As for this topic, please refer to my previous posting (http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20130917). (Lily)
1.“Jerusalem Post”（http://www.jpost.com）
‘Two-state solution is a deadly illusion’ 27 February 2013
by David Kirshenbaum
Only the dangerously foolish would believe that the Arabs would long forgo a fundamental attribute of sovereignty and agree to remain demilitarized．
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s elevation of Tzipi Livni to lead negotiations with the Palestinian Authority constitutes a serious setback to Israel’s efforts to keep its citizens safe, fend off the tide of regional violence and thwart the escalating efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state.
Israel’s Knesset elections took place in a week that featured the continued implosion of Syria and Egypt, the former already bogged down in a bloody civil war and the latter possibly on its way to one. The Israeli electorate utterly rejected Livni’s tired campaign slogans and her worn-out and failed prescription for a Middle East settlement: Israel withdraws from most or all of Judea and Samaria, uproots tens of thousands of people from their homes in the cradle of Jewish civilization and agrees to carve up Jerusalem. An Arab state, the 22nd, is created in the areas from which Israel withdraws, leaving Israel with a nine-mile wide border in its center.
The major upheavals in the Arab world have done nothing to bring about any fresh thinking on Livni’s part regarding this “twenty-second-state solution.”
In the years before Oslo, the widely held position in Israel was that a sovereign Arab state west of the Jordan River would represent a grave danger to the State of Israel.
Even the Oslo accords, which according to its architects were made with a leader that represented the entire so called Palestinian people and with an entity that had sworn off terror, didn’t guarantee the Arabs a state west of the Jordan.
Indeed, in prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s last major Knesset speech, delivered in October 1995 just a few weeks before his assassination, Rabin spoke of a final settlement where there would be a “Palestinian entity... which is less than a state... The borders of the State of Israel during the permanent solution will be beyond the lines which existed before the Six Day War. We will not return to the 4 June 1967 lines.”
Among the changes cited by Rabin were that Israel’s eastern border “will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term” and that Israel would establish “blocs of settlements in Judea and Samaria, like the one in Gush Katif.”
Not even Shimon Peres would have dared to present to the Israeli public an agreement in which Israel would withdraw from nearly 40 percent of Judea and Samaria if, following such withdrawals, the Palestinians would possess and launch missiles capable of reaching most of southern Israel and the Gush Dan area, incitement against Israel would continue in official Palestinian Authority newspapers and television stations, PA leaders would unashamedly preside over the naming of schools, summer camps and town squares in honor of suicide bombers, and multiple terrorist groups, including Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al-Qaida would continue their murderous rampages against Jews whenever given the chance.
But even after the fundamental tenets of the Oslo process have been shown to be vacuous, with 1,200 Israelis killed and thousands more wounded since the signing of the accords, with Palestinian groups highly fragmented, but united only in the single goal of eliminating the Jewish state, Livni continues to champion farreaching concessions that go far beyond what was contemplated by Rabin. Even after the Palestinians have reversed the clarion call of Isaiah to beat swords into plowshares and, instead, turned world class multi-million dollar agricultural hothouses into missile launching pads, Livni remains ever more keen to grant the Arabs a sovereign base right in Israel’s midst from which to continue their terror with greater deadliness.
It is telling that the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) movement against Israel was launched just after Ariel Sharon announced his plans to uproot every Jewish settlement from the Gaza Strip; and that the first Palestinian BDS Conference, held in November 2007, took place when Livni was foreign minister and in the same month as the Annapolis Peace Conference, when Livni and prime minister Ehud Olmert reiterated their support for the creation of a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria.
The abandonment by Israel of its rights in Judea and Samaria did not win us more respect and friendship.
Quite the contrary, it fed and encouraged the belief in international circles that all the ills of the Middle East are attributable to the “Palestinian problem” and that it isn’t Arab terror and aggression that is responsible for instability in the Middle East, but rather Israel’s refusal to end its so-called occupation of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.
Indeed, when Binyamin Netanyahu became prime minister for the second time in 2009 following Olmert’s and Livni’s stewardship, Israel was facing a hateful, well orchestrated campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state and to make it virtually impossible for Israel to defend itself from deadly attacks. Faced with unprecedented pressure, Netanyahu resigned himself in his Bar-Ilan speech in 2009 to the core principle of most US and European Middle East peace plans: the establishment of a demilitarized Arab state in the biblical heartland of Israel. Netanyahu stipulated that guarantees of such demilitarization would have to be provided by Israel’s “friends in the international community, headed by the United States.”
In a recent speech to a visiting delegation of American Jewish leaders, Netanyahu reaffirmed his support for “two states for two peoples: a demilitarized Palestinian state that recognizes the Jewish state.”
But only the dangerously foolish would believe that the Arabs, with all their emphasis on power and pride, would long forgo a fundamental attribute of sovereignty and agree to remain demilitarized. And only the hopelessly naïve would bank on the world community, including the United States, enforcing an open-ended limitation on a sovereign Palestinian government that has signed a peace treaty with Israel.
Equally fanciful is the notion that Israelis could live securely between well-armed sovereign Arab populations in Gaza and Judea and Samaria. Not only would most cities and towns in Israel, and every plane taking off and landing at Ben-Gurion International Airport, be vulnerable to even short-range rocket attacks, but as Israel’s experiences in Gaza in Operation Cast Lead and Pillar of Defense clearly demonstrated, Israel would be seriously hamstrung in its ability to respond to such attacks, as they would inevitably be launched from or near mosques, schools and civilian buildings. Accordingly, even a restrained Israeli response would subject Israel to severe international condemnation.
Were Israel to return to nine mile-wide borders and the eastern section of Jerusalem divided block by block into separate Jewish and Arab control, as contemplated by today’s most popular “peace” proposals, Israel’s vulnerability would dramatically increase even prior to a weapons flow into the new Palestinian state. Terror attacks, including simple sniper fire, which the official Palestinian government would presumably condemn, would bring incalculable suffering, paralyze life in Jerusalem, Kfar Saba, Netanya and other major Israeli cities, and wreak havoc on Israel’s economy, its tourism and the psyche of its population.
Responding to attacks emanating from a sovereign state would have serious consequences, especially when the sovereign dissociates itself from them, as would likely be the case. One can hear the voices of all those who will warn Israel to hold its fire lest it enlarge the circle of its enemies and incite the Arab “street” against it. Apologists for Abbas and the PA would point fingers at Hamas, and apologists for Hamas would pass off the attacks as the work of Islamic Jihad and al-Qaida. The level of pain that Israel would have to endure before it felt able to act would be devastating.
There is nothing “inevitable” about a Palestinian state in the center of Israel. But those who for whatever reasons support its creation should be honest enough to recognize that the chances of it remaining demilitarized are non-existent.
・The writer is an attorney in Israel and New York and a member of the Likud Party’s Central Committee.
2. New York Times（http://www.nytimes.com）
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Israel Should Annul the Oslo Accords, 20 September 2013
by Danny Danon
JERUSALEM — THIS month marks 20 years since the signing of the first of the Oslo Accords between the State of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Two decades after Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat stood on the White House lawn with President Bill Clinton, Israelis and Palestinians are again in the midst of the umpteenth round of negotiations.
Despite these efforts, true peace seems as distant as it did before the secret talks in Oslo were revealed to the world. The government of Israel must admit that we made a mistake and declare that the Oslo process has failed.
Only by officially annulling the Oslo Accords will we have the opportunity to rethink the existing paradigm and hopefully lay the foundations for a more realistic modus vivendi between the Jews and Arabs of this region.
Despite attempts to rewrite recent history by fringe elements, the failure of the Oslo framework cannot be attributed to a lack of will and persistence by Israel. What didn’t we try? We attempted direct negotiations, third-party mediators, public conferences and back-channel talks. We staged withdrawals and unilateral disengagements, established joint Israeli-Palestinian military patrols in Gaza and deployed American-trained security forces in the West Bank. None of this worked.
The P.L.O., and later the Palestinian Authority, never truly accepted that Israel, as the national state and homeland of the Jewish people, was here to stay. No amount of impressive ceremonies, cosmetic changes to the P.L.O. charter and Palestinian doublespeak to Western media outlets about their commitment to peace was able to change this grim fact.
To understand the mind-boggling scope of Oslo’s failure, it is best to look at the statistics. According to the organization B’Tselem, during the first Palestinian intifada in 1987, six years before Mr. Rabin’s attempt to recast the archterrorist Yasir Arafat as a peacemaker, 160 Israelis were murdered in Palestinian terror attacks. In the mid- to late-1990s, as successive Israeli governments negotiated with the Palestinians, and Mr. Arafat and his cronies repeatedly swore they were doing their utmost to end terrorism, 240 Israelis were brutally killed as suicide bombs and other heinous terrorist acts targeting unarmed civilians were unleashed in every corner of our nation.
Things did not get better after Prime Minister Ehud Barak made the Palestinians an offer in 2000 that, judging by his landslide defeat in the election a few months later, was way beyond what most Israelis supported. Between then and September 2010, 1,083 Israelis were murdered by Palestinian terrorists.
The Oslo process did not bring peace; it brought increased bloodshed. We must end this farce by announcing the immediate suspension of the accords.
Little impact would be felt by average Israelis and Palestinians. Those who would suffer most would be full-time negotiators like Martin S. Indyk and Saeb Erekat, who would find themselves out of a job after 20 years of gainful employment in the peace process industry.
What should replace Oslo’s false promise? We should implement what I have called a “three-state solution.” In the future, the final status of the Palestinians will be determined in a regional agreement involving Jordan and Egypt, when the latter has been restabilized. All the region’s states must participate in the process of creating a long-term solution for the Palestinian problem.
In the short term, the Palestinians will continue to have autonomy over their civilian lives while Israel remains in charge of security throughout Judea and Samaria, commonly referred to as the West Bank. Following an initial period, the Arab residents of Judea and Samaria could continue to develop their society as part of an agreement involving Israel and Jordan. Similarly, Gaza residents could work with Israel and Egypt to create a society that granted them full civil authority over their lives in a manner that was acceptable to all sides.
Most veterans of the peace process will mock this proposal, protesting that there is no way it would be accepted by the Palestinians. Their argument may seem convincing today, but as I often remind my critics, our region is unpredictable. Had you told any Middle East expert five years ago that two successive Egyptian presidents would be deposed and Bashar al-Assad’s regime would be in the midst of a bloody civil war, you, too, would have been mocked. Things change. We can make them change.
I am aware that even if the Palestinians accepted this plan, we would still have to deal with a fundamentalist Hamas regime in Gaza and continuing instability in Egypt. No plan for Israeli-Arab peace can be fully implemented until these issues are resolved.
In the short term, Israel’s only option is to manage this conflict by refusing to compromise when it comes to the security of Israeli citizens. At the same time, our government should take all steps possible to improve the economic well-being of the Palestinians.
The dissolution of the Oslo Accords would serve as the official act validating what we already know — that this failed framework is totally irrelevant in 2013. Once the Palestinians were ready to sit down and seriously discuss how our two peoples, through this new paradigm, could live side by side in peace and prosperity, they would find willing partners across the political spectrum in Israel.
It may not be the utopian peace promised to all of us on that sunny day in September 1993, but in the harsh realities of the Middle East, this may be the best we can hope for and the sole realistic chance for our children to grow up in a world less violent than previous generations have had to endure.
・Danny Danon is a member of the Knesset and the deputy defense minister of Israel.
・A version of this op-ed appears in print on September 21, 2013, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Israel Should Annul the Oslo Accords.
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