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World Jewish News
Hawkish Likud MKs propose giving part of West Bank to Jordan
26.05.2009
A number of lawmakers from the ruling Likud party on Tuesday proposed that Israel annex parts of the West Bank, while turning over Palestinian population centers to Jordanian jurisdiction.
The proposal was debated at a Knesset conference organized by Likud MK Tzipi Hotovely on alternatives to the two-state solution. The idea is a nonstarter with Israel's Arab neighbor and conflicts with U.S. President Barack Obama's support for a Palestinian state.
Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya'alon, who participated in the conference, said past peace plans urging Israel to give up captured land to the Palestinians have failed.
"The Western way of thinking has proven irrelevant and dangerous to this region," the former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff said, adding that Israel should stop looking for an immediate solution to the conflict with the Palestinians.
"We have to disavow the commonly held perception that we should find an imminent solution," he added. "The Disengagement from Gaza in 2005 was the Palestinians' golden opportunity to show the world that the end of the occupation would lead to political and economic stability."
"Hamas' violent takeover of Gaza and the ongoing missile fire at Israel proves that the problem was not the occupation. For them, the entire land, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, is occupied."
"[Late Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser] Arafat came very close to achieving independence, but he chose to launch a war against Israel in September 2000 instead," he said. "The issue wasn't the ability to give them independence, but their desire to get it."
"Instead of a state, Arafat chose to set up a terror regime," Ya'alon continued. "Abu Mazen [Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas] is behaving the same way and exercises political weakness as a strategy."
By Yuval Azoulay, Haaretz Correspondent
Источник: Haaretz
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