Israel Matzav

Hillel Halkin's pipe dream

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Hillel Halkin tries to present the idea of having Jews remain in their towns in Judea and Samaria under 'Palestinian' rule as something new. It is nothing new. It will not work because the 'Palestinians' will never agree to it, because their goal is to eliminate the Jewish state and not 'two states, side by side, living in peace' as the West likes to delude itself.

Halkin assumes that most of the Jews living in Judea and Samaria will in any event end up in Israel under some sort of land exchange as part of any permanent settlement with the 'Palestinians.' He ignores the fact that even though 'everyone knows' this will have to happen, the 'Palestinians' have thus far rejected any such exchange.

But he does write one thing that I have never seen anyone on the Left acknowledge, and it's something that anyone who wants to be informed about Israel needs to bear in mind.

Even if all the settlers living on the "Israeli" side of the security fence end up in Israel in the land swap that has come to be an assumed part of any peace deal, the 75,000 who would find themselves in a Palestinian state happen to be the very element of the settler population—the ideological and religious militants living deep in Palestinian territory—who are most committed to being where they are. What does one do with them?

The standard answer is: one evacuates them by force, just as was done with the 8,000 settlers forcibly evicted in the summer of 2005 when Israel left the Gaza Strip. Whoever doesn't want to leave the Palestinian state on his own two feet can be carried by his arms and legs.

But this cannot be done—and it cannot be done because of what happened in Gaza. To carry out the Gaza operation, Israel had to undergo months of agonizing debate that fractured its political party system; to divert a large part of its army and police force to the task in expectation of settler violence; to experience the national trauma of witnessing men, women and children literally dragged from their homes as Jews were in the past only by their persecutors in their countries of exile; to find itself saddled with a bill of billions of dollars for the evictees' relocation and rehabilitation; and today, nearly five years later, to face the reality that many of them have had their lives severely disrupted and still lack permanent homes. If this is what happened with 8,000 settlers who did not resort to violence in the end, what will happen with 10 times that many who almost certainly will?

This is something the Israeli public is not prepared to find out. It is not going to let itself undergo a trauma 10 times greater than that of 2005 and it will not be pushed to, or over, the brink of civil war. It lacks the political will to oust the more militant settlers from their homes and it will not do so, no matter what the world expects of it or some of its own politicians say.

Indeed.

Halkin also admits that Israel has as good a legal claim to Judea and Samaria as anyone and that the Jewish cities and towns in those areas are not 'illegal' as is often claimed. I wonder how his compatriots on the Left will like reading that in print.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:34 PM