A Wise Change in Plans
Talk is cheap. The inescapable conclusion for those seeking any kind of decent peace is that Hamas must be made to fail and seen to fail. There can be no equivocation. To the objection that the Palestinians will suffer, the answer must be that they must endure the troubles they have wrought. If they are protected, on the other hand, Hamas will get credit for improving Palestinian governance. The sooner we confront Hamas, the better; its leaders consolidate their rule by mobilizing additional sectors of Palestinian society and penetrating the security apparatus of the PA. Yes, some humanitarian aid in medicine and food should be extended to the Palestinian population, but only through organizations that will make sure it goes to the needy.
The Hamas threat, meanwhile, forces Israel to change the scope of its envisaged pullback, removing itself from control of 90 percent of the Palestinians on the West Bank. The Israeli settlers will have to be moved to settlement blocks cushioned from attack behind the security fence and beyond the range of terrorist rockets and guns. Israel will also have to retain a presence along the Jordan River so as to preclude the inflow of terrorists and weaponry, in order to respond on a timely basis to its intelligence. To continue its remarkable success in thwarting the vast majority of terrorist attacks, Israel must retain its security bases in the West Bank.
Some believe the Israelis should ignore Hamas and negotiate with Abbas. But he was unable to deliver when he held the reins alone, and there is little reason to believe he can make enforceable concessions today from his much weaker position. The danger from such conversations would be that if negotiations with Abbas go nowhere, Israel will have greater difficulty withdrawing from the settlements: The Israeli opposition would argue: If Olmert could not reach agreement with a relative moderate like Abbas, how could the territories then be handed over to Hamas? The opposition already believes that realignment will involve pain without gain, that it is religiously impossible and highly dangerous.
Obviously, any West Bank realignment is going to be much harder to achieve than the disengagement from Gaza. The West Bank is part of the religious patrimony of the Jewish people, and the number of settlers to be moved is many times those in Gaza.
Even so, Israeli realignment offers great benefits, and not least to the Palestinians. They would gain total control of roughly 90 percent of the West Bank in a contiguous mass. The evolution to a two-state solution would thus be more likely. While this realignment would represent a historic accomplishment in the Middle East for both Israel and the United States, Washington may be unable, for a time, to publicly acknowledge the realignment as Israel's final borders. At some point in the future, however, Washington could state that if the Palestinians continue to be led by those who reject Israel and are incapable of fulfilling their obligations, the new security realignments would become a real and recognized border. Whatever political and economic support Washington can extend will certainly improve the prospects for Olmert to galvanize support for a program very much in the interests of America and its allies in the region.
Olmert's target date for completing his plan is November 2008. It is a modern-day version of the policy of David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding prime minister. As he put it: "When it was a question of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the land, we chose the Jewish state without all the land."
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