Israel Matzav

Why Israel should adopt the Levy report

But what disturbs me far more is their predictions of disaster if Israel holds to its traditional interpretation of its legal rights as per the Levy Report. The authors claim that the Report’s legal analysis will force Israel either to “undermine the Zionist ideal of Israel as the state of the Jewish people” by granting citizenship to the Arabs living in the West Bank and threatening Israel’s Jewish majority, or, alternatively, to “adopt a governing structure for the territories amounting to a form of apartheid.”

Frankly, this argument is preposterous. Having legal rights does not limit policy options; if anything, it expands them. Whether Israel adopts the Levy Report or not, Israel has the same policy options – to surrender the West Bank unilaterally, to compromise on its territorial rights in an agreement with the PLO (should the latter ever return to the negotiating table), to take advantage of its rights and expand Israel’s jurisdiction, or to mix and match among these possibilities.

The scenarios offered by Weiler and Zilbershats are, at best, fanciful.

The first scenario relies on a misplaced fear that Israel would cease having a Jewish majority if it were to incorporate the West Bank. The demographics of the West Bank are a matter of debate, but even using the most inflated estimates of the Palestinian population, incorporation of the West Bank would boost the Arab percentage of Israel’s population to roughly 40% (the more realistic estimates would put the Arab percentage at closer to 35%). Incidentally, if Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank were to act like their brethren in Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in response to the extension of Israeli law, they would overwhelmingly reject Israeli citizenship. Even with the West Bank in the fold, Israel would continue to be both Jewish and democratic.

Labels: Judea and Samaria, Levy Report

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:16 AM