SPME Member, Haifa University
Ariel Sharon has presented his “disengagement plan” to the White House, and it has been endorsed by George Bush. The Sharon political machine, backed by the Labor Party’s machine and the Israeli Left, is flooding the Israeli media with ads and promotions for the “disengagement plan”. Many in Israel are presuming that because the Arab terrorist groups and the fascist Arab states are screaming in outrage against the plan, then it must in fact be a positive constructive plan that can reduce violence and produce peace. Polls are showing that even the majority of Likud members endorse the “plan”. The Arab critics of course are outraged because the plan does not provide for the immediate liquidation of Israel and its population and they oppose all plans that are missing those essential genocidal clauses. While the Sharon-Bush “plan” has a few positive features and aspects, it augurs badly and embodies existential dangers for Israel.
So, What’s So Wrong with the Plan?
1. It rewards terrorism. Ever since signing the first Oslo “Accords”, the Palestinians showed their devotion to its clauses as well as their unwillingness to comply with any of their written commitments by engaging in endless daily terrorist atrocities and by mass murdering 1,300 Israelis, equivalent to 22 September 11ths when measured proportional to population. The “plan” rewards the terror by delivering to the terrorists and Islamofascists a Gaza Strip ethnically cleansed of Jews. Guess how the Iraqi terrorists shooting Allied troops will understand and interpret this “deal”!
2. The “plan” is a recipe for escalated terrorism and atrocities. If Israel has trouble suppressing the terror even today, when the Gaza Strip is full of Jews and Israeli soldiers, what will happen once they are evicted? What will stand in the way of the PLO escalating the violence, firing hundreds more rockets into Negev civilian communities, and sending out dozens of new suicide bombers? What does Ariel Sharon think the PLO will do in Gaza once the “settlers” are evicted, take up knitting?
3. It is an evil precedent. It signals that Israel is willing to conduct “talks and dialogues” even while it is under daily attack by the PLO’s terrorists and its civilians are being daily murdered. It signals that Israel is willing ultimately to abandon the West Bank and Gaza to the PLO without the PLO ever having to comply with a single thing.
4. There is no “conditionality” at all in the “deal”. Israel’s concessions and capitulations are to be carried out without the smallest gesture from the PLO, and without the requirement that the PLO comply first with a single clause in any of the accords that it has already signed in the past!
5. While Sharon and his people have hailed the “deal” with President Bush as effectively recognizing Israel’s rights to maintain “groups of settlements” where they are concentrated, such as around Ariel, Colin Powell is already backing off from this publicly and declaring there is no such US acknowledgement of Israel’s rights.
6. While the “deal” and joint announcement are being touted by Sharon’s people as declaring there is and will be no such thing as a “Palestinian Right of Return” to Israel, Arafat and his minions have already denounced this and re-pledged that there will be no ceasefire until this “right”, which is nothing more than the Sudeten-like “right” of Palestinians to dismantle and destroy Israel, is accepted in full. Nothing in the plan is conditioned on Arafat and the PLO publicly renouncing this “right”. And the US cannot be relied upon in this regard. There was a time when the US was “firmly and permanently committed” to refusing to consider anything more than limited autonomy for the “Palestinians” and certainly no “state”. Look where we are now.
7. The “plan” relinquishes Israel’s moral claim to the rights of Jews to live anywhere they wish within the Land of Israel. The plan ethnically cleanses Jews from the Gaza Strip and parts of Samaria. There is nothing in the plan that limits the rights of Arabs to live anywhere they wish in the Land of Israel, including in Israel’s own capital city, Jerusalem. Incredibly and mindlessly, Israel has allowed a huge wave of Arab migration to Jerusalem in recent decades. The plan permanently relinquishes the rights of Jews ever to live in the Gaza Strip, regardless of any Palestinian misbehavior or violations of any past or future “deals”. The plan has Israel renouncing all “permanent” military installations in the Gaza Strip, including its radar facilities, needed to locate Palestinian smuggling boats, and this “permanence” is not conditional on such delicate niceties as the PLO halting rocket firings from Gaza into Jewish civilian areas or its sending out suicide bombers.
8. Israel largely renounces its right to operate checkpoints and inspections to deter and fight terror. This makes the mass murders of Israeli civilians all that much easier and it damages Israel’s abilities to do anything to block the movement of terrorists.
9. While the joint statement states that the Gaza Strip will be “demilitarized”, one does not know whether to laugh or cry at this. Previous “accords” with the PLO said the same thing and there were never any Israeli nor American attempts to force compliance. Since the PLO is not even a party to this Sharon-Bush “deal”, this clause is little more than an insult to the intelligence. And note that the demilitarization is not a condition for anything. Israeli concessions are not conditioned on demilitarization and Israel may not abandon its “permanent” concessions when it turns out Gaza is not demilitarized.
10. Israel once again agrees to the PLO operating an army. Guess against whom this army will be used. If you think it will be used against the Hamas and Islamic Jihad, then I have a nice bridge in Brooklyn I would like to sell you.
11. Israel agrees to demolish all “illegal Jewish settlements”, but there is nothing that would allow Israel to expel Arab squatters living illegally on lands they do not own or in structures illegally built.
12. Israel foregoes the possibility of responding to mass murders and other forms of violence committed by Palestinians by shutting off the power and phone lines for the villages or neighborhoods involved.
13. Israel pledges to continue to allow large numbers of Palestinians to enter Israel daily as “day workers” and this is a guaranteed program for many new suicide bombers blowing up Israeli buses.
14. Israel pledges to continue to bankroll the terrorists, and this financing is conditioned on nothing. No conditionality on compliance by the PLO with anything. No conditionality on ending the atrocities. Nothing.
15. The destruction and abandonment of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, with no PLO quid pro quo, provides enormous encouragement to those Arabs who believe that violence and atrocities are the only way to make gains for themselves. It is an open declaration that no act of violence by Arabs will ever go unrewarded. It sets the most dangerous precedent imaginable. Clearly every future “deal” will now be based on this precedent and will involve unilateral Israeli depopulation of its Jewish civilians with no Arab quid pro quo whatsoever. Eviction of Jews from large swaths of their homeland while never evicting a single Arab from anywhere has become the guiding principle for all future diplomacy.
16 While the Sharon team has been blustering that the deal means that Washington agrees that the 1967 “Green Line” will not again become Israel’s future border, there is no actual such acknowledgement in the deal and Washington has never agreed to any such thing. In fact, President Bush has repeatedly referred to the “1949 Armistice Lines”, meaning Israel’s pre-1967 Auschwitz Borders (which is what they were called by Abba Eban).
17 While President Bush acknowledges Israel’s “rights of self-defense”, these are not spelled out and in most cases where Israel has exercised its legitimate rights in recent years, such as by assassinating terrorist leaders, the Bush Administration has denounced these Israeli actions. So it appears that the only form of Israeli self-defense that is considered legitimate will remain self-defense by means of capitulation to terrorism.
18. While criticizing the PLO’s “lack of action” against terror, which is a bit like condemning Hitler for his lack of action to stop the Holocaust, the joint announcement does not explicitly denounce Arafat for leading, ordering and initiating most of the terrorism. There are no American sanctions against the PLO for its non-compliance with any of its previous commitments, nor any sanctions against it for the endless mass murders it has committed.
19. The plan envisages Palestinian “refugees” being resettled in Arab states, including the future “state” of “Palestine”. The word “only” is conspicuously absent.
20. Nothing in the agreement is conditioned upon the PLO ending its campaign to destroy Israel, nor upon any PLO acknowledgement of Israel’s right to exist.
21. The “plan” utterly abandons the “Land for Peace” formula imposed on Israel by its leftist governments of the past, and replaces it with “Land for Good Press Soundbites”, which is to say – “Land for Nothing”.
22 The plan is anti-democratic. Sharon ran for office opposing just such a plan being touted by the Labor Party under Amram Mitzna. Voters elected Sharon on that platform and because they opposed Mitzna’s plan, yet here is Sharon implementing it by fiat.
23 Maariv (April 16) reports that the plan has secret unpublished clauses involving Israeli agreement to additional concessions not stated in the public “deal”. The White House knows the contents of this document. Israeli voters do not. What does that suggest to you?
