For the past several weeks, Mahmoud Abbas has waited for clarification from Hilary Clinton regarding the conditions to reopen peace talks with Israel. Where exactly does America stand? According to Clinton, "settlement activity is illegitimate" and the future borders between Israel and the Palestinian state will be based "on the 1967 lines, with the agreed swaps, and taking into account subsequent developments." To Palestinians, this "clarification" is not clear enough. They are afraid that the route of the separation wall and barrier will become, in the minds of the Israeli leadership, the western border of the future Palestinian state. And this is an option they are not ready to accept.
The "security barrier" is often credited with the dramatic, and very real, decline in terrorism in the Israel, and appears to have fulfilled its stated purpose as such. However, Israeli leaders are lately finding it more and more difficult to deny either the barrier's value as a bargaining chip in future peace negotiations, or that Israel had always intended the barrier to be the future border of a Palestinian state. These assumptions are clearly illustrated by the distribution of settlements along the wall. According to a UN report made public in July 2007, 365,744 out of 421,660 settlers surveyed in the West Bank or East Jerusalem (86.7 percent) lived west of the wall. One year later, in July 2008, Peace Now estimated the number of settlers living west of the wall to be 388,800 out of 454,200, based on statistics from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics. More important, the five most heavily populated settlements of the West Bank (Ma'ale Adumim, Ariel, Alfei Menashe, Gush Etzion, and Modi'in Ilit), and the twelve settlements of East Jerusalem were on the western side of the barrier, sitting right on the very fringe of the West Bank.
These are not merely the paranoid delusions of Israel's enemies. During a debate broadcast live by France Inter in August 2007, former Israeli ambassador to France Nissim Zvili called the Green Line "the former border" between Israel and the future State of Palestine. Without going quite that far, numerous Israeli officials have said for years that the Green Line is not sacred, and that in the context of negotiations on final status, they were open to exchanges of territory with the Palestinians. Obsessed with reducing the non-Jewish population in Israel, some politicians have even suggested exchanging regions of Israel with an Arab-Israeli population for some border enclaves where principal settlements are located.
In a thirty-five-page study published in September 2008, General Giora Eiland, who presided over Israel's National Security Council from 2004 to 2006 after having served thirty-three years in the army, states that he is in favor of a future border that runs primarily along the "security barrier." This new border would annex most of the settlements west of the existing barrier. As compensation, Eiland suggests a range of possible territory exchanges, including a triangular barter among Israel, Palestine, and Egypt. He also believes that hostilities between Israelis and Palestinians are now so strong that all future negotiations must include the existence of a "security barrier."
Since the collapse of Oslo, the Second Intifada, and the rise to power of Hamas, Israeli public opinion, according to Eiland, is less and less in favor of "land for peace," which had always been an underlying assumption of all formal negotiations. According to a study conducted by the Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS), in Tel Aviv, 56 percent of the Jewish population in Israel favored a Land for Peace program in 1977. By 2007, that number had fallen to 28 percent. And in a booklet issued by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs in 2007, three former ambassadors, a general, and the director of the National Defense Institute, stated that the barrier/border was insufficient. They suggested a line of separation much farther east, in which Israel assumes control of the Jordan Valley and widens the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem corridor in order to create a zone of defense for Jerusalem.
These ideas do not remotely take into account the reluctance or outright resistance of the Palestinians. Israeli military leaders seem convinced that whatever is good for Israel's security is permissible, and they have ignored international law, UN resolutions, and even their own commitments with almost complete impunity. In 2004, a close collaborator of the state prosecutor Talia Sasson was commissioned by Ariel Sharon to create a report on the wild settlements in the West Bank. Her research found that many of these "outposts" had received direct funding from the ministries of Housing, Energy, Education, and Defense, in violation of Israeli law. Submitted to the government in March 2005, Sasson's report was relegated to a drawer, where it still lies. Sasson promptly resigned. "We have built a magnificent country, of which I am proud," she confided in April 2008, on the eve of Israel's sixtieth anniversary, "but our democracy is in danger. The military thinks they can do as they please, we are almost incapable of appreciating the distress of others, and since Rabin's assassination, all of our leaders have lacked courage."
"According to a new Gallup poll released over the weekend, Israel ranks fifth among the countries viewed most favorably by Americans, behind Canada, Great Britain, Germany and Japan."
Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Japan and Israel... Of those five, the United States (at one point or another in the past two centuries) has been at war with four of them!
Attitudes can change. There is hope.
Contrary to expectations, by many measures the surveys showed the level of ignorance remaining constant over time. In the 1990s, political scientists Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter concluded that there was statistically little difference between the knowledge of the parents of the Silent Generation of the 1950s, the parents of the Baby Boomers of the 1960s, and American parents today. (By some measures, Americans are dumber today than their parents of a generation ago.)
France, Spain push bid to recognize Palestinian state within 2 years
By Barak Ravid, Haaretz Correspondent
According to senior European diplomats and senior Israeli officials, Israel has relayed its opposition to the initiative - warning that it would undermine any chance of a successful peace process.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1151219.html
Any one else notice that every time there may be something in support of the Palestinians Israel says that it will undermine the peace process? Considering the fact that the peace process has been nothing more than an opportunity for Israel to steal more land by building, and the IDF defending, illegal settlements and talking about the new facts on the ground to keep that land, I hope this "peace process" is undermined and a true peace process can begin.
For those who actually interested in reality.
Fact: Israel is smaller now that it has been since 1968.
Fact: Israeli is i the ONLY country in the Middle East that has EVER given up land to a DEFEATED foe.
A, reality. A rare visitor to many an Arabic narrative. Could that be the reason that civilization has stagnated to such an alarming proportion?
..
no outrage from the UN , where is a commision,
you dont see jews of yemen strapping bombs on their children
how many rockets or guns did the yeman jews fire at the muslims in yeman?
nota ,
the jews packed up and left , no choice . The peacefull muslims said they would kill all the jews if they dont .
Normally when countries do border rectifications so that they don't include blocs of each other's population, this is considered a good thing. Wouldn't you rather live in your own country than in someone else's country? The alternative is population exchange/expulsion, which the Palestinians already rule out as "genocide".
And sometimes, as with India and Pakistan, the people have to move to fit the borders.
If that is your answer than you have decided that Palestinians will now give up more than 90% of their state. Wanna be a little fairer, or does Israel get what it wants because it decided illegal settlements put "fac ts on the ground"?
My personal vision of peace is a lot like the Clinton/Rabin/Arafat map but with more territorial adjustments involving taking Palestinian-inhabited land from Israel and transfering it to Palestine.
I have no idea where your 90% formula comes from. Ignoring the worthless Negev, a West Bank-Gaza Palestinian state (with the extensions I favor) ends up with a majority of the land allotted in 1947/48 and probably more square km than the 1967 borders.
wrong again , nowonder the palestinians are in such a mess , try the truth , no revisionest history.
israel only wants 5-7 % of the west bank, and they want to exchange that land so there is a land bridge to the gaza strip ...you have to show me where you get .90%
the war is not over land and % points ..its about islam , and the muslims are just following the koran in there never ending war against jews nomatter where they live .
everytime the arabs and jews go at it , god sides with the jews .
http://www.zionism-israel.com/maps/Betselem_Fence_06.gif
The security fence (with some exceptions) follows the '67 border quite closely. There are a LOT of Jewish settlements outside the security barrier. One suspects that those settlements would be abandoned after a peace settlement that recognized the barrier as the de facto border between the two sides.
At all.
Israel, because it is a democracy, has to accommodate at some level the right-wing settler voting bloc who want to live in the West Bank. These people are part of Israel's democracy and they are allowed to have their voices heard, even if the rest of us disagree with them.
But despite that, Israel's government is trying to compromise with the Palestinians. The Palestinians clearly do not want Jews living in their state, as indicated by their demand to freeze settlements. Therefore, the idea of a land swap is a brilliant one, because it allows Israeli Palestinians to live in Palestine while keeping the Jews in Palestine to a minimum. It should be a win-win for both sides. The main complaint of the Palestinians right now is "land theft" from the settlements, but if they are compensated by other land, that shouldn't be a problem.
It's time to compromise, and the Israeli government is laying out numerous deals for the Palestinians to negotiate for. But Abbas is continuing to refuse to talk. Who's the real problem here?
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=664916
Of course considering Ben-Gurion himself admitted zionizts were the agressors in the conflict, would you have been happy with the palestinians building a wall around the jews in palestine before the creation of israel? After all many were in the likes of the sten gang, lehi etc.
As for Ben-Gurion, care to cite a source?
If the Palestinians had built a wall and not crossed it, there would have been a Jewish state, and a Palestinian state, and everyone would have lived happily ever after. They didn't want a wall. They wanted (as Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League, put it on 15 May 1948) "a war of extermination and a momentous massacre".
The wall was built at a considerable cost to Israel.
The Security Barrier effective ended the suicide bombing campaign.
Yes, I realize many Palestinains are upset about the fact that the tterorsit campaing initated by PA has been defeated by the wall and check point.
My condolences.
After the Oslo accords were signed, the occupation was ending. Checkpoints were being removed and the IDF was rolling out. And how did the Palestinians respond? With the Second Intifada, the worst series of attacks in the I/P conflicts history!
After Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, there was no blockade. But how did the Gazans respond again? With rocket attacks!
CLEARLY, the occupation does not have much to do with the violence. Even when the occupation was stopping or over, there was still violence. What year was the PLO founded? 1964, three years before Israel began occupying the West Bank. What other excuses you got?
The wall was built at a considerable cost to Israel."
Funny but that the wall takes in strategic water sources etc isn't it?
And as regards financing the wall...how much does israel recieve each year from America?
Also the Palestinians themselves helped finance it...unwittingly of course !!!
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Report:+Israel+Stole+$2bn+from+Palestinian+Workers.-a0218286413
But the IDF ignores the rulings and we are left to the conclusion that Israel has elements of military dictatorship in their ethnocracy.
More proof that Israel is not currently a democracy, contrary to its long standing public relations schlock.
Can you imagine any Supreme Court of Palestine issuing a ruling against attacking Israel? Or anyone listening to it?
go to israel and americans are welcomed as friends in gaza they become kidnap victims.
wear an american flag on your clothing in an arab country and see how long it takes for the world to see you on video drinking tea with your captors .
israel should have had the eygptions make thier wall it appears the eygtion wall is more effective and goes into the ground.
If over 1.5 million Americans had been kept in an area the size of Texas, and Soviet weapons had been used repeatedly to enforce that confinement, and commit murder and land theft, do you believe that Americans would have cheered had a similar attack to 9/11 happened on Soviet soil? Of course they would.
Robert Kennedy.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Terrorism/usvictims.html
You are unbelievable, alysheba. Justifying the deaths of Americans across the boards because they somehow deserve it?! How about the Americans who were simply visiting Israel as tourists? What is the matter with you?
Texas today comfortably holds about 25,000,000 people. Not sure what your point was.
let US give 3 billions in aid and advance military equipment to Palestinians like we do to israelis and see how grateful they will be...
http://www.hudsonny.org/2010/02/palestinian-authority-where-the-money-ends-up.php
That child was killed by terror but the other dead child... oh that's ok because it was defense. It's all logical to the criminally insane.
Yes, Rabin's assassination was the bad omen. His killer represents the irrational settler mentality that has destroyed peace by deconstructing what was meant to be a future Palestinian state. He was weaned on this kind of anti-peace radicalism.
Israel is more immersed in injustice than ever with total disregard for the rule of law.