Mr. Magoo: Sharon was ready to abandon two thirds of 'West Bank'
Rafi Eitan, who has been persona non grata in the US ever since he was exposed as Jonathan Pollard's Mossad handler, claims that Ariel Sharon was ready to withdraw from two thirds of Judea and Samaria in 2006, before God decided He had other plans. Eitan now says that Prime Minister Netanyahu should surprise President Obama by offering to do the same.
A month before prime minister Sharon suffered a stroke, in January 2006, he was on the phone with Eitan. Four months after Israel’s unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip, the two discussed a preliminary plan to leave the West Bank as well, while maintaining the maximum number of Israeli settlements under Israeli control.
“Sharon knew that we must disengage from the Palestinians in the West Bank too; that we can’t continue occupying a foreign people,” Eitan told The Times of Israel.
Sharon dubbed his plan “the mosaic separation,” because it left most Israeli settlements intact, allowing isolated Palestinian villages access to large urban centers through an intricate system of underpasses and tunnels.
“Arik [Sharon] said: Let’s divide Judea and Samaria and take roughly one-third for ourselves, leaving two-thirds for the Arabs,” Eitan said. “Under this plan, the Jordan Valley and the Judean Desert would remain ours.”
With the Palestinian body politic divided today between Gaza and the West Bank — while internal rifts within the PLO prevent “even the signing of an interim agreement” — Eitan said he would advise Netanyahu to implement the Sharon plan immediately.
It was a lousy idea in 2006, and subsequent events have made it an even lousier idea. Mr. Magoo should go back to making cartoons.“We must disconnect from them [the Palestinians] as much as possible,” Eitan said, adding that he would even favor a plan attributed to former foreign minister Avigdor Liberman of handing over the area known as “the Triangle” in northwest Israel — with its 300,000 Arab citizens — to the future Palestinian state.
Labels: Ariel Sharon, Barack Hussein Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu, Rafi Eitan, unilateral withdrawal
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:46 PM
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