth is SUBJECTIVE, in the eye of those who hold these lies and duplicity as truth. Objective descriptions as lies, or even the truth of the matter, don’t make a dent in subjective beliefs of poetic truths. To those who do not benefit from these poetic truths (those benefitting meaning arabs local to Palestine and some arabs elsewhere), it is likely the result of a main stream media repetitive barrage of the poetic truths by Arab propagandists and the Soviet dezinformatsia.

  4. @ CuriousAmerican:One Lebanese journalist wrote that they had such confidence in the ability of the Israeli pilots that dined out at restaurants in the midst of the bombing, secure in the knowledge that the Israeli pilots would only hit the Muslim militant areas of Lebanon.

  5. According to the old saying, “more truth than poetry,” why don’t we just be up front and call it lies, obfuscations, prevarications and duplicity? ANY concessions at all to the Arabs is not considered as to Israel’s credit, but as WEAKNESS, and when they see that, they want more, and they keep chipping away. Any concessions, however small, that they might make, is made in the spirit of a quote I saw of Yasser Arafat (of lousy memory), “Kiss the hand of your enemy until you can cut it off.” Isn’t there more truth than poetry in that?

  6. Gaza is a rather curious open prison. It has a private club where you can dine in luxury. http://jdlcanada.wordpress.com/2012/01/11/why-peacekeepers-love-going-to-gaza-to-care-for-the-starving-palestinians/ It has a new shopping mall. http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001127.html Its shops are full to overflowing with goods. I has a new Olympic sized swimming pool. http://libertyledger.com/2010/05/27/the-truth-about-gaza/ It has wonderful beaches on the Mediterranean that are much used by the Arabs. http://current.com/groups/gaza/89622397_beautiful-sandy-beaches-of-gaza.htm If you looked into it, you would find it is not much like Auschwitz. That it is an open prison is a “poetic truth.” Poetic truths like that are marvelous because no facts and no reason can ever penetrate. Supporters of Israel are up against a poetic truth. We keep hitting it with all the facts. We keep hitting it with obvious logic and reason. And we are so obvious and conspicuously right that we assume it is going to have an impact and it never does. http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/2586/palestinian-victimhood-narrative The surrounding Arab countries have a greater number of people below the poverty level than Gaza. I think possibly Israel has too, but I have not checked that..

  7. @ Wallace Brand:

    “[The West] are not going to say what they really think and feel about what is so obvious about the circumstances among the Palestinians. So the poetic truth that Palestinians live by carries on.

    “International media also do not feel that they have the moral authority to report what they see. On the contrary, they feed this poetic truth and give it a kind of gravitas that it would never otherwise have. Consequently, we need to develop a narrative that is not poetic, but literal and that is based on the truth.”

    Don’t understand him.

    If a literal, truthful narrative is overwhelmed in the West by sheer poetry, then perhaps what’s called for is more poetry.

    Better poetry.

    If poetry has become the coin of the realm, then so be it.

    To cite the dedication I once found in the intro to a Mathematics text,

    “What one fool can do

    — ANY fool can do.”

  8. @ CuriousAmerican:

    “Gaza [is] an open air prison …. This is a simple fact, NOT a buzz word… Gaza was never free.”

    If you concede that it was “never free,” then you implicitly acknowledge that it was an “open-air prison” long before anybody associated that expression with Israel, and long before the Jews started returning to Gaza after the 1967 war.

    Yet whenever the expression is used, it clearly is intended as a reproach to Israel specifically.

    As long as that is the case, it most certainly IS a buzzword; you betcha.