Israel Matzav

Meridor shoots his mouth off

Sorry about last night - I am swamped with work and exhausted. Nothing a Sabbath won't help.

Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor shot his mouth off yesterday, proposing a freeze on 'settlement construction' outside the 'security fence' as if the 'Palestinians' would ever accept it and as if proposing it does not damage Israel's position. You see, in a return to 2005, Meridor wants to do this unilaterally. He calls it a policy.

In an acknowledged stark departure from government policy, and a remarkable one for so senior a minister, Meridor said the current relative calm in relations with the Palestinians, and the sharp decline in terrorism, might be producing “an illusion” among Israelis “that this is sustainable in the long term. It is not. It is an anomaly. We need to change it.”

This should be done, he said in an extensive interview, by freezing further settlement “across the line of the blocs or the fence or whatever you call it.”

Meridor, a veteran Likud leader who is also the minister responsible for Intelligence and Atomic Energy, made clear that he was not advocating a full settlement freeze everywhere beyond the pre-1967 “Green Line.”

“Don’t freeze it in Jerusalem or Ma’aleh Adumim or other places like this,” he said in the interview, conducted at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem. “But don’t build all over the place, because this is the most damaging of all the things that we are doing to ourselves in the world. Because people say: ‘You offer the Palestinians a state. But if you build there in every place, you don’t really mean it.’”

Rather than untrammeled construction, Meridor said, government policy should be focused on widening international support for the expansion of Israeli sovereignty to encompass the major settlement blocs. “We need to use all our efforts, our energies, our resources, to try to add the blocs to Israel,” he said.

“I think we are at the beginning of being able to do it. Because President Obama spoke of swaps, not of [an Israel withdrawn to the lines of] ’67… And Bush spoke of it… So we already see a basic understanding of the paradigm. The state won’t be along the ’67 lines. No way. It will be different, with some compensation. But if we build all over the place, we lose. Even if we don’t have an agreement [with the Palestinians], we need to have a rational policy.”

But Obama doesn't have a 'swap' like this in mind. He's thinking in terms of a swap of already-built neighborhoods in Jerusalem for 'safe passage' for 'Palestinians' between Gaza and Judea and Samaria. Only with the 'Palestinians' consent of course. And that won't ever happen even for the smallest 'swap.'

What's most disturbing about this is that Prime Minister Netanyahu has not and will not take him to task for publicly making a proposal that will weaken our position. In fact, I suspect strongly that Meridor was a trial balloon for Netanyahu (who recruited Meridor back to the Likud and insisted on making him a minister despite his relatively low rank on the Likud's Knesset list), and to date, there has been very little reaction. Well, count one reaction here.

What could go wrong?

Labels: Binyamin Netanyahu, Dan Meridor, Likud party, settlement freeze

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:05 AM