by Caroline Glick
Hat tip: Dr. Jean-charles Bensoussan
When you read the Trump plan closely, you realize it is a mirror image of Oslo. Rather than Israel being required to prove its good will, the Palestinians are required to prove their commitment to peace.
From 1994 through 1996, as a captain in the IDF, I
served as a member of Israel’s negotiating team with the PLO. Those
years were the heyday of the so-called peace process. As the coordinator
of negotiations on civil affairs for the Coordinator of Government
Activities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, I participated in all of the
negotiating sessions with the Palestinians that led to a half a dozen or
so of agreements, including the Interim or Oslo B agreement from
September 28, 1995, which transferred civil and military authorities in
Judea and Samaria to the PLO.
Throughout the period of my work, I never found
any reason to believe the peace process I was a part of would lead to
peace. The same Palestinian leaders who joked with us in fancy meeting
rooms in Cairo and Taba breached every commitment they made to Israel
the minute the sessions ended.
Beginning with the PLO’s failure to amend its
covenant that called for Israel’s destruction in nearly every paragraph;
through their refusal to abide by the limits they had accepted on the
number of weapons and security forces they were permitted to field in
the areas under their security control; their continuous breaches of
zoning and building laws and regulations; to their constant Nazi-like
anti-Semitic propaganda and incitement and solicitation of terrorism
against Israel – it was self-evident they were negotiating in bad faith.
They didn’t want peace with Israel. They were using the peace process
to literally take Israel apart piece by piece.
Israel’s leaders shrugged it off. Instead of
protesting and cutting off contact until Yasser Arafat and his henchmen
ended their perfidious behavior, Israel’s leaders ignored what was
happening before their faces. And in a way, they had no option of doing
anything else.
Time after time, Israel was required to release
terrorists from prison as a precondition for negotiations with the PLO.
The goal of those negotiations in turn was to force Israel to release
more terrorists from prison, and give more land, more money, more
international legitimacy and still more terrorists to the PLO.
On Tuesday, this state of affairs ended.
On Sunday morning, just before he flew to
Washington, US Ambassador David Friedman briefed me on the details of
President Donald Trump’s peace plan at his home in Herzliya.
Friedman told me that Trump was going to announce
that the United States will support an Israeli decision to apply its
laws to the Jordan Valley and the Israeli settlements in Judea and
Samaria.
I asked what the boundaries of the settlements would be.
He said that they have a map, it isn’t precise,
so it can be flexibly interpreted but it was developed in consultation
with Israeli government experts.
Suspicious, I went granular. Khan al-Ahmar is an
illegal, strategically located Beduin encampment built on the access
road to Kfar Adumim, a community north of Jerusalem. Israel’s Supreme
Court ordered its removal, but bowing to pressure from Germany and
allegedly, the International Criminal Court, the government has failed
to execute the court order.
I asked if Khan al-Ahmar is part of Kfar Adumim on the American map. Friedman answered in the affirmative.
What about the area called E1, which connects the city of Maaleh Adumim to Jerusalem?
Yes, it’s inside the map, he said.
How about the illegal building right outside the
northern entrance to my community, Efrat, south of Jerusalem in Gush
Etzion. The massive illegal building there threatens to turn Efrat’s
highway access road into a gauntlet. Is that area going to be under
Israeli jurisdiction?
He nodded.
How about the isolated communities – Yitzhar, Itamar, Har Bracha? Are they Israel?
Yes, yes, yes, he said. Our map foresees Israel applying its sovereignty to about half of Area C, he explained.
What about the other half? Without control of the
surrounding areas, the communities in Judea and Samaria will be under
constant threat. Their development will be stifled by limitations on the
development of critical infrastructure.
For now, Friedman replied, everything in the rest
of Area C will be governed as it has been up until now. Israel will
have overriding civilian powers and sole security authority. In fact, in
our plan, he explained, Israel will have permanent overriding security
authority over all of Judea and Samaria, even after a peace agreement is
concluded.
Friedman then turned to the nature of the agreement the Trump administration seeks to conclude.
The Palestinians have four years, he explained,
to agree to the President’s plan. To reach a deal they have to agree to
recognize Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people. They have to
accept Israeli control over the airspace and the electromagnetic
spectrum. They have agree to a demilitarized state and accept that there
will be no Palestinian immigration to Israel from abroad. They have to
agree to Israeli sovereignty over the border with Jordan. They have to
disarm Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza and demilitarize Gaza.
If they do that, we will recognize them as a state and they will receive the rest of Area C.
What if they don’t agree to those terms? I asked.
If they don’t agree, he replied, then at the end
of four years, Israel will no longer be bound by the terms of the deal
and will be free to apply its law to all areas it requires.
You’re telling me that in four years we’ll be
able to apply Israeli law on the rest of the territory? I asked, almost
afraid to hear the answer.
Yes, that’s right.
My heart started thumping like a rabbit tail.
You mean the Palestinians lose if they don’t agree to peace? Does President Trump support this? I asked in stunned disbelief.
Yes, of course, he supports this. It’s his plan, after all, Friedman said, smiling and a bit surprised at my reaction.
Boom.
Unannounced, tears began flowing out of my eyes.
Are those tears of happiness or sadness, Friedman asked, concerned.
For several moments, I couldn’t speak. Finally, I said, I feel like I need to take off my shoes. I’m witnessing a miracle.
Shortly thereafter, after thanking him and
wishing him well, (and washing my face), I left his home, got in my car
and drove to the Kotel.
As I listened to his briefing, there in his
study, I didn’t feel like I was alone. There with me were fifty
generations of Jews in every corner of the globe mouthing the Psalmist’s
verses, “And the nations of the world will say, God has greatly blessed
them; God has greatly blessed us, we were like dreamers.”
And closely, more immediately, as I sat there
listening, I felt 27 years of worry and frustration washing away. The
27-year Oslo nightmare was over. The blood libel that blamed Israel for
the Palestinians’ war against it was rejected by the greatest nation in
the world, finally.
When you read the Trump plan closely, you realize
it is a mirror image of Oslo. Rather than Israel being required to
prove its good will, the Palestinians are required to prove their
commitment to peace.
Consider the issue of releasing Palestinian terrorists.
Like the Oslo deal and its derivatives, the Trump
deal includes a section on releasing terrorists. But whereas under Oslo
rules, Israel was supposed to release terrorists as a confidence
building measure to facilitate the opening of negotiations, under the
Trump deal the order is reversed.
Israel is expected to release terrorists only
after the Palestinians have returned all of the Israeli prisoners and
MIAs and only after a peace deal has been signed.
Whereas Israel was required under Oslo to release
murderers, the Trump deal states explicitly that Israel will not
release murderers or accessories to murder.
One of the PLO’s more appalling demands was that
Israel release Arab Israel citizens convicted of terrorism charges. The
subversive demand implied PLO jurisdiction over Arab Israelis. Israel
strenuously objected, but all previous US administrations supported the
PLO demand.
The Trump deal states explicitly that Israeli citizens will not be released in any future release of terrorists.
There are many problematic aspects to the Trump
plan. For instance, it calls for Israel to transfer sovereign territory
along the Gaza border to Palestinian control in the framework of the
peace deal.
More immediately, the deal requires Israel to
suspend building activities in the parts of Area C earmarked for the
Palestinians in a future deal for the next four years. This requirement
will pose a major burden to the Israeli communities adjacent to these
areas. To develop, these communities require surrounding infrastructure –
roads, sewage, and other systems – to develop with them.
On the other hand, the Trump plan places no
restriction on construction inside of the Israeli communities. Residents
of Shilo and Ariel will have the same property rights as residents of
Tel Aviv and Beit Shean.
This then brings us to Israel and the leaders who
accepted the Oslo rules for the past 27 years. The Trump plan is a test
for Israel. Have we become addicted to the blood libel?
Will Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu keep his
word and present a decision to apply Israeli law over the Jordan Valley
and the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria at the next government
meeting or will he lose his nerve and hide behind “technical” issues?
Will Benny Gantz and his Blue and White party
agree to abandon the Oslo blood libel most of its members embrace, and
accept that Israel is capable of asserting its sovereign rights to these
areas? Or will they hide behind the legal fraternity braying for
Netanyahu’s head and preserve the anti-Semitic Oslo paradigm for their
friends in the Democratic Party?
And will the legal fraternity, led by Attorney
General Avichai Mandelblit act in accordance with the law, which
empowers the government to determine national policies even before
elections? Or will it continue to make up laws to block government
action and so render the March 2 poll a referendum between democracy and
Zionism and the legal fraternity and post-Zionism?
Under Oslo, Israel had no interest in taking the
initiative. Every “step forward” was a set-up. Tuesday Trump ended the
27-year nightmare. Oslo is the past. Sovereignty is now. We were like
dreamers.
The time has now come to give thanks for the miracle and get on with building our land.
Caroline Glick
Source: http://carolineglick.com/the-oslo-blood-libel-is-over/
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Wealthy donors, for all their talk of “equality” and pandering to the myriad of “oppressed identities” that form the Party’s base, virtue signal as they do because they are confident that their own core wealth and privilege will either rise or remain unaffected in a Democrat administration. That would not be true under President Sanders. And sitting representatives and senators worry that they’ll be dragged down in a Sanders debacle.
In contrast, liberal doctrine stipulates an equal outcome for all people. Their view of government is that its responsibility is to ensure that every individual has at least a minimally acceptable share of society’s spoils (that share being quite arbitrarily determined by liberal politicians, according to their whims and the political exigencies in effect at the time). Liberal governing practices of wealth redistribution, punitive taxation, excessive regulations designed to impede runaway capitalistic profits and “cover every contingency” individual benefit programs all combine to produce -- in many instances -- the unintended consequence of short-circuiting personal initiative and ambition. Instead, these excessive giveaway programs essentially “teach” some people how to game the system and get the government to pay for their existence in society. That’s not the original intent, but that’s how it ends up playing out in many cases.