Sunday, October 16, 2011

Preferred Option Three: Extending Sovereignty

No to statehood, yes to annexation is an op-ed of Dani Dayan, chairman of the Judea and Samaria Council of Settlements which suggests that "the peace process is stuck, it is time for Israel to protect its citizens and interests by annexing its population centers in Judea and Samaria".


Excerpts:
...Ever since Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat signed that pathetic [Oslo] agreement that was composed in secret in the Norwegian capital, the entire world has been playing a game of pretend. At the beginning, the game was innocent...But over the past few years, the game has turned cynical...

The Oslo Accords, the Road Map, the diplomatic process, two states for two peoples – all of these are synonyms for a situation that can never lead to an agreement or to peace...The Israeli minimum and the Palestinian minimum simply do not overlap. When a mathematician encounters this type of equation, he may feel very frustrated, but he knows that even years of attempts will not bring him any solutions. It’s a waste of his time.

There is no solution to the system of equations in the Middle East, partly because the Palestinians will never give up the return of the refugees and because the Jews will never give up the Temple Mount, but primarily because the Palestinians want to establish a state without putting an end to the conflict. They want their state (like the Palestinian state in Gaza that has been in existence for some six years) to serve as a spring board for the ongoing destruction of the State of Israel.

...Why waste more years in fruitless discussions or in useless negotiations that merely provide income for the owners of five-star hotels and conference centers throughout the world? Why continue a process that has brought nothing but frustration and humiliation to US president after president? In the current constellation, the diplomatic process is not only useless – it’s counterproductive...if we could only admit the simple fact, which we all know in our hearts to be true – that there will not be a Palestinian state – then we would be left with three possibilities. The first – a unilateral Israeli withdrawal and tossing the keys to whoever catches them – died with disengagement. Any reasonable Israeli understands that this would mean suicide for Israel. The second – maintaining and enforcing the current status quo – is a possibility. In contrast to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s contentions that the status quo is not sustainable, the status quo could become, to use terminology taken from games theory, a stable equilibrium. But this would not be optimal for Israel.

...option three is annexation. The area referred to as “Area C” in the Oslo Accords, the home of more than 350,000 Israelis and to only some 50,000 Palestinians, must become an integral part of the State of Israel...That is what Benjamin Netanyahu must do now: He must extend Israeli sovereignty over most of Judea and Samaria.

Read it all.

P.S.  I prefer the term "extending sovereignty" to 'annexation'.


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